Law&Crime Sidebar - 7 CIA Secrets Revealed as JFK Files Pour In

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

As more unredacted information is released as part of a document dump related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we’re learning more about clandestine operations that were also underway at that time. Law&Crime’s Jesse Weber takes another deep dive into the latest documents with University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: If your child, under 21, has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease, visit https://forthepeople.com/food to start a claim now! HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger, Christina O'Shea & Jay CruzScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Assassinations, poisoning, covert operations, romantic matchmaking. It has been a few days, more documents released and analyzed, so it's time to do a follow-up on what was found so far in the JFK files release. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. Okay, time to talk JFK once more,

because new documents were released after that initial release, according to the National Archives, to kind of give you a perspective here. March 18th, 7 p.m. Eastern, that was a release of 32,000 pages. March 18th at 1030, there was another 31,400 pages.

March 20th, 9.30 p.m. 13,000. 700 pages and it has been several days and it has allowed scholars and experts and reviewers to assess what is there to put it into context obviously not everything has been fully analyzed i mean over what 76 000 pages of materials were released and viewable now on the national archives website this of course is pursuant to an executive order signed by president donald trump but it's a discussion about the assassination from november 22nd 1963 there's a discussion about covert operations, sources, assets of the CIA, Cuba, Russia, Martin Luther King Jr., of course, Lee Harvey Oswald, the consensus being, and I think a fair assessment of the materials would

support that he is the lone gunman, the lone assassin of JFK, although, very interestingly, President Trump told Clay Travis on the program Outkick that while he believes Oswald was the one shot, the one killer here that killed Kennedy, suggested that perhaps he may have had help, And that, of course, is consistent with many theories over the years that it was the CIA who killed Kennedy or the mafia or Fidel Castro or the KGB. But there's a lot to get into a lot more revelation since we last spoke. So now we want to bring back on to the program to join the discussion once again, Dr. Larry Sabado, founder, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, author of the Kennedy Half Century. Doctor, so good to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time.

So since we last spoke, what have you learned? Oh, so many things. They're nuggets, Jesse. There is no comprehensive document that says, here's how the Kennedy assassination went down. Oh, and oh, by the way, Lee Harvey Oswald was encouraged by X and by Y, and we suspect the Soviet Union pre-programmed him to do this during the nearly three years that he was living in the Soviet Union. There's nothing like that. But I'll tell you what I'm learning, as we continue to work our way through these nearly 77,000 pages, I'm learning the context of the times had a lot to do with this.

That is, if you look at the situation that developed in the Cold War, where spy versus spy was the way daily life unfolded, not just in terms of East versus West, but also among allies in the West, probably among allies in the East, though we have less information. about that. And so you watch, for example, the U.S. and France at that time did not have the warmest of relationships, though we were allies. And the French had talked about getting out of NATO from time to time. And General de Gaulle, the president, was serious about it at one point. We suspected that the Soviets had managed to place a spy in the French intelligence services. So instead of going to President de Gaulle or through the French to locate the spy and

have him expunged from the West, we put our own spy in the French intelligence agency to find out who the Soviet spy was. And later on, the CIA actually broke and entered into the French embassy. It was a burglary. One person who was active in the CIA at the time and was an award winner within the CIA was James McCord. And people with a long memory will recall he was one of the very first people convicted in the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee. So he took the skills that he had gained in the CIA and he put it to practical use. But by the way, he was somebody who helped come up with the technology to try to detect

secret microphones, right? That's exactly right. That's what he was. That's what he was honored for within the CIA. Hey, everybody. This is a law and crime legal alert. Do you know that children are being diagnosed with serious conditions like type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and the research is potentially linking ultra-processed foods to all this?

Yeah, well, Morgan and Morgan is stepping in to fight to hold these food companies accountable. With decades of experience fighting large corporations, they are ready to stand up for families who deserve justice. So if your child under 21 has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or fatty liver disease, then visit www. for the people.com slash food or scan the QR code on screen to learn more. So by the way, we'll get to Lee Harvey Oswald in one second. But you have a great piece up. It's on the Center for Politics website. It's Savido's Crystal Ball.

