Who Killed JFK?

It's nineteen seventy five. We're in New York City at the offices of the Village Voice newspaper. Shaggy haired reporters hack away their typewriters and chat around the coffee machine. You can almost smell the smoke hanging in the air. One reporter, Dick Russell, is going through his mail and he comes across an anonymous letter.

The letter was from someone who identified himself as the Brooklyn Waiter, and he wrote that he was familiar with a recent article I had published on the JFK assassination. He also wrote that I was now part of the quote great game of researching the JFK assassination, and he wanted to bring the name of someone to my attention.

You might remember Field Operations Intelligence as the top secret army intelligence unit closely connected to the CIA. Nagel described its role as quote designed to conceal the true nature of CIA objectives.

I continued to research Willoughby and found out that not only was he an extreme, far right anti communist with connections to Nagel, but he also had connections to CIA chief Allen Dulles, the Hunt Oil family of Dallas, and the Cuban exile community. And then, when I thought I'd read just about everything I could about General Charles Willoughby, I stumbled upon his birth name. Charles Willoughby was born

This is who killed JFK? Sixty years later? What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien.

In the last episode, we covered the forty eight hours between Oswald's arrest and his death. We heard about Jack Ruby's extensive connections to the mafia and Oswald's connections to Ruby. We watched Ruby as he stopped to Oswald following the assassination, then murdered Oswald on live TV.

So where does this guy, Adolph Shepy Wiedenbach fit in and if he's involved in the whole thing, why is this the first time we're hearing his name.

He was a rogue and in this episode we'll find out how he and other hardline rogue elements came together to assassinate the president.

As I see the hallmarks or the markers of this being a CIA operation that rogues would have conducted.

That's Rolf Mowitt Larson. He worked as a CIA intelligence officer from nineteen eighty three to two thousand and six.

I do believe The reason I can say that with a different kind of approach than others is because I am a CIA officer.

Okay, it's time to lay out exactly what happened on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three.

All right, here we go. You've established three groups, each with.

A motive, and exiles were angry that Castro took over Cuba. They wanted the country back. The mafia wanted their hotels and their casinos back. And the hardliners in the military and the intelligence community were furious at Kennedy. They believed that he had gone soft on communism and was selling America out.

So what do you think happened?

Well, Ralph Mowatt Larson, the former CIA agent that we just heard from, he said it had all the hallmarks of a CIA operation, and he thinks that some people connected to the agency were involved.

As we go through this, it's important to keep in mind Operation Northwoods.

You'll remember. Operation Northwoods was the concept developed by the CIA and the military. The idea was to stage a false flag attack on a prominent US target, then blame it on Castro to galvanize public support for an invasion of Cuba.

CIA agent Bill Harvey's ZR Rifle explored the same tactic of using a pro communist scapegoat.

If you remember, ZR Rifle was the CIA program run by Bill Harvey that was designed to eliminate world leaders that the US deemed problematic. In nineteen seventy six, the Church Committee discovered classified documents about this program, which included a handwritten note from Bill Harvey himself.

He wrote, quote planning should include provision for blaming checks or soviets in case of blow. In other words, someone who is pro communist. Harvey also instructed the Central Registry to have a quote phony two oh one on that person.

A two oh one is a file that the CIA keeps on someone they're interested in.

He wrote that this phony two oh one quote should look like a CE file. The CE stands for counter espionage.

If they wanted a pro communist to take the blame for an assassination, they had to have documentation to this person, this fall guy, to prove that he was in fact a Communist agent. The idea of a pro communist scapegoat was part of both Operation Northwoods and Harvey's ZR Rifle. Now let's get into the details. Once the motorcade had been established. All the tactical leader had to do was placed the shooters in positions to be most effective.

Do you know what a triangulation is?

That's Colonel William Bishop being interviewed by Dick Russell. Bishop worked in intelligence for many years and worked in black ops for the CIA.

Only septrifie it happen nighte this depository, Resciole and the Billinheer Courses Street.

Now some people think they were two shooters, some people think as many as six, but based on the forensic evidence, the locations of the wounds and the directions of the shots, we believe there were at least four. There was definitely a shooter on the sixth floor of the school Book Depository building. There was another shooter behind the picket fence on what we've come to call the grassy Kno. Based on the bullet hole in Kennedy's back and some of

Knole, so we were on the south side and we were looking for shooters on the other side.

That's Tosh Plumley, the CIA mercenary pilot who said he flew mobster Johnny Rocelli and CIA agent E Howard Hunt to Dallas that day.

Plumley was positioned on the southknoll of Dealey Plaza at the time of the show sho He said a shot definitely came from that area, and based on the position Kennedy was in at the time and the result of his head wound, we believe this was a kill shot.

I know you've been researching this question for decades. Can you name the people that you think fired at JFK that day.

I'm gonna let Dick take this one.

With all of the information now available to us, we can name four assassins who were all present in Dallas that day. It's possible to make a highly educated guess as to who those shooters were and who was responsible for where they were placed.

