Shaun Newman Podcast - #777 - Larry Hancock

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Larry Hancock is an author renowned for his work on Cold War history, national security, and intelligence. He earned a BA in Education with concentrations in Anthropology, History, and Education from the University of New Mexico. Following his service in the U.S. Air Force, Hancock worked in telecommunications and computer communications before dedicating himself to historical research. He has authored multiple books that delve into areas such as covert operations, political assassinations, and national intelligence. His most recent publication, "Oswald Puzzle: Reconsidering Lee Harvey Oswald," examines the life of one of America's most notorious figures. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Contribute to the new SNP Studio E-transfer here: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

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Let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's an author known as a document geek who spent 30 years researching the assassination of JFK. I'm talking about Larry Hancock. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Larry Hancock. So, sir, thanks for hopping on.

Oh, it's great to be here. I'm looking forward to talking about it. You know, as I said before we started recording, like when it comes to the assassination, of Kennedy, I'm like, oh, I'm super skeptical of whatever the government narrative is. But in saying that, you know, I've never spent the time to like really delve into it. And to get you on, I'm really excited to hear some of the things that I'm sure you know, with your new book coming out and everything. I'm sure there's lots to get into there. but before we get into anything in regards to the assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald,

maybe we could just start with a little bit of your background. Who are you? Give my audience a little bit of a taste of who Larry Hancock is. Oh, sure. Well, obviously, other than being obsessive about Kennedy assassination, having spent 30 years on it, so there should be more background than that, right? Basically, my background education was in history, cultural and, anthropology education, got a degree in that from the University of New Mexico.

Then I went into the Air Force, served during the Air Force, and got involved in technology. After coming out of the Air Force, I worked in corporate America and communications technology, data transmission, that sort of thing, moving on into marketing and sales from technical training and spent a 35-year career in that. So kind of, kind of, very different started out in history and that sort of interest and ended up in technology and finally in marketing. After I retired, I got back into the history and I've always been interested in military history, national security issues, and the 60s. And so that I dive back into that and clearly, you know, having been alive at the time of the Kennedy assassination, where do you start if you're going to dive back into the 60s?

So I started with the JFK assassination. And I've been working in that area, doing research in that area, like over three decades now. Primarily, what you generally think of is a document geek. I go to the documents. I go to the CIA, the State Department, the National Archives. And like, one of the key things of that is always, if you're going to do history on it,

you can do it like 50 years afterwards. because then you can see what they were saying to themselves versus what they were saying to the public. And that's one of the real revelations in doing history and the way I like it. It's sort of like, you know, what did it look like at the time and how does it look now when we can see behind the scenes? And so I've done that with JFK assassination. I did it with the Martin Luther King assassination and did books on that. and ended up taking that same approach and writing some dozen books dealing with major events in national security, covert action, deniable warfare, including the assassinations of the 60s. So that's kind of me.

Well, one of the things that I find really interesting about what makes you, you, I guess, is this document geek. I'm like, oh, you're a guy who doesn't mind the, and forgive me, the boringness of reading government documents, right? Like, I don't, that's a very special individual that can sit down and read these things and find, oh, wait, that sticks out. And so I guess, you know, when I see that, I'm like, oh, this should be interesting because most people don't want to put in that type of work. They're like, I just, you know, okay, he was killed by Oswald and, you know, the government of, man, it's probably a little. off, but, you know, at the end of the day, they kind of just do loose ties. When I see somebody who's got document geek, I'm like, okay, where are we like, I don't know. I don't even know where to begin. I'm just like, okay, you go start looking in the documents because you're like, I want

to understand this more, right? You know, like they killed a president. Oswald killed a president, wherever it is. What did the documents say? Like, when you first started digging into this and then have more documents been released that have really been a revelation, I guess is probably where I'd want to start this. Yeah, the documents, the bottom line is the documents tell you who's doing what at the time. You know, you look behind the scenes at the FBI. What are they really investigating? You look behind the scenes at the Warren Commission.

On your question, one of the great revelations of the last couple of decades after the JFK Act, after Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, that really opened the doors to a tremendous. this amount of records. And the first thing it allowed us to do was to see behind the scenes to the investigations. We had not seen what the Warren Commission, who investigated the Kennedy assassination, was saying it to itself. You know, we're the internal memos. You know, we know what their report looked like. So one of the first things you see when you start studying their internal documents is they had a problem. Both the FBI and the Warren Commission, had a problem that Sunday afternoon after the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover tells his chief guy

at the FBI that their job immediately is to write a report saying that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president. There was no conspiracy. He was totally involved. You know, solve it. Don't even, don't even solve this crime right about the fact that we've already solved it. Now, that seems like that's a problem within 48 hours of the crime, right? Mostly, you tend to want to investigate a crime before you write the report on who did it. And that's the first kind of clue that what was going on wasn't really a sincere investigation. So when you start getting back behind the scenes, you talk about being skeptical. Okay, that's the first part of being skeptical.

Okay. And the FBI completed their report. The first thing you see coming back is a memo that says, you know, dear Mr. Hoover, this is going to be tough. We don't have the evidence that we need to write that report. Hoover does not care. It's like, okay, protest all you want, but write the report. That report was the FBI reporting the assassination is finished within two weeks and immediately leaked to the press. immediately. So we're not even going to wait for any legal process or any due. It's immediately leaked to the press. And the press begins, you know, months long period of writing about Oswald as the assassin because they, you know, like the FBI already solved it. They already did it. And at the same time, it's leaked to the, you know, this is leaked to the media. All of the evidence starts being leaked to the media from the Dallas police, from the FBI. So the media story develops to support this report because that's all they've got, really. So at that point in time, you can look back and see Lee Harvey-Ozwell has already been convicted by the FBI,

after two weeks, is being convicted by the media, and will be for another nine months before the Warren Commission, issues its own report. So that's that's that's the first the first thing that it starts to concern you is like, you know, what's really going on is not an investigation of what might have happened. It's an investigation intended to position Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin. The Warren Commission continues that. And now that we can look behind the the scenes at the Warren Commission, we find that there are internal reports by Warren Commission staff challenging their own report. Like one of their major staff members writes a memo on 26 different points that he wants to remove from the report because he doesn't think they can defend it. The Justice Department advisor to the Warren Commission says you guys should not even try to deal with Lee Oswald's shooting ability.

and make the case from a technical standpoint and a capability standpoint that he did the shooting because it's weak. And both of those concerns get ignored, and things just go straight ahead. And the Warren Commission gets published, report gets published, you know, vetting Oswald is the sole assassin, no conspiracy. and everything that doesn't support that, the get gets published in the general summary, like the report, everything else that doesn't fit, get shoved back into 26 volumes of appendices,

which they don't think anybody will ever read. But as you said earlier, there are document geeks, and people did read them, and as soon as they started reading them, even without being able to see what we see now, you guys have got conflicting information here. How could you write this in the report and put this in the appendix?

So a long-winded answer is the first thing we see from the document releases is a lot of information telling us why we should have trust issues with the official story and the official Warren Commission report. I mean, that doesn't solve what really happens. that just tells you that you've got issues with the official story and what's going to become history. The go beyond that to deal with what might have really happened is another story entirely, and it takes you much further into those FBI files and CIA files to explore what they either didn't investigate or investigate and didn't get into the warrant. and commission report.

