James Jesus Angleton and the Assassination of President Kennedy
Our Hidden History Interviews
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OHH: We're here with Lisa Pease, she's been a researcher into these assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King and JFK for over 25 years. She'll be coming out with a book in September called, A Lie Too Big to Fail, about the Robert Kennedy assassination, we're all very excited about that. And she also blogs at realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com. So thanks for talking to me today Lisa.
Lisa Pease: Oh, happy to be here.
OHH: So I thought we'd, I've always been interested in, we're going to talk about James Angleton today. I've always been interested in some of his early years, so if we can talk a little bit about that.
Lisa Pease: Sure. His father worked for National Cash Register in Italy and I believe he might have even spent some time there as well as in the United States, but he was Mexican, grew up in Arizona for most of the part. And at that time being Mexican made you an outsider in American society, but he was determined to be an insider. He was very bright, he went to Yale. He was picked by a professor, Norman Pearson, who saw a lot of talent in him. And Norman Pearson recommended that he join the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was FDR's, President Roosevelt's, forerunner agency to the CIA. It was the intelligence arm, you know the covert operations arm if you will, during World War II. So that's kind of where Angleton got his start.
He was assigned to the X-2 branch, which was counterintelligence operations and first in Great Britain and then again, he was moved to Italy at one point. He learned early on to make friends in other parts of the government and so he had this whole ring of informants telling him what was going on in other arms of the government. He and his buddies in some cases, how do I want say, set up people and took them down from within. For example, in Jeff Morley's book he talks about an incident where Angleton basically what they say burned some agents that they felt were playing for the other side and that apparently got those other agents killed. So Angleton was known early on as somebody who had a kind of take no prisoners approach. In later years it's funny, one of his fellow CIA coworkers said, "I always go into Angleton's office fingering my insurance policy," meaning he never knew if he'd leave his office alive or not.
I laugh, but it's not really a funny thing you know, if you're afraid somebody could kill you at any moment. It's not like Angleton would kill anybody personally, but he had assets who would kill for him. And this is one of the things, I think people think of the CIA as like this highly regimented organization where there is a manager and the employees and it really isn't like that or at least it definitely wasn't like that during the OSS days and the early days of the CIA. It was more like a bunch of rich kids with a lot of money running their own operations and making up their own rules as they went along.
Angleton had access to a lot of money, in fact he paid people on the side to run his, what they call, Singleton Agents, meaning they didn't report directly the CIA they reported only to him. And he would just give them money and tell them what he wanted to do and they would go to it and then they'd report back to him that it was done. He had journalists on his payroll as well as other spies and assassins. A very, what do I want to say, a very creative, independent character who kind of answered to no one. So he got his big start when Eisenhower was elected because Eisenhower then appointed Allen Dulles the head of the CIA. And Allen Dulles's very good friend, James Angleton, was then appointed to head at that time what was called Staff A, which was Foreign Intelligence.
And then a guy named Bill Harvey was assigned to Staff C, which was counterintelligence. And then over the years Angleton and Harvey, they had kind of a friendship and in a way a rivalry too. For example, Bill Harvey at the head of Staff C, suspected John Philby the, how do I want to say, he was a high level intelligence operative in the UK, who was really a communist agent. And Philby befriended Angleton and they hung out together and Angleton saw him as a friend and a mentor. And while Angleton was always cautious around him because he knew even as a UK intelligence employee, that he'd be after the CIA's secrets. But Angleton never really suspected him of being a Soviet agent. But Bill Harvey did and interestingly enough, although Bill Harvey did and wrote memos and basically exposed Philby internally in the CIA long before anyone else, it was Angleton that ended up being promoted to the head of the counterintelligence unit.
And it kind of shows the kind of power that, even when Angleton kind of failed, he still rose in the agency. And I think that was largely due to his friendship with Allen Dulles and his taste for the machiavellian. I mean Angleton was not above sabotaging others who stood in his way in order to make his own rise in the agency. Very interesting character.
OHH: He had a lot of connections. He kind of saved some of these ex-fascists and Nazis, but he had connections with the mafia. He had connections with Israel. He had a lot of kind of his own things going on and one of the things you talked about was his own links with even the media.
