I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy theories large and small.
Could they be true?
Or are we being manipulated?
This is mission implausible?
All right, guys, I think we've now worked together long enough that we can get to the issue that is the one I most wanted.
To talk to you about, the great white whale.
When people say CIA and conspiracy theories, it's actually kind of weird. We haven't done the big one. Where did Peanut Eminem? No, that's not it. I love Eminem's are good pratsol Eminem's I enjoyed, but I'm against them morally. No, we're talking about did you guys kill JFK?
Well?
I actually I think the jfk assassination thing is far bigger than just did the CIA did it? Because there's views that it could have been the Cuba, as it could have been the Russians. It could have been the mafia. Fux Clay, it could have been the mafia. Like it is like the mother of all conspiracy theories.
So in CIA, are there people who show up as new employees and they're like, where are the files?
Like?
How is it talked about within CIA?
That's a good question.
I mostly people joke about it, don't they.
Yeah, oh, I found we're.
Very focused on collecting foreign intelligence.
Now and not looking at past successes.
Yeah.
You know, we're too screwed up to be able to keep a secret like that for that long.
All right, so today and we should tell our listeners we're going to revisit I mean, to be honest, we could do every episode about the JFK assassination and probably have more listeners, to be honest with you, not the same listeners.
So what's interesting to me is the JFK assassination theories. It's very American. I mean, Richard hoff Staider famously wrote The Paranoid dial in American Politics, and that talks about how we've always loved these kind of conspiracy theories because our country was built on a distrust of elites is built into the system.
And in other countries in the world, though they just do kill people. They do kill people.
Well, this episode is cool because we've never done this before. But we've all got together in the same room over at John Stearn's house in LA and we had a special guest. So, John Stern, why don't you tell us who our special guest is.
You're about to audibly meet my uncle David Rubin. Let's cut to the live recording in front of a studio audience of four members of my family and three dogs.
Now and Jerry drank all of John's booze. That's that's what I remember about that event. Well, this week's episode of Mission and Plasmo is a little bit different. We are in person for the first time. Jerry and I are in Los Angeles at the home of our producer, John Stern, and he's bringing a special guest to us
to talk to today. And we have a little bit of an audience, and we're drinking John's booze, and so it may take us a little longer to get to the to get to where we're going, but bear with us.
You gotta talk a lot about the JFK assassination. What is your particular fascination and insight to this. I mean, you're more than just casual jfk assassination observers.
Right well, I have still had I have green stains on my knee from the Grassy.
Knoll, but it's just in an area that you're particularly interested in talking about, is that right?
Well?
I think people who listen to the podcasts will understand we are tend to be skeptical of conspiracy theories, and jfk assassination theory is one of the great conspiracy theories of all times, and so we tend to be nervous about digging down too deeply in.
The rabbit hole.
But there is a, you know, an important CIA connection. One of the early defectors to the CIA you're in, Nsenko, came to the United States and told the story of being the person who handled the files for the Harvey Oswald when he was in Moscow. And of course at the time there was a concern when Kennedy was shot, were the Russians involved? Where the Russians involved with the Cubans.
All the conspiracy theories, they can't all be right because a lot of them conflict, but they can all be wrong.
So I should introduce who David Rubin is. He's currently a private investigator, but this is at the beginning of his career. David, could you back us up and just tell us the different jobs you've had.
Or I started in law enforcement in Chicago for the Special Prosecutions Unit of the State's Attorney's Office. It was a brand new unit by a brand new State's Attorney, Bernard Carey, following a big scandal of a black panther shooting with the old regime. Then I got hired by San Francisco to start a special investigations unit again. Then I got hired by Oakland, City of Oakland to form the first police Review Board. Then I left there and became a private consultant and private investigator.
The story we're about to hear, i've met I ever heard it from any other source.
I've never read it, and I don't think.
It's the answer.
I think if it's true, it's a piece of the puzzle that might spurse some questions. And you said you started as a newbie in Chicago, and as a newbe you and your partner had to do the job of going to Joliet State Prison once a month.