And over the last decade or so, we've just gotten a large number of documents that allow us to do that. It requires digging. You said it's pure geekness, I guess, because you don't just read what's in the document. You have to understand who it's being circulated to, who originated it, who it's copied to, who knew what at what time, what the cryptonym. are for the different investigations and the code words. That's especially true for the CIA. Of course, it was trying to cover everything not from us, but from the Soviet Union, right?

It's internal security. So they're hiding their own communications under Crips. You know, who's who. A fascinating part of all of this is what we call Crip busting because it's so confusing even internally that occasionally they write real names and really. real descriptions on the margins of their documents, and we have to take those and reverse engineer it and publish documents that say, okay, now we can understand who's doing what, because we can read their crypts, and we know who was who and who's talking to who about what at a given time. That typical long-winded answer to your question. Well, it's good because I'm thinking I'm like, okay, we are 60, I'm doing the math here, 62 years past us, 61 years and change?

60 plus. And I go, you know, like, one is they get to hold all the documents because, you know, when was the last dump of documents on this assassination? There was a dump of documents last year. Okay. to some extent. There aren't that many left that are redacted release. There are a few critical ones, you know. What hasn't been released? That they're pushing on Trump to be like, you need to release everything. Yeah. What hasn't been released primarily as stuff that the CIA declares to Trump is still an issue of national security because it names an individual who's still living,

for example, and you might not want to see a communication published. That's not necessarily even American individuals. Some of those records deal with individuals overseas. Mexico, these are people that the CIA had contact with, that they still feel need to be protected. A lot of people still living or with relatives in Cuba that are of interest in regard to this. that they feel claim need to be protected.

Probably the most egregious example is something that's still being protected. And even if Trump released everything, you know, this might stand out is, for example, the case officer files for CIA officers who clearly knew about and probably were working operations using Lee Harvey Oswald for propaganda purposes, it's hard to think they're ever going to be released because we've been in court with those specific documents for over a decade now in front of multiple judges.

And every time the CIA gets backed against the wall, they get into closed quarters with the judge and show him something, and the judge declines the request. So to answer your question, there's a lot of stuff that we might like to get, but some of the most important stuff that we've learned about, I don't think we'll ever get because I don't think it exists anymore. We've learned about internal investigations that the CIA did of its own people and people it was using

in 1963. We know the investigation we've done. We have remarks in documents from the people who did it. We know what questions they ask. We know what report was supposed to be prepared. There's no sign that that report ever entered into the system. If it concludes what I suspect it concludes, it was too hot. You know, we absolutely know from documents that have been released that the CIA has the ability and the inclination to eliminate documents. from their master files, things that were setting out in offices, regional offices, in what are called soft files in somebody's drawer, if it's something that is going to be, have a negative impact, it never makes it into the headquarters files.

Even, even for example, James Angleton, the head of counterintelligence, the CIA, maintained his own file that had literally tens of thousands of documents in it. And after he left, and we know that would have included Oswald documents. When he left the CIA, they parsed through it, put some of it in the files, and destroyed the rest. So we don't get terribly excited over record keeping. We do what we can do with what we get, but it would be naive to think that there are. are, you know, truly smoking gun records that survive the initial process. When you, you've spent 30 years on this, correct?

Is that the number you said? Yes, sir. Now and then, not full time. It's like part of that. I was still working. But in fairness, I think about that. And I'm like, think about that. 30 years staring at something, trying to piece together,

deciphering the codes, understanding, you know, like, you know, as you're speaking, I'm thinking, yeah, you got to rewind the clock. you got you got big bad soviet russians or soviet union i guess you got you got cuba you got all these different things going on over the course of 30 years i don't know do you have a conclusion on the the everything that that went on with uh john f kennedy um like do you go this this is where i get to my conclusions this is what i see and this is what has come together over my you know my lifetime of work. Like, I mean, on and off, on or off, Larry, that's, that's, you know, most people don't do that. Fortunately, I do. It would be pretty depressing at this point in time

to have done all of that and like, okay, now I wonder what any of this means, right? Okay. So yeah, I do. Actually, one of, I, I write that in a book called tipping point. a tipping point. I've written like five books related to the Kennedy assassination, different editions, different books over a period of time. And some of them got really long. And I said, you know, okay, to answer the question that you just asked me a couple of years ago, it's like, can we get this down into a readable fashion that somebody could actually follow through? And that includes things that we've learned from people. We have interesting. We have interesting. interviewed people who talked to their lawyers at the time, talked to their wives, their family,

who later did talk to the House Select Committee or, you know, so we do have some insights inside the actual conspiracy, at least peripherally. So I put all of that into a book called Tipping Point, which which details the how the conspiracy was incited, how it was enabled, who carried it out. And after I finished that book, after a couple of years, I went, wait a minute, I never finished anything with Oswald. You know, what about Oswald? What about the guy everybody says, did it? You know, is it? And I decided it would only be fair to revisit Lee Harvey Oswald and really look at him from a personal standpoint and lead up to the fact of what he thought was going on the day of the assassination. because he clearly did some strange things the day of the assassination, which appear incriminating unless you understand a bigger picture.

And that's the book, the Oswald puzzle, is about half, 50% a biography, kind of establishing a character, personality baseline for Oswald. And then the latter third of it is a scenario. Speculation. I always liked it's kind of like, separate. the fact from the speculation, you know, be up front about that of what we think was going on with Oswald the day of the assassination, which actually had nothing to do with JFK and everything to do with Cuba.

I'm going to, so people, if they're listening to that and they go, okay, I want to go find a Larry Hancock book or the series of books, because one of the things that you're laying out for me, you know, once again, I'm thinking like 30 years, folks, like that's, you know, like how many people do you stumble into like that if people want to buy your work i assume amazon but at the same token i better not make that a silly assumption where can people go buy the books um at and yes your newest one is the oswald puzzle um um but where can they find them it's fascinating to me certainly they're on amazon but they all almost always get on ebay amazingly quickly, you know, for example, the Oswell puzzle I looked this morning, it's like, it's already in

five resellers on eBay and it hasn't shipped through Amazon yet. You know, how fast does that happen? But those are probably, I mean, the Oswald puzzle will be in general distribution in bookstores. Somebody could order it through a bookstore. You know, it's, it's available in general distribution. But normally the whole, I mean, the quick way to look at the whole list is on Amazon, But then you can find it through other online resellers, you know, not just through eBay, but online resellers. At this point in time, the list is about a dozen. But to kind of answer your question and maybe make more sense out of how does this one guy spend so much time on one thing, you know, which is a good question. Basically, as I went along with this, I had to check.

Checkpoints. First thing is, if you're looking at what the government did, on November 22nd, 1963, you need to understand how the government reacts to any crisis. So I actually ended up looking at a dozen different national crises over 30, 40 years span, and analyzing their reaction each time. What do I expect? What are they doing in public? What do they do behind? I put that into a book called Surprise Attack. So before you skip over that, what did looking at a 40-year span of course? crisis teach you about what government does when they or how they react to a crisis?

The first thing that they, it's damage control, seizing the message. I mean, and you have to sort of, even in your personal space, you know, how do you react to a crisis? You want to seize the initiative. You want to control the dialogue. If somebody starts asking you questions, you want to look like, you know what you're talking about. So every time you start seeing the government responding as if they knew what they were talking about when they really don't. You know, like we just said, Hoover can't. It's not real for him to say, write a report on this and have it ready for me next week. You know, this could be anything.