I read it this morning. One of the things that shocked me the most, there was, you talk about CIA operations, there was a plot to poison the Cuban sugar supply. Can you talk to us about that real quick? Oh, absolutely. And now, we've known about this for some time because in one of the early, earlier batches a century ago, a decade ago, we learned that, in fact, the CIA was involved with a whole series of plots, some of which were not carried out, to poison the sugarcane

crop in Castro's Cuba in order to oust Castro. That is, to cause a popular rebellion. They wouldn't know what happened or why, because there would be widespread poverty and hunger. I don't think that was done from everything I can see, nor do I believe some of the crazier plots about painting American bombers with Cuban insignia and then bombing a friendly country and blaming it on Cuba. Occasionally planes are shot down when they're in these kinds of enterprises.

So I kind of think they would have scraped the paint off and figured out they were U.S. planes. Some of this never happened. But one that did happen was the poisoning of a big shipment of Cuba, Cuban sugar, going to the Soviet Union. had a problem with the legitimate problem with the ship, and it had to stop in Puerto Rico. While it was there, they managed to get an agent on board that put an agent in the sugar that they claimed would not poison Soviet citizens, but would merely have a terrible aftertaste and would make Soviets less likely to buy Cuban sugar.

Well, first of all, our limited knowledge of additives in those days doesn't give me any confidence that the agent would have caused more damage to people than they ever admitted. But second, it's just an incredible risk. Imagine what would have happened had that ever become public at the time. The Soviets would have had an incredible propaganda tool, as well as whatever illness resulted from those who ate the sugar. That's just one example of the kind of 007 James Bondish plots that they were constantly coming up with in the White House,

in the CIA. There was a group in the White House dedicated to this. Bobby Kennedy was on it as attorney general. And they were constantly cooking up these schemes to embarrass Castro, embarrass the Soviet Union. And what they never realized, it seems, is they could embarrass themselves. Yeah. And by the way, you know, I just think about additives right now. I think about RFK Jr. I think he would probably have an issue with the additives that were potentially being used in the harmful effects. But I mean, I agree with you. One of the things that I found fascinating was just the operations, the mindset, the ideas that they were trying to come up with because this was, you know, the Cold War and trying to get an upper hand. It was fascinating. Now, I'll get a little

bit more into that because there's also things about matchmaking and assassination plot. Just going back to Oswald, though, you heard the president speak to Clay Travis and talked about he believes that Oswald, the lone gunman, but may have had help. Your assessment of Oswald, Oswald having help after your initial review of the documents that have been released? Well, I don't find any direct evidence of that, but there is indirect evidence that there were two crime suspects who could have been involved in helping Oswald. One, I've discounted the Soviet Union simply because it made absolutely no sense for them to be involved in the assassination of a president, especially because JFK and Khrusha were getting along much better and had

just signed the test ban treaty in the summer of 1963 and had other projects on the agenda that would have helped ease the tensions of the Cold War. So I don't think that happened, though Oswald was there for nearly three years, and I don't think that Khrushchev or other members of the Politburo and necessarily knew what the KGB were doing, just like our people in the United States often did not know what the CIA was doing, our leaders in the U.S. But I don't think they pre-programmed him. It's not a Manchurian candidate kind of situation. though it could have been. I mean, you can easily imagine that happening while he was there. But the other agent, the other suspicious agent, is obviously the CIA. And the reason I say that

is because they really resisted telling the truth, all of the truth, or even part of the truth, for decades. And they directly, intentionally misled investigators, including the U.S. Congress on their role in following Oswald, in knowing where Oswald was, in reading Oswald. and obscuring all that through some really unpleasant circumstances. One example, they provided a liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was one of the investigations in the 1970s of what had happened with JFK, MLK, and also RFK. And they sent a liaison over who participated a lot in the JFK part of the study. And what they never told the committee, who had asked them to pick a neutral person, somebody they could count on, that individual, George Joannidis, was his name, was, in fact, the person who was deeply involved in blaming Oswald from the very afternoon of the assassination onwards, trying to pin it on Castro and the Cubans, though there really is no direct evidence or even indirect evidence that Castro did it.

He had threatened that if assassination attempts continued on him and other Cuban officials, that American leaders were not safe. Those were Castro's words in the fall of 1963. But we have no evidence at all that he ever followed through. I think he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish just by sending that message. And it certainly worked on LBJ. Didn't necessarily work on Kennedy, but it worked on LBJ. So I wonder about what the CIA did.