Is that right? When you work, especially in a new investigative unit in a local jurisdiction, you get a lot of letters from inmates. Cook County Jail was one of our big sources. Of course, Juliet State Penitentiary was another big source. And if everybody in state prison or federal penitentiaries are innocent, if you ask them, and they all provide very detailed letters to tell you why they're innocent,
so that they could be given forgiveness. What they have a committee didn't do that they didn't do because they're all indicent. And as a new investigator, one of my early assignments was, I got all those letters and I we've going to Joe when letters have come in from inmates saying we got a bunch of crimes that could solve for you if you could get us out of here. Of course, and of course ninety nine point nine percent of these things were nonsense and we're just feeble attempts
by inmates to try and swing a deal. Every once in a while, I get a little tidbit I might help you with some kind of crime, So you went along with it, and I'd get a stack on my desk of letters, and my partner and I would do the interviews with the inmates to see what they had.
How do they choose who gets these things? And is there squabbles between organizations?
Ever back in the day, there were always squabbles the federal agencies and the local agencies. I'm hoping that has ceased to be beautiful. They still they still squabble. Okay, gee, gentlemen, I shocked to hear that. I mean literally, you would investigate the same case. And I mean I remember one particular case where literally guns were drawn by the federal agents and local and coming around the corner, there's the same building under the same investigation. It was lucky nothing disaster,
which occur. So there's one letter. So a letter comes in. Correct, a letter comes in and an inmate states that he has information about the Kennedy assassination. So this is nineteen seventy four, so nine or ten years after the assassination. So kind of interesting to read something like that. It beats the local I'm minisova a couple of robberies around
the corner. Letters. So I go and interview this particular in it and he gets a story that he had had a cell mat that was involved in friends with the Jack Ruby connection. And Ruby was from Chicago. He was a local club owner, a fringe mobster. Actually was friends with Gene Connon. So Jack Ruby and I'm just his real name was Rubinstein, Yes, Rubinstein, exactly. You go.
So Jack Ruby was a owned a couple of sort of bars, strip clubs in Dallas, sort of one of these people that was on the fringe of society. And he was somebody.
It was either day after the second day after when the police were moving Lee Harvey Oswald to a new facility, to a new jail. They moved him through an area where there's a lot of national news cameras and and Jack Ruby essentially just came out of the crowd with a gun and shot them in the stomach and killed him. And it was the first time there's ever been a murder on national television.
In the long run, what ended upapping Jack Ruby, He died in prison. He had he got sick cancer in prison.
But he never talked, never talked. He never talked, which.
Adds to conspiracies, right of course, Well he had nothing to say.
Well, I think that I was mad and I killed him, right, Well that was.
That was that he idolized JFK and he was so horrified and depressed and angry that he did this spontaneous act.
That's right, And he never applied. Somebody put it up to him to get rid of the Harby Oswald to protect like another person behind him or anything.
And one of the big questions ever was how is it possible in such a huge setting with all of the police and everybody's there and cameras when you're moving the guy to prison or whatever, that security could be so laxed to let a guy come up directly to the assassin issue.
Part of the answer to that, which came out at some point was that he was connected and had friends in the police department. He had a gun ferment, which in Texas you send him two Superman comics and you get a gun from it.
And security couldn't have been that good if they let all these guys with those big cameras.
The media was all over the.
Place, right, they were well known and open. It wasn't like a super high security.
And people know him. I mean, people are hey Jack, I mean people were on a first nine basis from the police department. With that, he was kind of a I think you put it that way, John, he was a fringe guy around whatever, and he probably needed police contexts, maybe corrupt contexts for his clubs.
You know, probably give them tidbits of information.
Yeah, you know, he'd give him something so that they would look the other way in a permit or or whatever. So that was then, and prior to that, he was from Chicago. He was a thug as a kid.
It's important to know at this stage and the story JFK. Even though he was assassinated in Dallas. Originally that parade route was going to be in Chicago, but they moved it to Dallas.