They don't know. But as an example, it illustrates us that when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, assassinated, One of the things you find is that that same day, the Attorney General and Hoover issued a statement that a single person had shot King. It had nothing to do with any racist motive. It was a pure act of, you know, there's no conspiracy, there's nothing else going on, and they're on national television. Now, why did they do that? They want to prevent riots. I mean, they want to prevent an overreaction, just.

like in 1963, we now know that Lyndon Johnson told multiple people within 48, 72 hours that he had to prevent a national, international crises in a war with Russia or Cuba. That's what goes on behind the scenes. What goes on up front is be calm. We got it. And that occurs each and every time, whether that is with the liberty, in the Mediterranean when it gets attacked in the 1970s, whether it's 9-11, that the response is always the same in it. In the book, you can almost,

you can parse it out is who's going to say what when, and then how does the eventual storyline emerge? How is it crafted? And one of the problems is when they do that and they make a statement that they know what happened too soon, what do you think happened? they have to end up defending their statement. They can't step back and say, oh, well, we're just, you know, we're trying to control panic.

And by the way, we learned something totally different than what we said first. That just doesn't happen. People don't do that. Why don't they? I mean, I don't know if you have an answer to that. But like, okay, you know, like, so, you know, you point out very clearly that you go back to the assassination. And Hoover says, like, listen, it's this guy who did it. Find me how he did it.

And they go, well, that might be a little difficult. There isn't a whole lot of evidence to support that. Don't care. Do it. I mean, my tinfoil hat goes off immediately. I'm like, okay, so they're trying to cover up something. But when you look at all the large fiascos, they have a like, okay, we got to come out real fast because we don't want another thing to happen.

but at no point did no leader ever go actually on upon further investigation this is what we found yeah they don't i think one maybe we wanted just before i answer that question or give an opinion because it can't answer a question uh you look at the gulf of tonkin incident with if you're my age you remember that because that essentially kicked the vietnam war into a new a new phase it just Lyndon Johnson, even though within five hours, was being told by his commander in the Pacific, his field commander on site, and numerous people that the North Vietnamese had not really attacked that destroyer that day, decided to go ahead with a narrative for political purposes, to make him really look tough because he had an upcoming election.

and authorized a major airstrike campaign against the North. Based on something he had been told was not true for political purposes. Just opposite of that, in the incident I mentioned earlier in the Mediterranean, when he was told what had really happened with the Israeli attack on the ship, he decided to do nothing for political purposes. And we now have the documents that show that because the NSA was monitoring the communication channels with the ship. They knew exactly what was going on. So bottom line, everybody does that.

My opinion is they look at how they can use the information, the incident. First of all, is there an opportunity to use it for some purpose? Okay. And some presidents, presidents decide to do that. to do that and others do not you know they're just you know they don't decide to use it they just decide to control the situation but it's all either about controlling the narrative or using the situation uh and that that sounds it sounds cynical it doesn't stop to it's not something you want to hear right well you know i i i'm at times i'm like naive i'm still naive right and when i listen

you say that like you know you go you go back to vietnam you're like for political gain i don't how many people died in that uh conflict i actually don't know uh larry oh do you know off the top your head hundreds of thousands let's put it that way so hundreds of thousands of mine which i'm you know okay got that that that was my era hundreds of thousands of people died for political gain i just i hear that and i'm like this is why i didn't detest politics and government because like I understand trying to get ahead of the situation. I understand like things happen and you got to calm a public that you're that you're supposed to be the voice of you know, I don't know, reason and and leadership and I'm sure a bunch of other

terms. But like that's something that when you think about that, I don't know if it gets any darker than that, you know, I'm sure it does. I'm sure folks it does. But you know, you're, you're, you're, You're making, okay, if I want to get reelected, I'm going to have to kill millions of lives, or hundreds of thousands of lives, or you get the point. And then we get reelected, and then what? Like, I mean, now you've got to go unravel what you've just created. Instead of just being like, oh, actually, we're going to pull back

and we don't want to do that. And what's worse, if you're, let's look at Johnson's position. Because Johnson, at that point in time, had not been a particular war hawk on Vietnam. He had not been, you know, hawkish or pushing JFK to become involved. He'd been over to Vietnam. But I think it, again, we're looking at when Johnson made the decision that he needed to look strong. Because who's he running against?

He's running against somebody that already looked stronger, right? Goldwater. You know, it's this is a guy who's known for his militants. So Johnson's got to look strong. Once he makes that move, he can't back off from it. And that's what we see for the next several years. He's got to maintain that. And a bad decision, I think that's the scariest part of it,

a bad decision that one day in history that I need to position myself and make an image for myself today, I mean, it was just one set of airstrikes. You know, it could have gone no further. but he had set a precedent for himself that he had to follow up on. So I guess one of the things that I get torn by is you always want leadership to take a stand, right? Well, sometimes it's maybe better not to take that toughest stand immediately. Like, just back off and admit that you're controlling the situation, you're aware of the situation,

but don't overcommit. Don't overcommit the country. Don't overcommit yourself. because once they do it, it's like they always have to live up to it from then on. Yeah, there's no turning back. It's, you know, it's everything. You know, when I come back to your tipping point book, and now, you know, like, one of the things about having different authors on the podcast

is I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to be stacking more books on to my reading list, you know. Because, like, you know, I find this, I find your depth of knowledge on these subjects. very fascinating. You go back to tipping point, though. So when you're like, okay, we got to, okay, we got to get to a conclusion here. We got to compile this all in a way that people can read. What conclusion do you find?

Where do you get to? You're like, you know, Oswald, Oswald did it by himself. He had no other things. He just disliked Kennedy and that was that. Or what did you find? What I found really in the kind of walk through the steps, What I found is you had to start, I won't say with motive in general, but what would lead people. For Oswald, there is no motive.

So you can discount that. Even the Warren Commission found that they could not find a motive. As a matter of fact, that was one of the big problems where they pretty much had to cherry-pick their presentation of Oswald. because not only could they find no motive, everybody that they talked to said, oh, Oswald was all about the same things, racial justice, economic justice, that JFK was about. They talked to people and they said, yeah, he actually thought JFK was doing a good job. When Oswald was on the radio in New Orleans that summer, the radio announcers had tried to get him to say negative things about JFK and Cuba. and he would not. He would just say,

no, it's not an issue. You're saying, sorry, is there, forgive me, is there an audio recording of him on a radio station

saying, and they're trying to pull out, like, isn't the situation and everything bad and he's going, actually, that's actually on a radio?

Yeah. And actually, those radio interviews, as part of the story, were pulled, and within weeks after the assassination, a radio was being circulated, including those interviews and a lot of other stuff about Oswald as a propaganda device because Oswald was being presented by CIA surrogates

and people they were working with as a danger of Cuban recruitment. How easily a young Marine, ex-Marine, American, citizen could be recruited and totally taken off track by Cuban propaganda. That's part of the story. But yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. And to paraphrase what he said, basically said it, my issue is with the administration. My issue isn't with JFK. They have some policies about Cuba that I don't, we ought to change. But he would not make a personal statement about JFK. So it's very difficult. call it to find a motive. Let's discard a motive for Oswald, okay? Who else had a motive? Well, at the time, and this is the real motive that we found emerging, what had really happened that would be the

tipping point? Well, the tipping point would be that by the fall of 1963, JFK was fairly pleased with the way his concept of neutrality was working in Laos. He was actually pressuring, Vietnam towards a more neutral solution, you know, some kind of compromise solution. Ho Chi men had asked in the very beginning, it asked the U.S. for support saying he didn't want to go communist. We decided not to support him. But JFK was very pragmatic. He was willing to talk to people and maybe look at compromise solutions. What happened is during 1963, Fidel K. Castro through back channel negotiations through the State Department approached Kennedy and essentially said, we need to end this embargo. We need to have better relations with the U.S. I'm not happy with the Russians.