Lisa Pease: Yeah, in fact it was one of the things, I was disappointed, I went to hear Jeff Morley talk when he promoted his book here in LA and I thought I was lobbing him a softball when I asked him to talk about James Angleton's media assets. And he had no answer and I didn't realize that wasn't in his book because to me that's one of the most important things about James Angleton is that he had these deep connections with big people in the media. For example, one of his close operatives was a guy named John Oakes, O-A-K-E-S. John Oakes ran the editorial page at The New York Times from the 50s to I think the early 70s. And so if you wanted to control kind of the tone of The New York Times during the assassinations of the 60s, what better person to have in your back pocket than the guy who ran the editorial page. News report are one thing, but the editorial is kind of where they get to try and imprint opinions on other people. And so I thought that was a phenomenally important contact and Angleton basically considered him an asset.
In 1966, after the JFK assassination, before the RK assassination, and after the Warren Commission, a lot of data had come out about the CIA that they weren't really answering to the Presidency. And so The New York Times started to do a series on this in 1966 and they sent questioners around and they started getting hints that some of the media people might have been involved. And that the CIA was running off the books operations and running things without presidential approval. In fact, one of the things The New York Times reported on in this really good series they did was how there was a shipment of sugar, I think it was in Puerto Rico, and it was from Cuba en route to the Soviet Union and CI operative got in and tainted or poisoned the sugar. You know to ruin it so they couldn't, so it ruined the trade between Cuba and the Soviet Union. Well somehow President Kennedy got wind of this so he ran his own counter operation and he sent operatives in to switch out the poisoned sugar or whatever to save the situation. And the CIA was pissed at him and of course Kennedy was furious with the CIA because they're running an operation he hadn't ordered them.
This was part of the impetus for President Kennedy, he wanted to put the CIA under stricter control. After the Bay of Pigs, after being lied to for all these things, he realized that the CIA was running its own kind of off the books operations and he thought if he put them in the military chain of command it wouldn't be able to get away with that kind of stuff. So he literally set up the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. That was the place where he wanted to move CIA covert operations and put them under strict military control. And he did set up the DIA and he started the process, but he was killed long before he could really get it off the ground. And people can draw their own conclusions about whether that contributed to his murder or not.
So Angleton had John Oakes, but he had many other people. He had close relationships with a lot of reporters and some of the reporters, according to Carl Bernstein who wrote about this in Rolling Stone in the 1970s, he said that Angleton's groups included covert operators who were kind of using the media as cover. Meaning actual assassins posing as journalists for example. And I know the Church and the Pike committee they looked into this and they found that the CIA had pretty much everything in kind of a rainbow gamut. They had reporters who did a little bit of intelligence work and then they had intelligence agents who did a little bit of reporting work and everything in between.
But there was also what was called an assassination unit according to E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars. And that this assassination unit was headed by a guy named Boris Pash, P-A-S-H. That Angleton ran that unit and that the unit's job was again, to kill people who were giving away CIA secrets, in other words to kill CIA, the employees who were breaking the secrets of the agency. And that's somewhat the function of the CIA's Office of Security. The point of the Office of Security is to make sure the CIA's secrets stay secure. So if you have an employee who's going and talking to the media, it's the job of the Office of Security to shut that down one way or another. And of course the most extreme way to shut that down would be to kill somebody. Now whether the CIA ever did kill their own agents, it's been kind of reported, but without names and dates and specifics. You know that yes, this has kind of happened, but it's also the case that people fear it happening, which is almost as good right. If you want to control somebody and keep them from leaking, it helps to keep them in fear of their lives if they tell a secret.
So that's partly what Angleton did. Angleton also controlled the relationship with Congress to the extent that he had bugs all over Capitol Hill according to Tom Braden, who was on Crossfire for years. Braden was a CIA employee for many years and ostensibly quit in later years. Famously wrote an article during the Church committee saying why "I'm glad the CIA is 'immoral'", basically defending the CIAs worst excesses. That kind of shows where Braden's loyalties lie if you will. But Braden told author James Mangold, or Mangold reported Braden saying this, that Angleton would go into Allen Dulles office every morning and they would talk about the take from Capitol Hill in the guise of fishing talk.