The people were about to name were all cold blooded assassins.

To me, it was a job, no more and no less, and a human target is no damn different.

That's Colonel William Bishop again talking about his mindset during assassinations. Later on, during this interview with Dick Russell, Bishop admits that he himself had a hand in the nineteen sixty one assassination of Raphael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic.

You look upon your target as a ten can. You don't allow yourself to become emotionally, psychologically, or mentally involved with your target.

You have to be attached to be good at it cold, Okay, So who were the men in Dallas?

First there was a Cuban exile named Erminio Diaz Garcia.

Emigio Lea.

That's fabian Escilante, a former Cuban intelligence officer.

Escolante said that Armenio Diaz is one of the people that we think was almost definitely involved in the plot against Kennedy.

Who is Henrimnio Diaz Garcia.

Escalante said that in the nineteen forties he was a gangster in Cuba. He participated in a plot to kill the president of Costa Rica. He said that Herminio killed several people in the fifties.

In twenty thirteen, an old friend of Garcia's Rinaldo Martinez Gomez gave an interview stating that Garcia had admitted to him that he had been part of the JFK assassination team. Garcia was killed in nineteen sixty six while on a mission into Cuba to try and assassinate Fidel Castro. We think another shooter was a man named Jean Swetra.

We mentioned Swetra in an earlier episode. He was a notorious French assassin. Cia files Declassified in nineteen seventy seven revealed that Swetra was in Dallas on November twenty second, and was then quickly and quietly deported from the country almost immediately after the assassination. We believe another shooter was a man named Charles Nicoletti, also known as Chucky the Typewriter. He was part of the Chicago mob and a hitman for Sam g and Conna.

You may remember Sam g and Conna was one of two mobsters, along with Johnny Rosselli, that agreed to help Bill Harvey assassinate Castro.

Nicoletti was murdered in nineteen seventy seven, right before he was due to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The fourth shooter we know about was a man named Jack Cannon. Cannon worked under Charles Willoughby.

Willoughby was the guy you talked about earlier, the guy you received the letter about exactly.

Willoughby was the head of intelligence for Douglas MacArthur, and after World War Two, Cannon worked with Willoughby. Cannon ran a Bloe black ops group known as the z or Z Unit. When I wrote my book on Richard K. S Nagel, The Man who Knew too Much, he told me that Canon was a part of the CIA unit that reported to Willoughby, and he indicated that Canon was directly involved in the assassination of JFK.

It seems like a lot of people to be working on a secret plot.

It was all compartmentalized. Everything was done on a need to know basis. Most likely none of the shooters were aware of the others, so in that sense, they didn't work together.

The CIA agents that we talked to said that people in operations like this would be given very specific instructions of what they were expected to do. They would know little or nothing about the other people involved.

As both of you said a little while ago, it's nice to name the shooters, but knowing who put them there, that's the real question. Who do you think orchestrated the assassination of JFK.

The challenge to answering that is that people want a simple answer, and it isn't simple.

I can hear the audience groaning as you say that.

No, no, no, don't worry. We're about to answer you very directly. But it isn't a one word answer. It wasn't the CIA, the mafia, or the Cuban exiles, but it was rogue individuals that came from those worlds.

Operation Northwoods and ZR Rifle served as the blueprint. The people that wrote those documents never thought they would ever see the light of day. They thought that it would stay secret forever. Alan Dulles, the godfather of the CIA, kept these programs from the War and Commission. He knew what a bombshell it would be.

So to start, none of this happens without the knowledge of Alan Dullas.

We don't think that Dulles played an active role in the planning, but we do think he would have been aware of the plan.

Why do you say that, because it's inconceivable that he wouldn't be aware of something like this, and it explains why he was at the remote CIA facility known as the Farm on the day of the assassination.

What's the farm?

This was the top secret facility. What the hell was Alan Dalles doing going to a CIA facility when he had been fired two years before.

That's David Talbot, the author of a book on Dulles called The Devil's Chessboard.

He was there all during that fateful weekend when President Kenny was killed and when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on national television.

With Dulles's approval. I think that James Angleton and David Attlee Phillips were responsible for ultimately setting up Oswald.

You'll remember James Jesus Angleton as the poet spy. He named his world of counterintelligence the Wilderness of Mirrors.

He and David Attlee Phillips, who worked under Angleton, were the ones moving Oswald around the chessboard. They were developing him as a pro communist who would ultimately take the blame.

Otivele was a damn thing in the world, but a dicoy.

He was a patsy.

We started this investigation with Lee Harvey Oswald famously saying I'm just a patsy. And now Rob, you're fully explaining why you think that's true.

Let's take a moment to understand why Oswald's saying he's a patsy is so important. If I was arrested for a murder I didn't commit, I would say I'm innocent. I didn't do it. You got the wrong guy. But Oswald says I'm just a patsy. Now, why would he say that? If you look at assassinations of world leaders throughout history, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, what happened after their deaths?