You know, they could go away. You know, I'm willing to talk. And by the fall of 1963, JFK, much to the objection of the CIA and a lot of his advisors was in the process of sending a personal envoy to talk privately one-on-one with Castro about just doing that. Russians out, Cuban neutral, recognized a Cuban regime, improve economic relations. That was all going to happen. Actually, the first meeting was supposed to happen on November 22nd. in Cuba. What we found out was that people within the CIA took that story down to the people in CIA operations in Florida, who had been running operations with anti-Castro Cubans for over three years at that time. Same people they had worked with them in 1960, at the Bay of Pigs, during the

missile crisis. They had continually worked with overthrowing the Castro regime, and all of these people, several of them, had involved a project to kill Fidel Castro over and over and over again. They had attempted to kill him. They told these people about this new approach by Kennedy. Forget we're not going to kill Castro. We're going to do business with Castro. Okay. And by the way, all the programs that you've been involved with are going to go away and you'll be exile forever. There's a pretty strong motive. Basically, we either have to stop Kennedy from proceeding with this or, you know, you're never going home again. Forget it. You're done. We're done. And that was the tipping point. Now, the people at the higher end of that didn't like Kennedy's approach to V. Vietnam. They didn't like his approaches, his pragmatism at all. It just wasn't what they wanted.

They wanted much more aggressiveness. Kennedy was trying to balance things. But bottom line, in Tipping Point, I traced through the individuals and the timeline for an evolutionary, for conspiracy involving a small number of CIA operational people out of Florida. in the Cuba project, along with the anti-Castro exiles that they have been working with, and some other people on these Cuban Castro assassination programs, and trace it to the attack in Dallas. Okay. I guess none of that shocks me.

So then I go, your new book, Oswald Puzzle. Why spend an entire book on Oswald? What did they, like, what, like, you know, Think about that, folks. He gets, you get, I don't know, this is just me analyzing, I guess, from a long way away. You get to the point where you're like, well, all the information says this. And I think most of us, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on this, go, honestly just makes sense. You know, like it, it, he was messing with very big things that certain power, powerful agencies and probably people behind the scenes didn't want them to mess with. enter lee harvey oswald and like i know bits and pieces of the guy's story i know he i know he served in the military i know he ends up in soviet russia for a time i know he comes back i didn't realize he was on like uh like a radio station like build me this picture lee harvey oswald then

i'm i'm maybe i've just always glazed over you know he's just a scapegoat and there's nothing really to see here it sounds like if you've written an entire book on him there is something to see here. Yeah. And actually that you have kind of answered that question for me in a way because there is something to see. Oswald was actually a rather unique individual. I mean, here is a young man who is a teenager, was moved like six or seven different times from New Orleans to New York City, back to Dallas, had a very difficult childhood, was, you know, constantly. You can imagine what happens when a kid from New Orleans at the age of, you know, puberty is moved from New Orleans into school in New York City. His clothes don't fit. His accent

doesn't fit. Nothing about him fits. Life is going to be difficult for him. Becomes a truant. Yet when the truant officer sets down with him and says, look, either you straighten up and fly right or you're going to go into a juvenile home period. Suddenly, Oswald becomes a great student. The trots he stops. His grades go up. He tests 118 on an IQ test. You know, this is actually a bright young man who's had some difficulties

and following him all the way through. This is a fellow who is an inveterate reader. He's not, and we know this from his writing and his reading, in his readings, I think I was shocked, so you'd be shocked, to realize that by 1963, he was writing monographs about geopolitics and a compromise between capitalism and socialism and just very activist. Yes. Are you explaining to me that he was quite astute in geopolitics and writing about it and not only just writing about it, but writing maybe coherently to the point where you're like, actually, he's making some very valid points.

Like, he was sharp. Is that what you're saying to me? Absolutely. And that's not the picture we get from the Warren Commission. That's not in the picture in the history books. As an example of that, when he was in the Marines, and this is documented in multiple places, in the appendices of the Warren Commission, right? Not up front. One of his commanding officers in Japan said, you know, this guy and this all, officer had graduated from an Eastern College in political science and geopolitics. And he said, what was embarrassing is Oswald would try to engage me in debates and discussions about geopolitics,

like in the barracks where everybody can hear. And the officer is complaining that Oswald knows as much as he does. You know, lieutenants do not like that from guys who have one stripe. It's not, it's not comfortable, you know. And he was even in his testimony, it's kind of like, you know, I had to admit that this was a totally, this is not your average Marine. This is, he's not like his, he's reading. And at that point in time, he was beginning to self-teach him Russian to himself. So why does he pick?

So he goes into the U.S. military. Okay. I can see that. And then to hear off your story or to listen to your story, I'm like, okay, so he, he, was he was well read not only was he reading things he was he was starting to see uh um probably some things from the u.s military that started to bother him i would assume um and and then you know to pick up russian why does he pick soviet the soviet union what what is it about Soviet russia that you know because i've been painted this picture by lots of different sources that wasn't the place you wanted

to go i mean i guess idealistically maybe but what was it that you you found why does he go there. Okay. And that's, that's easy to answer in the long picture. The kicker is with Oswald, if you have a baseline of Oswald for several years, you can kind of see what's with Oswald, but what the Warren Commission and even conspiracy folks like myself have done is, is taking slices of that. Look a minute, given point in time, make something out of it. That's not the right way to do. But just as a segue, I will say, just to get across how different he was, we even know that on the on the boat to Japan the the book that he took to read on the marine you know transport boat was leaves of grass by Walt Whitman now I got to tell you

there are very few Marines on that ship who were reading something like leaves of grass by Walt Whitman you know even though there's sex in it okay no that that's not what they're doing so he is very different at the age as a teenager when before you went in the Marines when he's still leaving in Dallas as an example. He wrote a letter to the American young socialist federation saying that he had been reading about socialism. He was very upset by all the difficulties his mother had and getting very menial jobs and economic justice was important to him. Racism was important. So even at that age, he declared that he was interested in socialism wanted to pursue that, you know, agenda. And interestingly enough, says, look, is there a

chapter I can join? Right. So at that age, he's trying to join a chapter where this is supposed to be a totally anti-social guy, right? He just wants to join a chapter with the right people who thinks like he does. And if I can't join, I'll join. Can I start one myself? You know, so he's, he's, he's not. not a passive individual. When he gets to Japan, two big things happened to him. He's never had a real personal social life, especially with girls. And we know from the Marines, he was around in Japan, he started going to bars. He started visit a prostitute. Okay. We know this. So his social life began to change pretty dramatically. But in visiting the bars, and he writes this himself, The people that he most liked to talk to, other than girls, okay, or even maybe some of the girls,

were the students in Japan who were in the bars because they were very, they were socialist. They were thinking the same things that he was thinking. They didn't like government dictatorship. They didn't like the post-McArthur, you know, Japanese government. There were common influence. There were communist cells. And they were being influenced by Soviet communism. And so what they would talk to him about is how things could be better if we did things like they did it.