You know I can just imagine it would be a fantastic scene for a movie, you know these guys having a conversation because there's another statement that Miles Copeland attributed to Angleton that was somewhat along the lines of, if you can't figure out what Capitol Hill is doing about the CIA, you shouldn't even be in the CIA. Meaning, it was a fairly young agency at the time, I mean when Angleton joined it, it was just being birthed and they were very worried that Congress would rein them in or cancel them or shut them down. And so if you're tapping people on Capitol Hill what does that give you? That gives you leverage. If some Congressman is sleeping around on his wife that's fantastic leverage to ensure the CIA's budget stays secure.
I don't know how many of your listeners ever watch the TV show Scandal, but it's honestly it's the most true to life show I've ever seen about how Washington really works. You know it's like all the blackmail that goes on behind the scenes. I really honestly believe that is how our government is run and I know Nancy Pelosi and other high level people have made comments like we don't dare go up against the CIA, they can destroy you in the media.
And the relationship between the CIA and the media I think really explains why we've never gotten the truth about the assassinations of the 60s. Because if the CIA killed both Kennedys, if they had anything to do with Martin Luther King's death and Malcolm X's death, they made sure their media assets never reported it and they made sure that no critics of the agency ever rose in the ranks in the media. And those that did were quickly ousted. There was a guy Sydney Gruson who was reporting on what the CIA was doing in Guatemala, so what does the CIA do? They had him transferred off of that beat, they just went right to his employers, The New York Times, and said we don't want him reporting from Guatemala anymore and basically neutralized him.
And people who did play along with the agency and covered their operations like Hal Hendricks in Miami, he would get scoop after scoop. In fact one of the scoops was so good he reported a coup a day before it happened. All right, so it's like how does that happen? But you know, inside sources. By the way Hal Hendricks evidently showed up on, who was it, Jack Ruby's phone list or something. Or Hal Hendricks had called, oh it was Seth Kantor, when Seth Kantor, a reporter in Dallas, was trying to followup on Oswald's background somebody referred him to Hal Hendricks. And Hal Hendricks evidently had a close relationship with David Atlee Phillips, a man who many believed was directly involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
And I'm getting far from Angleton at this point, but I want to go back to Angleton and the bugging of Capitol Hill because it went further back than that. When the discussions on whether there should even be a CIA or not were happening, because after World War II ended, a lot of people didn't want a standing intelligence service, they felt that's what the Nazis had with their SS and they were very fearful of having the same sort of agency at home.
And so there was a big press to kind of disband those efforts and let the existing agencies, the FBI and the Army and all the other intelligence agencies that were already around, let them stand, but all these other desk operatives, again these are rich banker's kids with a lot of money and time on their hands and lawyers, smart people with huge networks in the establishments. And so they worked their ties from that end. You know I think some bugging was going on and then who is one of the biggest voices they had to silence? J. Edgar Hoover. Because Hoover at that point had an international, a lot of people don't realize this, but the FBI was an international agency during World War II. They had bureaus in Europe, they had bureaus in South America, I mean they were kind of all over. It was a very big intelligence agency. And the CIA, Angleton and Allen Dulles and his ilk, wanted to neutralize Hoover and make sure he couldn't sabotage their efforts to become the predominant agency in the world.
And so it looks like that Angleton evidently paid one of his operatives to go get a blackmail photo of Hoover having sex with his close aid, Clyde Tolson. Because at that time homosexuality was a huge sin, it's like people didn't talk about it, they shunned it. If it was displayed in the movies it was always some horrible thing. You know it's so sad, I feel bad for all the homosexuals who throughout history have had to suppress who they are just to please other ignorant people, that's just crazy. But they took advantage of Hoover's homosexuality and they used that to silence him and blackmail him into allowing the CIA to be formed. You know because if they could neutralize Hoover and keep him from using his own blackmail material on Congressman and Senators, then they could get the CIA passed and that's kind of how that came about.