Did they follow up on the fact that they knew that Oswald, was somewhat unstable, could be wooed to one side or the other. Is it possible that they knew more than we understand they knew about the attempted assassination on General Walker, who was a right-wing nut, living in Dallas, leading all kinds of crazy demonstrations? And Oswald attempted to kill him in the spring of 1963 with the very same rifle he used to kill President Kennedy with in November of 63. They could have had Oswald then, not just the CIA, but the local police.

It was an attempted assassination. They had the bullet. They could have checked with the community that was somewhat pro-Russian in the Dallas community. There were Russian emigrates there who knew Oswald, who knew Oswald because of his wife, Marina. And one of the key figures there even suspected Oswald of having taken the shot against General Walker and mentioned it to Oswald. So there were clues just ready to be picked up so that Oswald could have been picked up in jailed, never done.

And that's the question. Was it not done because of negligence? Was it not done because it was intentional? Because when you have JFK scholar and former Washington Post editor and reporter, Jefferson Morley wrote writing on his substack, the fact pattern emerging from the new JFK document shows that a small click in CIA counterintelligence

was responsible for JFK's assassination, You wonder, there's that statement in general, when we're looking at this, this means it was deliberate on the CIA to look the other way, or was it a failure on their part to actually to track Oswald properly? Well, it was certainly a failure. The second one, the latter one is absolutely true. And that can be pinned on the CIA. I'm not personally convinced that the CIA was involved in any other way. But with a salute to Jeff Morley, who has followed this more closely, I think, than anybody else and has tracked every little. new development with respect to the documents and other things. I think he's made a case that Jim Angleton, a very senior CIA official, who clearly was not Pro Kennedy, and who had the ability heading up the counterintelligence part of the CIA to organize some siloed effort to assassinate JFK or other people. After all, they were assassinating foreign leaders. You know, in these documents, we have more detail than we've ever had about the CIA's involvement in the assassination.

of a former and still powerful leader in the Dominican Republic, we supplied all the weapons via the CIA. The dissidents in the Dominican Republic supplied a list of what they wanted and he got everything they wanted and got it to them. And that's what they killed. You're talking about Rafael Trujillo, was killed with the weapons supplied by the CIA. And there were other foreign leaders, of course, around the world that suffered the same fate. We were running, you know, assassinations incorporated. One of the things that came out as well, and I think it was known before, but maybe the degree of it wasn't known, was the CIA apparently reading mail, maybe reading Oswald's letters, but the scope of which this mail operation was being conducted?

What can you tell us about that? Certainly. The mail tampering program was far more extensive than we've ever known before the release of these recent documents. We've known for decades that the CIA was opening up people's mail, presumably mail that was under suspicion for some other reason, although I don't think that's always the case. And we now know that there was extensive mail tampering with mail coming from the Soviet Union and apparently China as well. Another document suggests that China mail was involved in this on the West Coast. And they were also manufacturing letters to people that they wanted to incriminate with having received letters, credible letters from the Soviet Union, from China, from North Vietnam, and they reproduced

the signatures of people who were relevant to the documents in question. They produced stationary that resembled that which was normally used by the individuals that were sending the letters. They had calligraphers at work. They actually produced postage stamps that were from the countries or resembled posted stamps from the countries. I mean, this was elaborate. And it took hundreds, hundreds of people who were in the employ of the CIA to do this. And the people who received these letters, well, either they didn't receive them because they were confiscated. And they were examined for codes and special watermarks and anything else you can think

of from the James Bond era. Or they actually received the letters after they had been opened and examined and copied. And they never knew that they had been opened. Well, today, this is absolutely unacceptable, though I want to use this opportunity to raise one question I mentioned to you in one other forum. And that is what I have learned from studying these documents for so long and particularly from the recent batch is that we lack the imagination to understand what our representatives or our bureaucrats are doing right now that we may not learn about for 25 years, 50 years, 100 years. I'm not alleging it.

anything, although I suspect there are things happening that they wouldn't want us to know about, and we would be embarrassed to know are being done in our name with our money. But eventually the American public, or maybe others, we'll find out about them one way or the other, but everyone will be dead, just like it is right now with the Kennedy Papers. Everybody's dead virtually. There's hardly anybody left alive who's mentioned in these documents. But we're embarrassed about the things they did. We regret the things they did.