And he got very interested in Russia and reading about just. And Oswald, naive in some ways, very literate and enlightened in other ways, was he always wanted to see for himself. It's like, I want to go it. I want to go. I want to do it. I want to see. I can, I can, forgive me, I can really understand that sentiment. Sitting here and, and, and, and sitting in a studio, you know, I look at Buceli in El Salvador, and I've talked lots about it. I'm like, I gotta go see this for myself, right?

Like, because, you know, when you put it that way, it's like what he's doing in El Salvador, I find very fascinating. It's where I sit with a lot of things. He's a guy that, to me, looks like they're, you know, trying to do things that I want politicians to do. So what you're, I think what I'm grasping here, is, you know, in my mind or the way stories go,

they just paint this picture of like, you can't move anywhere without anyone knowing. But he goes to Japan, he gets into bars, he needs a couple of women, and he starts free thinking, goes and talks to some college kids because why, you know, they're around his age. And the ideas are the same. They have the same thoughts.

And he goes, Soviet Russia, Soviet Union, has these ideas. I got to go see it for myself whether or not they're actually working out. That's, that's what you're saying. And where I sit right now, I look at El Salvador or Malay, you know, like these guys that are tearing apart government and are speaking way different. And you're like, I want to go see this.

You know, is it actually what I think it is or is it something different? So actually, you know, when you position it that way, it makes complete sense. And that's exactly what he did. The other thing about Oswald is he has no fear. If he wants to do something, if he needs to go to Russia, he'll do whatever it takes to get to Russia. you know that travel however he did it legally but inside russia he did exactly what you said it's like how does this work is it and he didn't like it and actually when he came back to the u.s he wrote a manuscript talking about how he didn't like it how they weren't doing what they claimed to be doing

how how the russian communist party soviet communist party in russia was not really for the people I provided some basic security, but it was way too restrictive. And he just tore apart. He really did. And he was even writing that in 1963. I think it's interesting. Oswald may be the only person, certainly the own American, who ever went on a one man's strike in a Russian factory.

And his Russian friend describes this. And he went, Oswald just got fed up with all of the meetings and the mandatory. stuff and I got to sit in this. He writes about this. I got to sit in this meeting for an hour and the only people who are paying attention in the meeting are the Communist Party guys who are looking to see if anybody

else is not paying attention. And, you know, he got fed up and he just said, I'm, and his supervisor, his boss who he's close with, he's dating the guy's daughters and hanging out with him.

And he's embarrassing his supervisor. This is a, This is a unique individual. Why didn't he die? Why didn't they just go, this guy? He's got to go. Oh, good answer to that. Ernst Titovitz, who was very close to Oswald when he was Russia, actually went to the trouble, you know, years, decades later, of collecting the Russian side of the documents of the Oswald story.

they were they were afraid of being embarrassed by oswald when he showed up in russia you know he's he's an american he wasn't invited the first thing that happens is he says well i want to stay i could even become a russian citizen they said no we don't want you go home they actually gave him a ticket and said your tv expires now be at the radio train station and get out of here being Oswald is not going to take that that easy. He actually, and this is kind of bogus away, but he could be a drama queen. He actually, as his tourist guide is coming to pick him up to take him to the train station, he gets in and slits his wrist, just enough to get to water bloody and get into a hospital.

So what is, what's the Russian government going to do? We have this an American ex-marine who wants to come to Russia and be part of our system, and we told him he couldn't and he almost killed himself. This is not good PR. You know, so they actually. But once again, but think about that. Think of the, I hate to say ingenuity, folks, but I'm like, when I'm getting deported from a country, my brain doesn't go to, if I sleep my wrist, just enough, just enough.

Not to kill me, but just enough. then they'll have to change their because I'm a Marine like sitting here we can we you can go well he's a Marine and they don't want this be ass going on and on but like for a guy to do that I mean they might just let him bleed to death and then call it a day oh see you later good riddins Oswald challenges a he was a challenge for the Soviets you're right it is you know whatever it is when I said he was fearless it's kind of like he's pursuing his agenda, you know, what it takes to do it. And so he becomes a political problem and they say, look, we're just, we're going to let you stay. We're not going to make you a citizen.

We're going to send you to Minsk and we're going to put you in a factory. And Oswald, who thought he might get to be a college student in Russia, goes into a factory job and learns to hate it. Start dating girls again because he has his own apartment. And he's the only guy in Minsk who has his own apartment, and this is pretty attractive. Proposes to one girl, she turns him down, proposes to another girl, she accepts because she thinks it's going to be kind of glamorous to be married to an American. Even in Russia, has relatively lots of money in his own apartment. Anyway, long story short, but your basic question on how he ended up in Russia to find out how it was. He was unhappy with it. And eventually, for over a year,

year had to pasture the State Department. And they had to let him come back because he was there legally. It's kind of like he always does these things, like kind of like to be a pest. If you could put it in today's terms, and I know that's really, really difficult, Larry, like, but I'm like, okay, I actually, I actually get why he went. Like, that makes sense to me. But in today's terms, would you say, because I'm like, you know, one of the things I didn't realize this, this radio.

station interview and them scrubbing that. Like the scrubbing part of my like, oh, that makes a complete sense. What I didn't fully understand, and maybe this is just showing how green I am to the entire thing. And I'm fine with it. You know, folks, I'm the dummy here learning about JFK. If you were to put it into today's standards, today's terms, if you would, are you saying like, or would you put it more to leave Harvey Oswald, was closer to like, um, a social media influencer, right?

He was going around and he was making a noise and he had a bit of a following. And that's why he was on the radio stations. And that's why he went to Russia and he was, he had this background. He was a military guy, which is always prominent. Even look at our society day. If you've served any former military, that all of a sudden put you a little rank higher of what's going on in the world. And then he's gone to Russia.

So he's a little more well-traveled. But he's getting invited on the radio stations because he's a bit of an influence. He's got this influence on this cultural, topic. Is that what he is? Absolutely. Absolutely. He is that. And he said that himself. He said, even as a teenager, he wanted to write. When he's going to Russia in his manuscript, he says, I'm doing this because I wanted to

write about American culture, but understand it in part of the bigger picture. He wanted to be an influencer. He wanted to be an author. He wanted to write. Constantly, we see him saying he wants to. wanted to write. And he did write, and he wrote to publications. By 1963, he was writing to publications, socialist publications, for example, socialist workers party publication. We have a, in that spring, we have, and it's almost certain to be Oswald, a letter to the editor published that's totally in line with what he's writing in his own view. of the world and what should be. And it's a view from Dallas. The title of the the letter to the thing is a view from Dallas and it signed LH.

You know, we're pretty sure that's Lee Harvey Oswald. And he he's because we know he's corresponding with lots of people trying to get his views out there. Yeah. I totally agree. That's a that's a great characterization. And he would have wanted that. He he wanted just I just think of today's age. Like, there's never been an easier way to get your voice heard through social media. And I'm like, I'm just trying, it's probably a terrible thing to, uh, to try and bring those times to today. But I'm like, you know, when looking into the past, I just feel like it's so foreign to me at times of like, how can I possibly relate to this? And I, and I have this view of what went on probably through, through pop culture, movies, um, interviews on and on and on. And as you're talking, I'm like, oh my God, this guy, if he was on the radio, he wasn't just some guy they handpicked out of the middle of nowhere.