OHH: So it shows that he has his own power and then he has power within the CIA.
Lisa Pease: Right.
OHH: So he's kind of in the perfect position to handle something like the JFK assassination. Should we start going into that? I don't even know what the best way to approach it would be. Through Oswald or?
Lisa Pease: Yeah, well I think we have to talk about his relationship with Oswald because in the CIA Angleton's counterintelligence unit was very large, like 200 people. And then within counterintelligence, Angleton had a very small, tiny group of about five people for something called SIG, Special Investigations Group. This was his liaison group with the Office of Security. This was his mole hunting group. This was his most trusted, most closed mouthed associates. If you will it was kind of where Angleton stuck his black ops within counterintelligence it's like there's all the legitimate counterintelligence operations, and then there's all the super secret ones that may or may not have been legitimate. And he buried those in this little SIG group.
So I find it really important and significant that when Oswald's file was finally opened officially in the CIA, we'll talk about the unofficial stuff in a minute, but when it was officially opened in the CIA, it was officially opened in that little tiny group and not in the larger counterintelligence effort where I would have expected it to be. John Newman did an excellent job explaining this to me and others in his book, Oswald and the CIA, and I highly recommend reading that. But I also recommend read that in conjunction with Tom Mangold's book on Angleton, it's called Cold Warrior. And I think these two have to be read together because you have to understand how counterintelligence and the CIA and the Soviet Russia division worked normally to understand why it's such an anomaly that Oswald's file would be in this little area not in the bigger area.
Because now let's talk about Oswald for a second. Here you have this guy, first of all he joins the Marines but according to Warren Commission testimony of his military buddies, he's always playing Russian operas, he's talking about communism. And I mean we're talking the military, one of the most conservative organizations on the planet at the height of the cold war and you have this guy openly talking about loving Russia in the middle of your Marines. They had to all know that this guy was an intelligence agent or he would have been thrown out on his ass on day one. Like as a traitor right?
OHH: Right, right.
Lisa Pease: What do they do instead, they take this communist loving guy and they put him in the radar operations of the super secret U2 plane. So again it's like they had to know at the start that this guy was being trained for some intelligence mission in Russia. And so Oswald, while he's at the Atsugi base, which by the way is called the super secret plush CIA base. It's also where some of the mind control operations were originated, where a lot of interesting things happened at that base. But unbeknownst even to the higher ups at Atsugi, the U2 was flying not just over Russia, but it was flying over China and it was Oswald who figured this out, which kind of shows how intelligent Oswald was. And Oswald had gone to his Unit Captain and said I think we're flying over China and his Captain was like, "No, no that couldn't be, they would have told me if that was the case." This was what he told the Warren Commission years later. Or John Newman even, I don't remember if John Newman quoted his Warren Commission testimony or if this was from John Newman's interview, I'd have to go back and look at his book.
But Newman reported this basically Oswald thought that at Atsugi, Oswald had figured this out on his own and when he checked into it and found out it was true, he was surprised and impressed. So again, not only was Oswald smart and intelligent, he was finding out data even beyond his own clearance level. And so when this guy then ends up "defecting," to the Soviet Union, why didn't huge alarm bells go off? Why didn't somebody sneak into the Soviet Union and kill him? Why was he allowed to defect?
And he didn't actually defect, let's put that on this thing right away. Everybody reports that he defected. Well he said he wanted to defect, and the people at the, the Americans at the American Embassy in Moscow basically deflected that and said well you'd have to fill out this and that paperwork and you'd have to sign this declaration. You'd have to do this, and then Oswald didn't do all those things, so he didn't actually ever defect. And of course that seemed to be the plan.