So he gave me information that the inmate was friends with the Ruby's brother or cousin the first time he told me the story his brother brother. So basically, the inmate told us that Jack Ruby's brother had rented a short term rental along the parade the proposed parade route in Chicago, which was probably Michigan Avenue or State Streets
or one of the main drags there. So we had some tidbits and I don't recall exactly what we were able to verify, but we verified certain aspects of that, like the story or the relative or the effect of that was the parade route, but we've verified enough to keep us kind of interested. So he'd have you come back and he'd give you more information. Yeah, pretty much, or
we'd say, well that checked out. And he was very proud of himself, and he thought, okay, well, you know who knows we needed to report this to our supervisor because a had interesting tenbits that may be worth following up. And we directed because you know, it was kind of unique. We reported directly to the states attorneys. But he's former at FI, remember, and so he thought that was interesting and he said, right, let me call some of my
old friends. And you called me back in at one point and said at b I will take care of this. They they're interested, they'll follow up on this. You're off that casse. I mean, well, it wasn't even a case really, it was kind of an inquiry. I don't even know if there had been a case file. Establishment.
You're following, you're following the clues and leads and well down that road.
Those days you're working with you know, you call him pformance. On some level. There are different types of informants, and for the sake of discussion, he was an informant about information that was potentially worth following up on.
So they said, don't go down that rabbit hole.
Right pretty much, And anyways, it was like, if that's true, that's bigger than we are or you are, and again I'm twenty four years old. Whatever, this is beyond you and we'll turn it over to the bureau. As we discussed earlier, locals and fans didn't get along real well. But my boss was former FBI and I was so far down the totem pole that it wasn't my position to say, well, you're kidding, boss, this is great, this is a great
case for us to follow up on. You know. It was like, okay, well here you go.
Well, even from the beginning again I'm reading.
This book on Judd to Hoover.
Hoover was very interested in, you know, very quickly saying that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and cutting it down because he knew from decades of trying to protect the Bureau and then what the Bureau covered, that these political sort of issues could get out a hand and
they would start to rebound against the FBI. So the more they started to question, like why didn't they look into Lee Harvey Asswold when he traveled to Mexico to the Cuban embassy of the Russian embassy, and he was in Russian why didn't you do and so he was very interested in sort of quickly coming to the conclusion.
So very quickly they wrote like a four hundred page thing which then President Johnson, who followed up after Kennedy was killed, decided to create a commission, the Warrent Commission, to look into this correct And at the time Johnson and Hoover were talking to each other, and both of them are trying to say, let's do this as quickly as possible.
Is keep this down.
I agree with you.
It looks like it's Lee Harvey Ailswald was trying to keep all these other questions out, but of course that couldn't happen.
And as much as they tried to.
Do that, more and more questions came in regarding the Russians, regarding Jack.
Ruby's and.
Kennedy right, and THEBA want yes Epians to protect themselves. And if you remember, Hoover's boss was Robert Kennedy, also in his early thirties at the time, is the attorney.
And there was no love loss. They hated each other, yeap, So I go back to Joliet to tell my quote informant, for lack of a better term, that the affair is going to look into this, and you should be under the circumstances. You would think an informant would be very happy for something like that, because it means he's been taken seriously exactly. But when I went there, I was surprised to find out that he had been killed in prison.
Oh oh, just in that in those few weeks I remember if it was a weight weeks or maybe a month and a half, we'll say it was for weeks for this for the sake of the discussion.
And did you find out who killed him?
Or why? Or I mean not why? Prison? Prison fight? That was all I got. It was a prison fight. Of course, this happened a lot in prisons. That there would be, you know, a guy with a kN It could be over turf, it could be over politics, internally, gangs, it could be a million things. But the timing was odd, certainly in hindsight when you look back at it, it was interesting timing. Now I was going to tell him we were done anyway.
Obviously that would make you concern and sort of look into things. Did you on your own over the over the coming years looking to Jack Ruby and connections. So this is potentially suggesting that Jack Ruby may be more involved. Traditionally thought that it might have actually been involved working well.
And again Ruby was Chicago, so you had a connection with Ruby in Chicago and a parade route and Kennedy in the same time period. Ruby. Going back, I think we were talking earlier that there were all these theories of course that the Mob assassinated Kennedy. The Jim Kanna connection.
Wasn't he Chicago too?
Oh yeah, he was the godfather in Chicago and he was a well known hit. I mean I tailed Jim kind of a number of His girlfriend was sleeping with Kennedy and gan Conna, and so one of the theories was that gian Conna took Kennedy out over the girl, over the girlfriend.
It was crazy kind of like so I know, also Kennedy and the CIA were working with the Mob to assassinate Castro in Cuba.