You know, I just interviewed a guy who went to jail for January 6th. And, you know, like overall, he's a family man. I wouldn't say that he's got, he's not a military guy or any of that, but he ended up going. But what did he have a bit of a social media following? Well, that's interesting. So when you look at this, and the more you, you know, you talk about it. I'm like, huh, when did the CIA or government or whatever agency you want start

following what Lee Harvey Oswald was doing? Well, that's a great segue because they started following what he was doing when he became visible in the media. And when did he become visible? The summer of 1963. You're saying to me, just before we go any further on that, Lee Harvey Oswald goes and does all these things, military, Japan, Russia, and you dig all the way in his life.

There's nothing that would suggest the CIA or any other three-letter agency was corresponding with him, following his works, anything like that? Following him, yes, not corresponding. Two things. He was very much on their radar. Obviously, when he went to Russia, you know, the State Department informed the CIA and the FBI and everybody else. And without going down the rabbit hole, about a year later, James Angleton's CIA Counterintelligence Group opens a file on Oswald.

And there's a long story there that says that they might have been using Oswald and information about Oswald to track who had information about him at what time and maybe look for leaks within the CIA. So I would say he was of interest to the CIA even when he was in Russia. But that's, you know, they didn't, when he came back to the U.S., the FBI interviewed him, of course. And the CIA actually had one of their domestic contacts assets, basically, a guy who, within the Russian community, expat community in Fort Worth. they had him contact Oswald, visit him, kind of report back. And, you know, so it's not that he was totally off the radar, but they were monitoring. Everybody was just kind of watching him. The FBI is, is he going to make contact with communists in the U.S.?

They looked at that and they found that he was not. So they didn't put him on a watch list. However, all that changed in late spring and summer of 1963, when Oswald, who had become very dissatisfied with the Russian system of socialism, if you will, began to look towards Cuba. Because he was always, as he told friends, it's like, I want to find something. I may never find it, but I'm looking for this. and he started seeing the Cuban revolution and Cuban socialism as maybe what he was looking for. And he became very focused on Cuba. He reached out and wrote to and join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was the FBI classified as a subversive group.

They had their offices. They intercepted their mail. They bugged their office. So as soon as he writes to them, he goes back on the FBI watch. list. And of course, they copy the CIA. And by the time Oswald gets to New Orleans and decides that he's actually going to become a street activist leafleting, he goes on the street, passes out leaflets in supportive Cuba. He gets, he actually, it looks like he may have scheduled it himself, TV coverage, because they come down and do TV of his street leafleting. He goes on radio. He's on,

New Orleans, he's on TV, radio, in the media, news coverage of here's a Castro supporter in the United States, you know, and that, it's a lot of attention, right? You know, this is, you're supporting a communist regime that we're, you know, it's illegal to even travel there. So he gets a lot of media attention. And the interesting thing is he gets into a street confrontation with some anti-Castro Cubans who he's he tried to contact earlier and tell him he was really anti Castro but they didn't buy it. So he gets into confrontation. He gets arrested, goes into jail, get more news from that. Okay. And at that point in time, in the court appearance where he's charged with street, you know, public disorder, there are two FBI informants who are also CIA informants in the court hearing, and one of the

guy's brother is a senior counterintelligence officer at the JM Wave Station in Miami. Beginning in New Orleans, the CIA is all around Oswald. And actually, at that point in time, gives instructions, or it's the student group who's been in contact with Oswald and who challenged his leafletting, gets the propaganda assignment of making Oswald a propaganda crusade. So by August, we see this group writing to Congress about Oswald, sending out letters to other groups about this naive young American Marine who's been turned by the communist. So to answer your question, by, by, Before he ever gets to Dallas, he has become operationally important to the CIA for propaganda purposes.

And that's why these recordings are made and not only made in New Orleans, but all compile onto a record, a propaganda record about Lee Oswald and of how dangerous Castro is. This stuff is all in play during the fall. And Oswald has no idea that any of it is going on. He's off on his own agenda. Actually, he would like to get to Cuba. His wife says by that point in time, his main goal was to actually go to Cuba. And if he'd get to Cuba, she would go ahead and follow him. But he's changed his focus from how they do it in Russia to maybe they do it right at Cuba.

I want to make sure that I get this. I don't glaze over this. What I think, I want to, hmm, I just want to understand when it comes to the FBI, the CIA, the government, and just all the agencies, he makes a name for himself when he comes back from Russia because that would be very interesting. He's coming back. He's, once again, a Marine who lives in Soviet Russia for a time. And when he's coming back, that would raise probably security concerns because for those two things, right? there so immediately there there it's it's is at that point where where i don't know how you know when you talk documents i just assume if you you search out enough documents you're going to find

oh the fbi mentions them back in 19 i don't care 76 and he was in the military and then oh in 1979 what year was he in in soviet russia so he was in soviet russia he was in soviet russia 59 to 62. Is there documents in that time frame, Larry, where the FBI, CIA, I don't care what agency, is like, we have a U.S. Marine living in Soviet Russia? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So they knew about him during that time. Mostly through the State Department, because, you know, he's in contact with the State Department, the American Embassy in Moscow. So the State Department is constantly reporting on him.

So initially they know about him. They don't know them through their own resources. They know about his interactions with the American State Department and through the media. Oswald did talk to the media inside Russia after his arrival. They're very much aware of him, yeah. So when is the first document that raises your eyebrow? They're like, huh, they started paying attention to, Lee Harvey Oswald on this day of this year.

Just even in like not like obviously not like, oh, he changed his whatever, a mailing address. Just like it's, it raises your eyebrows of like, huh, there's a memo referencing Lee Harvey Oswald. The first document is a 201 file. It's a personality file that was opened within CIA counterintelligence, but it was opened a year after he got there. Okay. No, 1960. I can't give you the exact date. No, let's say it's 59.

It's opened after he gets there. So it's not immediate. They're getting documents from other people about it, but they don't open their own personality file, which is kind of elevates, this is someone we're interested in. We want to collect information ourselves on him at the beginning. And the interesting thing about that file is what you then see is information that starts coming back on Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA counterintelligence.

You would think that it would be copied to the CIA Soviet Russia division because they're the ones that really, you know, would be interested in what he is doing in Russia. It's not. That information at that point in time is compartmentalized within counterintelligence, which suggests to us that, Angleton's group and counterintelligence has some agenda that they may be thinking about using information about Oswald for. So they're going to keep it tightly controlled. And this goes all the way up to the assassination and the post assassination. One of the things that clouds all this, and I apologize, anybody's listening to me on this, their eye should start to glaze over. I mean, it's because. I disagree.

But hey, that's me. They start compartmental. We know that even as late as the fall of 1963, we have concrete evidence from their own documents that different groups within the agency are withholding information about Oswald from each other. And when somebody in Mexico City asked, send me current information, a current photo,

I need this right now because he's in Mexico City. They don't do it. They send them information that says, Oh, he's in Russia and he might come back. No, he's been back for a year. You guys know he's back. This guy in Miami that I was talking about, his brother was in a conflict.