But while he's there, he's saying very loudly for the microphones that the CIA knew the Soviet Union had installed in the Embassy when it was built, he had something of special interest he wanted to divulge. Now again, here you are an Embassy officer and you've got this guy saying, "I'm about to commit treason, hey anybody want my treason?" You know, it's such a fake story, as I read it I laugh. You know, this had to be so obvious and I believe that's why the Soviets didn't really show a lot of interest in Oswald. He was so obviously an intelligence agent to them that they didn't want to touch him because they knew he was probably what they called in the intelligence world, a dangle. Like something you put on the end of a fishhook to bait fish. It's like, here's a guy with U2 knowledge, let's see who bites because at that time the CIA worried that they might have a leak in the U2 program and so they wanted to see what the Soviets knew. And they knew if they all swarmed in on Oswald that meant they didn't have a source in the U2 program and they needed what Oswald had. But if they didn't touch Oswald then that would tell them they did have a source because they didn't need Oswald and they were getting that information from somewhere else.
But to me there was also a third possibility that whether or not they had a source, they knew Oswald was CIA and they weren't going to go anywhere near him in the first place. It seemed like that was a possibility the CIA never considered as an option, but it was such clumsy spy craft, it's like how could anybody be fooled by that? So, anyway, and why did, how do I want to say it, I don't know, I don't believe that Oswald went to the Soviet Union as a CIA operation, but I would find it would make great sense if he went as an Angleton vest pocket operation. You know, it seemed like Angleton had been in the Army, he had contacts in the military. He had contacts with ONI, Office of Navy Intelligence. He had contacts everywhere. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if he said, "I need 10 of your guys." Because there were about 10 defectors at that time, who in which had similar backgrounds and in fact, Marina Oswald apparently had met a different one of the "defectors," that went over at the same time, Robert Webster. And almost hooked up with him, but then ended up with Oswald, it was like her job was to secure one of these guys. And when she didn't get one she went on to the next.
OHH: Right, right.
Lisa Pease: So, you know, just loads of intelligence implications and then when Oswald's there one of the first people he talks to is this journalist Priscilla Johnson who later became Priscilla Johnson-McMillan. And we now know that her file, she was a witting CIA reporting asset, a reporter who wittingly worked for the CIA because the CIA had unwitting reporters who thought they were maybe doing favors for a businessman not knowing they were really working for the CIA. So it's important to understand there are people who work for the CIA who don't even know they're working for the CIA. They think their working for a foundation or some business or whatever, but they're really working for the CIA. And then others are witting and Priscilla was witting.
So this witting CIA asset interviews Oswald in the Soviet Union and writes about him. That comes in very handy then after the assassination of President Kennedy, she's one of the first people to write about his background and "Oh, I remember when he defected," and remember he didn't really defect, but she presents it as his defection to the Soviet Union. I can't help but suspect a tie between Angleton and Priscilla, but I can't document that. I suspect it because that would make sense. Anyway, next question.
OHH: Well so Oswald was also on James Angleton's HTLINGUAL list where Angleton was running the mail opening program between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and Oswald was on there right?
Lisa Pease: Right. And not only that, it's interesting because there was a watch list of people whose mail was to be opened, but Oswald's mail was opened regardless of whether he was on the HTLINGUAL watch list or not. And again I find that significant, so it wasn't like his mail was being opened because he was just on a list that was made up by somebody else, it's like Oswald's mail was always being opened. Which indicates an extremely high level of interest and they saw all the communications between his mother and himself.
And then when Oswald comes back, he brings with him, they call it I think his historic diary. But, as John Newman explained it at one of the conferences, it's really like a "Soviet Realities" report. He talks about the factory he worked at and how many airplanes were out in this airfield. And which restaurants are near this. It's like if you, you know at that time, again people didn't understand because you can go to Moscow and travel around pretty openly nowadays, but it didn't used to be like that. They were a completely closed society, very different to get into. And so how can the CIA run operations there if they can't even pick a drop spot. You know, if they need to pass secret files they need to know if there's a park and a bench or a toilet where they can hide something. They need all that really mundane information so that they can start to connect with others in the Soviet Union.
And it seemed that that's part of what Oswald's "historic diary" was about, just kind of describing the factory he worked in and what kind of things happened there. You know, what the streets were like, and so it's almost like an intelligence report in the guise of a diary. And in that diary, of course when I read it I was struck by how much money Oswald was getting from the Red Cross. Now we all know the Red Cross is a charity organization that provides blood to victims of accidents you know, if there's a mudslide or a volcano or whatever. The Red Cross goes in and takes care of people. But, if a guy in the military defects to the Soviet Union, I don't expect the Red Cross to be paying him a stipend. So in that sense it appeared the Red Cross was really fronting for the CIA in the Soviet Union because who would suspect a nice charity organization like the Red Cross to be funding CIA operations.