Somebody claimed responsibility?

Exactly when he was arrested, he said, I'm a patsy. That's not the words of an assassin who prattly kills the president.

That's David Talbot again.

John Wilkes Booth said six semper tyrannus. As he'd left to the stage after killing Lincoln, he was proud that he'd killed the.

President six semper tyrannus, which means thus always to tyrants, if you're going to.

Kill somebody for political reasons, and you think that you're doing your country a great service, you want to own it.

What about those who say he was just someone looking to make his mark on the world, even.

More reason to own it. If you're nobody and you want to feel important, to take your place in history, you want to own that. Setting up Oswald to take the fall also explains the cover up. How do you mean, Well, we know that Oswald had extensive connections to the CIA, So the people who had been handling him since the late fifties, they now had a personal incentive to make sure that everything was covered up.

Their fingerprints were all over Oswald, even if they had nothing to do with the assassination directly, and any real investigation would reveal their involvement.

So the men responsible for Dallas were counting on the fact that the CIA and FBI would have to close ranks in the cover up because of their connections to Oswald.

Exactly. Anyone who dealt with Oswald handled his file, read his mail, cut his paychecks, gave him his assignments while he was in the Marines, took care of him when he got out. They now had to deny any connection to Oswald, even if they had nothing to do with the assassination. And we know what happened to those who tried to talk.

Okay, so you're saying that we have Dulles as aware of the event, and Angleton and Atlee Phillips making sure there was a patsy to take the blame, but who actually orchestrated This.

Evidence leads us to the ZR Rifle Chief Bill Harvey as the strategist and General Charles Willoughby as the tactician. Willoughby and Harvey then tapped the mafia and the Cuban exiles to help provide the shooters.

I think Harvey and Rosselli and a couple other guys were the people who were training the assassins, and the theory is that Harvey decided to direct those assassins against Kennedy.

That's Robert Blakey again. You'll remember he was in charge of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in nineteen seventy nine. They concluded that President Kennedy was murdered as a result of a conspiracy.

Harvey's hatred for Kennedy was well documented. He hated the president's politics, and he saw his path toward peace as the act of a trader, and he hated Kennedy personally for banishing him to Rome. As we know, Harvey was also in charge of the CIA's program of hiring assassins to kill political leaders around the world, and Willoughby was

The assassination in Dallas came directly out of the Operation Northwoods and ZR Rifle playbooks. It had been implemented against world leaders many times, just never at an American target.

I'm sure the audience, just like me, needs a moment to digest all this.

To me, the names of the shooters and the men behind them is less important than the reason it happened. Kennedy represented progress. He wanted to move us away from nuclear annihilation toward peace, but sadly it prompted a coup that profoundly changed history.

Up next, why it matters that we're asking that question today? I came into the story interested in whether the question who killed JFK? Could actually be answered? And to what degree did this question destabilize American's faith in our country's leadership. The murder of President Kennedy seems to be a moment

Yes.

If you talk to young people today, they're turned off by the society in which they live. They're cynical. Where did the cynicism come from? I think the cynicism that are characteristic of young people today are not entirely related to but are the outcome of the cynicism over the War On Commission War.

To this day, a US president was assassinated, and it's likely that the real perpetrators were not held accountable. The fact that some of these perpetrators may have been officials in the US agencies designed to protect us is likely the very reason why people like rob continue to pursue

I think the only closure you get is that you come to certain conclusions. So this podcast series is going to show that there was a huge cover up going on.

To people like Dick Russell crystallizing his theory is closure. For others like Jefferson Morley, closure isn't up to us.

The CIA records that are still classified they will help answer this question.

In other words, as long as the government is holding on to records, this story isn't over. But as time passes, even that becomes more complicated.

You know, one thing that we see is when they release these records, you know, people who would have been really interesting to interview have died.

They can't talk anymore.

This guy writes a detailed memo. His name didn't come out until twenty twenty two, you know, and when we get the name, you going, look, the guy died in twenty seventeen. You know, if we'd had that document in twenty seventeen, that would have been a very important interview.

For historians like John Meacham. It's about what America might have been had Kennedy survived.

It is tempting to want to see our martyred King as wiser and better than he might have turned out to be. But it's not nostalgic to say that the Kennedy of sixty one was not the Kennedy of sixty two, and that Kennedy of sixty two was not the Kennedy of sixty three.

I think there's a piece of Americana that feels like, if Kennedy had survived, the country would have avoided the view now moar, because that's what Kennedy was promising when he was murdered. It's impossible to know if that would have happened. But it's enticing to envision that alternate reality. And after spending time with Dick and Rob, I've come to see how that reality may be a bastion of healing in what otherwise is a wound in their psyche.

I hope they continue to demand the truth from their government, and not just about what happened to President Kennedy, but as a way of coming to grips with our past. If we want to continue to strive for a more perfect union, in order to preserve our democra, it has to be built on a foundation of truth.

Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me Solidad O'Brien, and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and Me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pinero. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Lauro. Our project