They compartmentalize that information. And the only reason to do that is that by that time, he has become of operational interest. Because if nothing else, they're starting this propaganda campaign. But when they do those things, they keep it within the group. They don't share it with everybody.

So that's one of our keys always is tracking even internally who knows what about Oswald at a given time. And they start confusing themselves. And if you think they confuse themselves after the assassination, that confuses everybody because clearly they are even lying to themselves. And that's one of the reasons the book is as long as it is

is we try to explore how they were doing that and why they were doing that. And it's the sort of thing that drives you nuts, but okay. I know I'm jumping around on the audience, and forgive me. This is, once again, you're dealing with Sean's brain. And so I go, okay, they start having internal memos opening up a profile on them, 59, roughly. And, you know, I mean, we can take that for as lighter as serious as it is, but he's, starts to really gain fame when he comes back to the United States and then starts to talk openly

about Cuba being, I want to go there. And you just got to think about the height of tension at that time. That would be an odd thing for an American military guy to be saying. So all of a sudden, it gets escalated. November 22nd, 1963. I think you said somewhere along the lines of like, basically, and forgive me, this may be just the way I remember it, so to clarify it for me, please, but like, you know, he's there, but nothing else lines up other than he's there. What do you mean by that? Walk me through this date specifically. The simplest way to look at is from the time that when he was back in the U.S., he had repeatedly tried to get jobs. He wanted to be a writer, but that didn't work. And he's trying to write to people.

and cultivate that, as you were talking about today, he would have started a podcast. Sure. If you could get him enough money, there's no doubt about it. But things aren't working out for him. When he goes to the unemployment agency, which he does constantly to try to get different jobs, he tests well, he presents himself well. In their documents, we find they even evaluate him and test him that he would be good for a management job. But he always needs a job immediately.

So there's no time for a placement process. So he gets manual labor. Okay. One job after the other, he gets bored with that he doesn't like. By the time he gets into New Orleans, he's facing the fact that he's not been able to hold a decent job. His wife,

who expected things to be really great in America. You know, they don't have a car. They don't have a washing machine. You know, things, there are problems. They have two children, but there are problems with the couple. couple. By that point in time, she's thinking about going back to Russia. He's thinking about, well, okay, I could go to Cuba. So by that point in time, he becomes focused, which she says in her testimony,

on getting to Cuba. However, he needs to get to Cuba, he even talks to her about hijacking an airplane. Got to get to Cuba. She says, Lee, you're nuts. I'm certainly not going to cooperate in anything like that. But if you could get there, maybe I could bring the kids. We would be okay. But he gets really focused on going to Cuba. He even ends up in Mexico City at the Cuban consulate trying to get a visa so he can go in and be in Cuba while she's trying to get back to Russia. None of that works for him. Okay, just fails. Because the Russians, she's applying, but her paperwork hasn't been processed by the Russians yet and the Cubans say, hey, until the Russians say she's good to go back, you're good to go back, we're not talking to you because we know that they're American spies

here all the time. And, you know, we don't trust any of you people, rightly so. We go into all that in the book. But so he ends up back in Dallas. He's back in Dallas. Why is he back in Dallas? His wife and daughter, Jr. there, and his wife is pregnant and just having another baby. So he's back in Dallas. He's trying to reconnect with her. Gets another manual job working at schoolbook depository there in Dallas where you eventually find him on November 22nd. And you can see he's kind of torn.

He'd still like to get to Cuba, but he has a brand new baby. So he's conflicted. There's no doubt about that. And that is the point at which we feel that people, and this is the speculative scenario that way that, that some Cubans who contacted him in New Orleans, who were actually anti-Castro Cubans, posing as Cuban supporters, and pitching him with, we'll help you get to Cuba, show up again, and convince him, if he still wants to go, they're still interested in helping him go to Cuba. Okay. Now, when this first happens, it's a good part of a propaganda story, which never came together. But now in Dallas, it becomes used for another reason. Because these people are now not just part of a standard CIA propaganda operation. They have joined the conspiracy to kill the president. And they are setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as a patsy who can be used to point the crime. crime to Castro and Cuba and the communist.

And so he is approached by these people, told that they found a way to get him to Cuba. They know he's a strong supporter of the revolution. You know, you're our kind of guy. We need you. We'll showcase you as the kind of person we're trying to reach. And the week of the assassination, we have a report from. local airport there in Dallas, Redbird Airport, of these people showing up in a car at the airport to lease a plane for November 22nd for a long-distance flight. They say it's to Yucatan. The guy who

owns the plane and leases the plane thinks that they may hijack at Cuba. The interesting point about that visit is the people that are trying to lease it, are talking to this fellow named Ray January, and in the car watching this all happen as somebody that he later assentifies as Lee Harvey Oswald. So the scenario that we lay out is that we think that they convinced Lee Harvey Oswald that he was going to be leaving Dallas in November 22nd, while what they really intended to do was frame him with a weapon in the school book depository and eliminate him. in a fashion that not get him to Cuba, but eliminate him in a fashion that pointed out that he was trying to get to Cuba. And these same people, the night of the assassination, contacted Claire Booth Luce, whose husband was the owner of the largest media network in the United States, Life magazine, like the most media reach in the United States, contacted her and told her. her that they wanted to provide evidence that they had been monitoring Lee Oswald from New Orleans

all the way through to Mexico and would provide the FBI with evidence that he had come back with a Castro assassination team and that Castro and Oswald had killed the president. They tried to pitch that media story that night and it didn't work. And they continued to try to pitch that story for the next several days and it didn't work and the reason it didn't work because of what we talked about at the very first part of your show is because damage control went into play and the president johnson had called dallas the night of the assassination had an aid called alice and tell the police and everybody else that the story was lee harvey oswald acted by himself There was no conspiracy, and we will tolerate no talk of conspiracy.

And if you don't accept my word for it, I'll get the president on the phone with you. That's a lot. Yeah. Well, I mean, it has been 30 years, but I apologize. No, you don't need to apologize. The only way I do disbelief people not shaking their heads, right? You're like, oh, man. it's it's it's um at no point it like you know i'm just sitting here and i'm like man what i would

have been to have sat across from lee harvey oswald right and have like a a full-on podcast right to just pick his brain because at times he sounds incredibly um naive desperate like a whole bunch of things, you know, and yet he had a goal in mind and obviously was willing to overlook probably some things that he probably shouldn't have. And that really puts him in a real tough pickle, you know? Well, the one thing I've learned throughout all of this and all of the books is that this, in some sense, is like a scam. What we feel happened to Oswald. If you're going to use someone, the best way to use them and especially do it deniably is you've got to talk to their agenda. You don't force your agenda on them. You find an agenda that matches what you want to do

and how you want to use them and then you play that agenda. So as you just said, the people we think played Lee Harvey Oswald became aware of what his real drive was, what his real motive was. and once they started speaking to that, he sort of became stupid. It's like at any other time, yeah. I need you to say, can we talk, we need to talk about that for a second. Because, you know, like in the last couple of years, there's been a rise of the podcasting world. You know, you look at, I don't know, just look how the media landscape has really changed. and if you want to get someone to turn their brain off, what you're saying is you talk to how they believe and how they think, which think about today's world and probably back then too.