But that's really the only explanation I can come up with, there's really no other reason for the Red Cross to be paying Oswald so much that he's like wow, I'm making as much money as the factory manager, it's a dream come true. It's like he had all his expenses taken care of. His rent was like nothing and then he's getting this stipend, his salary from the Red Cross. He's getting more than his salary from the Red Cross. It's just incredible and again, really the only way to explain that is that the Red Cross somehow knew he was an intelligence asset of somebody's and was paying him so he could do his intelligence activities. That's really the only way that story makes sense.
And then also I'll talk about coming back to the United States on a military hop. And I've never quite understood how he did get back to the United States and I assume he probably did take a military hop because I've never seen records otherwise. And maybe I just, I haven't researched that and maybe he came back on a commercial flight, but again if he's met when he comes back to America and given some aid when he returns. And again, this is a guy with high level military secrets, who not only "defected," but actually verbally offered those secrets up to the Soviets and he comes back like an American hero. How does that happen unless he's an intelligence agent?
I mean, the whole story makes sense if Oswald went over there as a spy and came back as a spy. The story doesn't make any sense at all if Oswald went over there on his own will and did all these crazy things and then manages to get rewarded when he comes home. That story makes no sense.
OHH: Right, right. Well tell the story of Otto Otepka because he was trying to look into who was real defectors and who were not.
Lisa Pease: Right and that goes back to the opening of Oswald's file because Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 or 1958, I think it was the end of '58 or the beginning of '59. But Oswald's file in the CIA isn't opened for almost a year later, which is really interesting because his "defection" was actually reported in The Washington Post, I mean right there on the nose of the CIA and they read the paper every day. Again, the U2 was the CIA's plane. It didn't belong to any other agency, that was a CIA facility that he sat at Atsugi.
And so, here is this guy who worked at the CIA facility tracking the CIA's secret spy plane and defects openly to the Soviet Union and the CIA doesn't even open a file on him? Again, that should indicate ... Of course, they didn't open a file publicly on him because they had some secret file on him open already. Maybe even under a code name. That would make sense. It would not make sense the CIA's that incompetent. Some people believe it is, but no they are not incompetent, they are highly skilled at what they do.
All right. So anyway, so this guy at the State Department, who is State Department security, learns that a bunch of these Americans have suddenly defected. Again, there are 10 or 15 of them that in a short period of time all decide to move to the Soviet Union. And again, here we are in America, you know land of the free, home of the brave. Prices are reasonable, life is good, the weathers great. Why do these people leave to go to a closed society, communistic, under dictatorship. It makes no sense that people would choose to leave a free country to go to a dictatorship. It usually happens the other way around right?
So, obviously the State Department employee is suspicious, and he goes, I'm guessing this is some sort of intelligence operation. So he writes to the CIA and he's like, which of these are yours? And when the CIA gets that request they know to route some of those names directly to the Security Research staff, again a subset of the Office of Security, in the same way that SIG was a subset of counterintelligence within the overall Office of Security there was Security Research staff area, a smaller component. And they knew right away that Oswald needed to go to that smaller component, whereas others could just go to the Soviet Russia division. So even on the intake people recognized that Oswald was a special case.
And it was at that point when the State Department requested information, at that point the CIA opens a file on Oswald. And now I'm going to jump ahead a few years because during the Church Committee hearing Bill Harvey, who had ran counterintelligence and then later moved into running Cuban operations and some of the plots to kill Castro. Bill Harvey in his notes about how to create an assassination plot said we need a phony 201 file made up to look like a counterintelligence file. And that's I think what Oswald's file was. I think his official file is a phony counterintelligence file designed to hide his real status as a deep, deep, deep cover CIA asset.