Somebody else, No, that was gan Conna. There was that theory. But again Ruby, I think he hadn't worked for Giancanna at one point early in his career. They were both part of that old Mob the outfit we used to call in Chicago. That might have been a local term. But there was a connection. I mean, it wasn't a far reach to see the connection between Ruby, Chicago, the Kennedy Parade route potentially communist. I mean, it wasn't like, oh, well,
that doesn't make any sense. It wasn't Witchital, Kansas or Newark, New Jersey with Chicago with the connection to Kennedy and Ruby. So that what made it a little more interesting than just oh that is the possible thing.
Well, the other part of the riddle here is if you connect these imaginary dots that the FBI or someone someone in the federal government had this witness killed because it was exposing.
What time great analogy. But so you guys are the conspiracy theory experts.
My question to you is, given this information, what what could you theorize really happened?
Given this new information, The.
Dots aren't theoretical, it's the connections between them that we can only guess it. So you've got the dots, but how you connect them and whether they connect, Well, let me ask a question this epical public was.
There ever any public thing or authors or journalists who dug in if that I ever recalled.
That's why it's a story that I've only heard from him and nowhere else.
Will this story even more interested if in the coming weeks after this is air that he's killed.
One. We can only hope this show.
Yeah, I was really a pretty.
Mad pleasure. I'm in John Stearn's home.
What's the address again?
And I'll be living here for a cemetery.
He's got vicious dogs, but he.
Does one story.
Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, probably Uncle be able to tell us who killed get it?
Where is that one? I mean, you know, you look back at it and you can project a lot of possibilities here. I mean, this guy could have run full of crap. Maybe he had a cellmate that knew Jack Ruby's family, and the rest of it was made up. The thing that made it more interesting if you look back at it, was that Kennedy was supposedly going to be Integra and the parade room and the parade also, just like in Dallas, back in those days, parade roots
and presidents were public. They were publishing front page of newspapers so that the public could go and watch president.
Do you remember more about the cellmate, because I mean, obviously that's the key.
Like who was that he was, where did he go? Who's he was? He was a non entity, and that's what kind of made it problematic. He had a link that he was a Chicago win so that made it a little more credible. A lot of guys from the Mob were in Joliet, and so there was a link between the Chicago Mob and inmates into Chicago. So informiation could have easily gone between those two sources. Jerry and John separately.
What is your prevailing theory about the Kennedy assassination?
There's so much, there's so much to it.
I think, probably similar to Jerry is we tend to believe the simplest explanation, right. So there were professional investigators, there was the FBI, the Warrent Commission. Lots of people have looked at this, and even the people who come up with all sorts of theories, they are less likely than the direct theory that a crazy guy who had connections that were worth looking into in Russia and Cuba and Mexico and all the sorts of places decided to kill the president.
And just a few years ago, reread the War and Commission stuff.
And this was after there had been the movie, and there's been a number of other books and stories of complaining about the War and Commission that they didn't look into this.
It did seem to cover a lot of those things.
The War Commission seemed to cover a lot of the things.
There was pretty terrible that.
People said, oh, they didn't look into this, and they did look at that they and I thought they did.
Yeah. I get concerned when people get wrapped around the axel On minutia. There's sort of two things that I'm concerned about it. This one is these detailed descriptions of ballistics on the bullet couldn't.
Have ballistics is a very inexacic science, and understanding how a bullet travels is something that's extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to predict.
And the other thing is that the CIA always seems to get involved. I think if there was a Winer conspiracy, it would seem to me that it would be one of two things. It was one Castro was looking to kill Kennedy, because Kennedy was looking to kill absolutely right.
And we do know that the shooter spent time in Mexico and the other is that the Soviets were humiliated after the standoff, and so this is a guy, the Harvey Oswald, who spent time in Russia, and to be frank, the Soviets did have a long history of killing people they didn't like. Now it is a stretch killing the President the United States, But it's not beyond the pale that Lee Harvey Oswald would have thought, in meeting with a case officer that that's what they wanted, or that
he was doing them a favor. It doesn't always have to be I want you to do X. It's often could be he was trying to show off. But I think the fact that he had links to the KGB and lived there, I think if he lived there, it's almost impossible for him not to have had links. So I'm open to those possibilities, but I don't think they've been proven.