Wouldn't have been that hard with Lee Harvey Oswald. He was writing. He was willing to talk to anyone by the sounds of it. And so by doing that, you could, I don't know, is parrot the right thought of what he was saying back to him? And immediately he would think you're one of them and welcome you in. And his brain goes off because he's around friends now and away we go. And if you do that to today's world, Larry, that's a very unnerving thought. It's scary. It is. And actually, we know exactly what you described as.

true. Lee Harvey Oswald is intelligent. He's a born skeptic. He's, he's critical of everything. He's in talking to one of his, both his best friends, but even back in Dallas, he tells an older friend of his who kind of likes Oswald because Oswald is more progressive than this guy's own son. And he says this in writing. It's kind of like, it was easier for me to talk to Lee than my own son because my own son is too opinionated. And, you know, and, and, and, and, and, in, talking with Oswell, Oswald even said to him, he said something like, you know, I'm never going to find what I'm looking for. And I understand that, but that doesn't mean I won't keep looking for it. So he understands kind of his own problem. Yet when people, and he will, he will be great friends with anybody who is in sync with him. You know, if you talk his talk, you're great. And people love him. If you don't, he's the worst asshole in the world. I mean, that's it. I've known these people.

You probably know, you probably know these people. But that's the way to get to them. The way to get to them. And I've seen in CIA operations over and over again. You get to somebody by telling them what they want to hear. And that's why they're called surrogates. They're doing what they want to do. And you find the right people that fit your agenda.

agenda. And we think that's what happened with Oswald. And as you said, it's like his brain turned off. He did things that I would have expected the normal Oswald to go, what? This makes no sense. What are you selling me? But he didn't. They had indeed turned his brain off. You know, I just finished reading, I think it's, what was it, Project Chaos? I can't remember in the book title now. but it's about Charles Manson. Oh, yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and he spent,

you know, a considerable amount of time on that book. I mean, you know, to think about it, it's just like, this is a wild story. But the reason is,

is because it sounds similar, honestly, to what you're talking about, is every time he thinks he's getting close, some new things get on earth, and he goes, oh, that's strange.

Why would they do that? And when you see Lee, Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson. Do you see similarities? Because I mean, obviously MK Ultra comes up in that book. And this one, you just go,

he was already talking in line. They just needed to get in line with him and just kind of shift him a bit without him knowing and off he went. And it didn't even require chemicals for Manson. Once they realized, because I know very familiar with the book and the author,

they just, they needed his profile. And that's, that's what you need is they needed his profile. Well, this guy has a criminal history. He's a manipulator. What we want is somebody who can manipulate people. And he's it.

So they just had to put him in the right venue and give him the drugs, quite frankly, which they obviously did through M.K. Ultra and Jolly West and that sort of stuff. And we won't get into fact that Jolly West visited Lee Hart, Jack Ruby, after while he was in prison for killing Oswald. That's another story. No, absolutely. That's, it's, in a way, it's always simpler than you think it might have to be because of people are used because they fit.

And somebody the other day, you know, it's like, but isn't it more complex? No, it's, it's having the right person who fits in the right place and using them. I know we're, I don't want to pull us down into way too many other rabbit holes. But you know, when you start taking a step back or when you start, you know, you've gone through all your documents, do you start to see a web of how the CIA or others really operate? You know, one of the things that really I found interesting is you talk about Mexico City. And they knew he would have been back. But they didn't say that. And what does that signal?

That signals it's operational. That means they've got stuff going on. and I assume you picked up little trends, little traces, little things in the spider web of how a government works. You're like, oh, yeah, here's a couple other ones that are noticeable. I don't need to know enough about, you know, it doesn't even matter. The Trump assassination temp or, or, I don't know, go further back into other things. That's the one that pops to mine right away. But I guess, you know, there's other things that have gone on here in the last 20 years that you're like, oh, yeah,

You can see these little cycles, these little trends. Are there things out of your research that you started to stumble on and you're like, oh, there's one. And there's another. I just call them standard operating practice. I mean, the agency is no different than a, you know, what are standard practices? And actually, one of the reasons I did so many books is one book that I wrote called Shadow Warfare basically says, what are the standard agency practices for deniable operations?

You know, how do I do these things that don't trace to me? What are the covers I use? And always use surrogates. By the way, the rule says none of your personnel are never involved in the actual action. Even though there might be case officers, the worst thing in the world, They've got to have these people prepared to do it on their own because if somebody goes down, you've got to be at a distance. So, yeah, there are, absolutely. And then they operate, sorry, and they operate with, they need plausible deniabilities.

That's why surrogates is so important. Yeah. Because it's not that. That wasn't us. That always applies even when you boil it down, not to just covert military operations, but assassinations. I wrote a book on that side. How do they do assassinations? And here's one of the really damning things about it is because they tend to use surrogates, right?

And they're overthrowing governments or they're overthrowing regimes. You're always working with revolutionaries or radicals or somebody that will be credible to do that sort of stuff. But they always want to do it quickly. And strangely enough, although CIA has been involved with numerous. political assassinations. It usually are the people that they're working with, their surrogates, who suggest it to them. It's like, we don't need this complex thing that you want us to do. Just give us the right weapons or the poison. We'll kill the guy and we're done. Because you're working with people who want things to happen fast, you know. And some of the

Some of the ill deeds occur with your surrogates doing it on their own, right? And you turn the blind. That's even in the documents. You know, we gave them this stuff and then just on their own, they kill this guy. Or they did this or that. But it's not our fault. It wasn't in the written plan. They're not supposed to be doing that.

Nothing to see here, folks. You were a part of this at all. And actually, we're kind of good with it, but we didn't. You even see it in the documents. Sometimes the reports they were at, it's sort of like, we did not tell them to do this. Did you give them the guns? Yeah. Did you know that they were, you were both trying to overthrow this guy?

Yeah, we knew all that. But we didn't, we do not have a document that says, we told them to do that. We just looked the other way. Yeah. When it was happening. And then we didn't investigate because we already knew what the investigation would bring up. And we were good with. Yes.

Man, Larry, this has been. fascinating. I appreciate you giving me time today and hop it on. And I hope people will buy any of your books. I'm like, you know, if you're just dabbling into JFK or maybe Larry Hancock, what book would you be like, you know, I know, I know the Oswald puzzle is your latest. But if you're like, you know what, your first time you've ever heard me talk, you're, you're thinking about like maybe this is something that can kind of wet your appetite. What would be the book you'd suggest? Yeah.

If it's not tipping point in Oswald Puzzle, if you really want to get a fairly quick flare into how these things work, how, how deniable operations work, and how they go bad and why they go bad and why when they go bad, we keep doing them over and over again. you know, because after the Bay of Pigs, the president ordered a, you know, review. And even the head of the CIA at that point in time said, we should never do this again. CI should never be involved in a military operation again. And within three years, the CIA is running louse from a military. Why does it keep happening?

The book would be in denial. In denial? In denial, exactly. Sounds like a perfect starting point. So I'm not going to lie. How can this keep happening? How can you keep being this stupid? It's a temptation.

The temptation is always to do it. Like, I can do this perfectly and nobody will ever know. And know that never happens. Well, Larry, I appreciate you hopping on. And like I say, I hope people will buy a copy of any of your bucks, to be honest. you've certainly, well, it's just fascinating to hear somebody with the depth of knowledge you have about the subject. So thank you again for hopping on. I enjoyed being on after 30 years, it's a chance to talk about it finally.

Appreciate it.