They did it in our name with our money. what's being done today? It's really useful to keep that question in mind as you read the newspaper every day. I think that's a very fair assessment in the sense. I believe that's one of the people, one of the reasons people have interest in this story even today. Obviously, that people want more answers about what was going on with JFK and around that time with the CIA, but I think it was also tied back to, well, if things were happening back then, what does it tell you about what may be happening today? I believe that is one of the prime points of interest that people have in JFK. But also, I want to ask you about this. Do you think that includes the CIA

allegedly using a former FBI agent to procure women for foreign dignitaries? Because that was a big revelation that came out during these JFK files as well. If you can talk to us about that. You think something like that might be happening today? I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were happening because it's a honey trap. I mean, that's a classic technique that intelligence agents. agencies have used all over the world. And they try and satisfy the urges and desires of those who are powerful. And of course, they're recording all of it. In those days, I don't know how much of it they actually recorded because we don't have any of the tapes. We don't have any evidence that they

were doing it. But it only makes sense. If they're setting up the honey trap and they're procuring women, and they particularly liked Hollywood starlets, obviously lower level starlets who were trying to progress in the industry under the conditions and the standards that existed at that time, they would line them up with a royal visitor, a head of state, prime minister, a cabinet officer from any number of places, sometimes allies, sometimes adversaries. And you also collect that on allies because you never know when they might change sides or they might get alienated. And then you can present them with this information that they would deeply regret having to make public. I'm sure that's the way it's presented.

We don't want to do this. We would never do this, by the way. But we had this material. So now they goofed on occasion. They matched up an Arab dignitary with a Jewish starlet. They didn't realize she was Jewish. I read that. Yeah, that caused a problem.

But there were others where they actually fell in love and had long-term relationships. I'm sure they were just one of many relationships, but they had relationships. This is before love is blind and all the reality shows. It was the CIA was a great matchmaker, yeah. No, they were a matchmaker. They were an app. They were a dating app before we had dating apps paid for with public money. And they would do this regularly and thought nothing of it.

And remember, this was an era. You're much too young, Jesse, but this was an era when religion was much more important than it is today, moral standards. You couldn't even have TV stars in a sitcom. like I Love Lucy, having a double bed. They had to have two single beds or the Dick Van Dyke Show. They had to have two single beds. You couldn't use the word pregnant on television. But behind the scenes, they were doing things like this constantly.

And we all know that our national leaders and not just John F. Kennedy were involved in lots of love affairs of one sort or another. So, Professor, before I let you go, I wanted to ask you what, and I encourage everybody to check out the Crystal ball piece that you have on the Center for Politics website. But what was not in there? What else do you want to, if you're going to write the second article, the second crystal ball tomorrow, what else is there that you think our audience should know, or what else are you hoping or believe the documents may reveal? Because I know that there's still a review going on of them.

Well, I want to know a lot more if we have it on the Mexico City visit. And everyone says this, that this was Lee Harvey Oswald going to Mexico City. for about a week at the end of September and the beginning of October, 1963. We know for certain he visited the Soviet embassy. We know for certain he visited the Cuban embassy. We don't have the details on what actually went down in both embassies. We did at one time have tapes of Oswald calling to make the appointments at these embassies. And you know what?

They were just lost. Isn't that incredible? They were lost, just like the FBI lost Oswald's fingerprints for a good long time. How does this happen? This is a presidential assassination. You know, it's kind of important to keep them behind lock and key. And so many other things have been destroyed. So the things I want to see, Jesse, probably are no longer in existence or were destroyed.

They didn't just lose them. Though recently you had over 10,000 pages discovered by the FBI that hadn't been turned over to the Assassinations Review Board in the 1990s. Whoopsie? How did that happen? Oh, they probably fell behind a filing cabinet. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. Sure. So listen, Dr. Larry Sabato, I'm lucky to have had the chance to meet you and go over this with you because I really think that you are providing an incredible service as people are going through these materials or trying to make sense of these materials. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to do this. I know that you and your team have been working around the clock to try to make sense of what this is. So I really do appreciate this. I encourage everybody to check out your current publications and further publications about this. But again, thank you for putting all this into context. And hopefully we can continue the conversation as well.

I'll look forward to it and thank you for preparing carefully. That isn't always true with interviewers. Appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And that's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. And as always, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you should get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. binge all episodes of this long crime series. Add free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus

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