Lee Harveaz was a marine, right a sharpshooter, sharp shooters or whatever you call at the time, was in Japan and then eventually left the Marines and defected to Russia. Made his way to Moscow. The KGB did question him there, married a Russian woman, and the.
KGB then sent him to Belarus. To mintzk which is a republic inside Russia.
Married a Bellerussian woman, Marina, and then eventually he was working as a tool of die person there for some period of time and maybe even as much of a couple of years, tried to change his citizenship for being an American to being a Russian and eventually made his way back to the United States and the KGB part of it. Obviously, after the shooting, the concern was, oh, my god, the guy who shot Kennedy had spent time in Russia and clearly had connections with the Russian intelligence.
Services to KGB at the time.
And he had traveled to Mexico and been seen visiting the Russian embassy at the Quban Embassy while he was in Mexico, and the FBI was aware of this and were investigating. They hadn't talked to him yet, but they had investigated this prior to the shooting, so when the shooting came up, they were like, ooh, we've been paying attention to this guy, not because we thought he'd be an assassin, but because we thought he was tied to
the Communist Party. If you remember, at the time, they were very focused on communists and then similar to this time a Russian defector, and then you're in Asenko defects the United States and says.
Oh, by the way, among the other things, I'm telling.
You, I was on the internal service to KGB, which looked at foreigners inside Russia, and I looked at the file of Lejavey Oswald and we talked to him, but we thought he was a low level nobody and sent him off to Minsk and didn't pay much attention to him. But of course then there was a big concern afterwards that like, did the Russians send this guy to us here to tell us this story to try to deflect
us from interest. So all of a sudden, you know, the Russian Kremlin says, holy shit, our guy killed the president of the United States. They're gonna realize we were behind it.
Send this defector off to tell the story.
That we had nothing to do with it.
And so that went on and on, and it's a really sad story part of the CIA, because this guy was eventually brought down to a special prison cell that was created just for him to be to be interrogated for several years and given drugs and all sorts of things, and he never confessed, and there was lots of internal CIA studies back and forth different parts of the CIA, and Head of Counterintelligence James Ingleton, was convinced that Mosenko was a false defector came here to try to deflect us,
and other people thought the opposite. Eventually, over lots of internal fights over a number of years, the CIA came to the conclusion which the FBI had come to long before, that Nosenko was a real defector and that Russians likely did not have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination.
As far as the I mean, how things work in real life. There's one incident I can think of, and I'm not going to go into specific details, but something violent happened, and it happened to one of our adversaries in a country. And what came out of this violent event was we were able to get some intelligence out of it. Right, something was stolen from one of our adversaries that would be helpful to us. Oh, well, that's interesting.
And one of my guys comes to me afterwards and says, hey, man, I was out drinking with some of our buddies, like a couple of weeks ago, and we were drinking, and I said, wouldn't it be funny if somebody did this? And they all laughed and we said yeah. He said, oh, it would be like something out of a novel, and then we just moved on. And then exactly what he said happened. And basically there was a break in in this one place and the computers were stolen. And he's like,
I didn't order him to it. I just had a couple of drinks and I was just.
Like, I didn't do nothing. I didn't, you know.
And they obviously afterwards they went, that's sort of interesting, Maybe we should do that. And they probably also thought, was he hinting to us that we should do it? And he was not right. He didn't even think of it after that. And so when I think of Lee Harvey Oswald, I also want under if he didn't talk to one of his handlers, or when he went into the walked into the embassy in Mexico to the Soviet embassy, if somebody didn't said that fucking Kennedy, you know, bah,
and he's thinking, hey, I can be a hero. That doesn't mean that they did it, But I think there's a lot of gray areas in there.
There's other theories.
There's many theories.
I don't know all of them, but we have a friend, longtime senior career CIA officer worked in all kinds of places, very accomplished. It's a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but
also very bright who was really dug into this. He would have to explain it because I don't know all the deal, but he believes there was a generation of CI officers were really angry at Kennedy for not taking on Communism the Soviets properly, and especially after the Bay of Pigs where they were sort of hung out to dry, and therefore may have been involved in something related to
the assassination. I don't know anything about it. I don't buy it necessarily, but this is another one of the theories that can He was hated by the hardcore right wing people of the National security space, so it.
Wasn't CIA, it was CIA officers working on their own I think that's what.
I'd have to have a listen to that Mission Impossible movie Rogue Office.
I think John and I would agree that if it was a CIA operation, it is almost impossible inside of the CII to keep something like that secret. I mean there would be highly classified operations that I was not read into that. I don't even know how. I didn't know the details, but I kind of knew him from hanging around in the coffee shop, or you know, you walk in on a meeting and the dots and duncan
do yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And I have heard in thirty three years, not a peep out of like we might have been involved, or again it was a bit before our time, But I never heard anything like that any what about you?
Impossible to imagine that they could be held that secret for that long on their deathbed, wouldn't say anything like I mean, I worked in for thirty years, I had any inkling who about it.
I'd like it.
I'd try to make some cash off right now.
Now we still might figure out who killed Kennedy, but we have.
To have a short break first.
No, I know, no one cares about my theory. I do. I've developed this as a result of working with you guys.
I don't like it now, I don't like it.
I've learned so much from.
So I don't have a theory as to why leave Harvey Oswald killed him, Whether it was the Cubans, the mafia, the Russians, the CIA, whatever, he was connected to someone. But I do have a theory that at some point the federal government figured out who was behind it, maybe even a very loose way. But who would get blamed
for being behind it? Maybe there's a Russians, maybe there's a Cubans, there's a mob, right, whoever it was, it is better to keep that hidden than to allow that to come out, because then there would have to be a response. And the only way there couldn't be a response that's required is if it was a lone gunman. If it was the CIA, well all hell breaks. If it was a mob, I mean war between the government and the mob at that point. If it was Russia
or Cuba, then it's World War three. This dovetails with your story about the informant being killed by I'll just say the FBI, because it was necessary to keep whoever was behind this under wraps.
So let me throw this stchet from someone who has done conspiracies, not obviously like this, But.
You know you didn't kill Kennedy, No, but you were telling yeah.
So your operation is only as good as the weakest link. So if insert whoever it is wants to kill Kennedy, if who they're going to use, if they're vector, even if he's not the only guy, let's run with the grassi and old theory. He's gonna get he's gonna get caught. And Lee Harvey Oswald, by all accounts, is not a guy who's going to keep his mouth shut.
That's for Jack Ruby, because.
Well, now you're getting into a pretty byzantine conspiracy.
But if you assume institutions have incentives, is what you're saying. You're saying each institutions and incentively, if we thought it was the Russians that might start a war, if we thought it was the mob, it might start And so the FBI is saying, Okay, we don't want to do this because we don't want to start a war with the mob, and c I just wanted to just want to start a war with the Russians or whatever.
That's giving institutions almost like human brains and they're thinking this thing through.
But there's a lot of people institutions.
And they don't always think the same way. And so there's all kinds of people at low levels who are getting this kind of stuff, and you're assuming that somehow they think the same way, Like, yes, if the leadership got together and said we don't want that to come out, but I'm I don't care.
If there's a way with the Russians.
This is exciting ship, I'm gonna like tell.
Everybody, but I'm gonna tell it. I'm gonna get drunk and tell my money. So well, who would do that?
This is the flaw that you guys find with almost one hundred percent of the conspiracy theories, which is there are just too many people that would have had to keep it secret and it would have.
Come out right.
And Jerry's always saying Occam's razor to all of these things, and it's it's hard to disagree, although once in a while it's.
A is a rule of thumb, which doesn't mean it always.
Well, the problem is there's probably pieces of this that don't hold together that people don't want to talk about.
It leads people down roads and stuff.
So so yeah, I think there's probably more story than the clean story. But that whether that means it's a massive conspiracy?
So is it?
Is it?
You've spent a lot of time with the police, right, if you were gonna kill Kennedy, would you again again? Would you would you would you put somebody in a tower where they don't have, you know, a perfect shot. They got to get it just right, or would you put it? There's like other ways of doing it much more ways were like you're more likely to get away absolutely, like maybe get a better rifle, maybe get a better shot, maybe get out, you know.
The poison theory, you know, put a bomb in the road.
There's a lot of things you can do. And if I were going to do it, I get a better rifle, I'd probably get it. If I was wanting to pancy, I'd get a better better, better pantsy than Oswald I would put. You know, I would be thinking of like how am I getting How is he going to get away? Well, because you want to get.
Away, Yeah, that's the key is you make a plan, but the plan involves how I get away with it. But of course the prisoners are all full of guys, we're idiots.
Well, yeah, it's funny, like we've seen a number of recently Indians, the Turks and the Russians now in Europe had like tried to hire killers to take out people for them. There's this interesting thing that a lot of people try to reach out to find hitmen. And I think law enforcement has been like incredibly successful because essentially there are no hitmen. People come looking for hitmen, there's
no such thing. But they people start looking for him, and then they come across law enforcements thing and they're like, let's watch this guy.
The Russian guy who killed the dissident in Berlin. His getaway. He was on a freaking bicycle. So he rode by and he shot and killed the guy. But everybody saw it was in broad daylight, and you know what, his bicycle could not run a police guard right.
Went through.
Well I don't know, I mean thinking that this is a paid Russian.
But Whattin did then is arrested, A bunch of Americans held them prisoner and then swapped to get the guy.
There's always one step ahead that guy and the the.
Indians didn't do a very good job. They got caught and in Canada and Canada and on other than Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor for a couple of days did talk to he's.
A frequent target of this podcast.
Well he did. He did talk about trying to kidnap this he today gulan.
Turkish guy in Pennsylvania that awan the head of Turkey believes did a big coup against him.
You know, even Michael Flynn when he was on the inside and he was going after al Qaida and Isis and Iraq, he was effective and efficient and he made things happen. And well, these guys were his guys, were his guys were. But you know, he came up with a shitty planned to try to kidnap a guy out of the Poconos and didn't work out. For at least he said he did. John and I never got caught.
By the way, we're just putting that out.
It helps not to actually do it.
But we never got I never got you never got arrested.
Right.
I don't think he solved it, But this is this is great.
Oh it's interesting and now fifty some years later, but you look back at you you know, maybe something to it, but again just another theory.
And running operations. I will say that the world is full of weird coincidences, right, absolutely, It's like coincidences happen all the time. We're taught we do surveillance detection.
Once you're out, you're moving, let's you're driving your car to see a phone's following and you're chosen a route that you believe you can manipulate someone who might be tracking you and see.
What they're there. You're like hyper aware.
You look around and you realize there's all kinds of shit that's like there's guys sitting.
In cars and people in places. Also you're like, oh my god, what that doesn't make sense?
Why are they doing this? Like why did this part?
Like all kinds of stuff that doesn't make sense. You got to work your way through that and find a way to continue on to it. It's all kinds of stuff.
Also, I think we all found out an investigation, it's usually the simple answer. Yeah. In the end, we talked about these conspiracies and these complicated ways of looking at things, And in the end, I most investigation goes, of course.
He did yeah, the butler.
The butler did it. The butler did it.
I remember one time I broke a rule at CIA. I was supposed to meet this guy and we're gonna meet in a certain place, and he was early and I bumped into him on the street, and we probably shouldn't have said anything to each other, right, pretending we didn't know each other, but he didn't, and he looked at me and said, can we please please just go
for a drink. And now this is in Berlin, where there are fifteen hundred bars and restaurants and everything like that, and he says, I just want to have a drink, you know, just the two USTs, like the old days. And I'm like, we're both clean. Who's gonna know, right, I'm like, okay, twenty minutes, I'll meet you at a certain place at a certain time, like wasn't far away. And so we went off and we went into this bacrner of an Irish pub in places a few people in.
It was really big and dark, and we shared a beer and talked, and then he went back and then we did our correct meeting. The next day, I went into work and another officer came over to me and said, how was your guinness?
Oh?
And I'm like.
And he said, I saw you sitting over in the corner over there. And I said, was that so and so? And I'm like, yeah it was. I said, where were you? He says, I was in another corner with another thing. I was meeting with selling. Oh my god, we had two meetings in the same place. Today they are like twelve hundred.
Places in the Cold War would have ended sooner up that was the only really dark Irish Yeah.
Well, Dave, it was incredible to hear your story. I'd love to hear more of your stories. We've we've crossed in different places.
Your stories about how different agencies work and don't work together resonates with us around. I want to thank you very much much for spending some time with us, and it's also nice to be together for a change.
Not Worthy.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern.
The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.