And in fact there are, when Ann Egerter was the one who opened his file, when she was questioned about his file and the opening of it, she indicated there were top secret code numbers on certain of these files. And then later when shown Oswald's file she points to something on it, we can't see because I've only a transcript not a video, but she points to some numbers and goes, "Those are those numbers like I was telling you about earlier." And the only numbers she talked about earlier were top secret code numbers. So it's like there's something secret in Oswald's file we still don't understand because no one has explained fully what codes she was referring to or what that meant.
But anyway, so Otto Otepka now finds once he stars asking questions about Oswald, suddenly he becomes the target of an internal investigation at the State Department. And people are following him and taping him and going through his burn bags at night. Soon he is under suspicion for whatever and he is literally forced out of the agency shortly before the assassination. And one of the files in his safe is his study of Oswald because he's still trying to figure out is this guy CIA or not. This was like '62 and of course the assassination was in '63, so when I say shortly before I'm talking a year and not a day or a month. You know, I'm talking a year, but I found that fascinating because here this guy is just trying to do his job and just trying to figure out what's going on, but the CIA realizes he might be stumbling upon their own internal operations and they freeze him out. And that's unfortunate for Otepka.
So that's an answer to that question, next question.
OHH: So well, it kind of matches Oswald's experience in the U.S., this all kind of matches what he does in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee right? That also kind of does not fit with a normal person's behavior does it?
Lisa Pease: Exactly, exactly. So here again, now he comes back from the Soviet Union and who does he hang out with? He doesn't choose to hang out with communists or whatever, he instead is befriended by this really conservative, Russian George De Mohrenschildt, I'm looking for a word that I'm not finding, but you know a super conservative guy who is-
OHH: Right he's like an aristocrat, right?
Lisa Pease: Yeah, yeah. An aristocrat and who is coincidentally of course working with the CIA through the New Orleans office J. Walton Moore, De Mohrenschildt was in touch with him. And so this guy Oswald befriends this CIA guy who's got a whole group of very right wing Russians that he's in bed with. And then from this right wing Russian group, Oswald then goes off and wants to join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, you know a bunch of leftists promoting Castro. Or so it might appear because honestly I've begun to wonder if this whole Fair Play for Cuba Committee wasn't a false flag operation from the start set up by the CIA to pull in Castro supporters and neutralize them. But that's the story for, you know I've never had time to fully research that, but every time I look down that path it's always looked very promising.
Buy anyway, James McCord, one of the Office of Security guys who later got involved in Watergate, was part of an anti FPCC, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, operation and it sure appears Oswald was to, but again he's going out and handing out flyers and trying to overtly look like a Castro supporter. And arguing with Carlos Bringuier, who is working for the DRE, which is the, I can't say it in Cuban, but it's basically a student organization. That is, by the way, run by the JM/Wave station in Florida by George Joannides, a high level CIA operative there. So although people don't usually think of Oswald's fight with Carlos Bringuier as being a CIA operation, to me that was so obviously staged as a way to paint Oswald as this prominent leftist. So it made the news and then Oswald's suddenly on TV and the radio doing a debate with Bringuier.
You know, it's like Oswald was being groomed for something and honestly I have always thought that Oswald was being groomed to be a patsy in a Castro plot. You know, in a Castro assassination plot because the CIA was working on that before the point at which, I mean the CIA when they sent Oswald to the Soviet Union in '58, they were not planning to kill Kennedy. They didn't even know he would be president. You know what I mean, it's like he was being groomed for something that had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. And I think he was being groomed to infiltrate Cuba and run operations there and that's why he went to the Soviet Union to be as they call sheep dipped as a communist. And then comes back and pretends to carry on his communistic activities even though at other times he's happy with the gun guys and talking to the right wingers. Kind of like a split personality here.
So, I'm sorry now I forgot where I was going with that.
OHH: No I think-
Lisa Pease: Anyway, so yeah and I mean Oswald appears to be part of an anti ... Oh, that's the other thing. So he's running this pro FPCC operation out of the building of Guy Banister, again, one of the most hardcore right wing ex-FBI, current CIA asset. Was probably involved in the Guatemalan coup from what I understand. You know Guy Banister has a long right wing record that crosses paths with the CIA. Also in the same building, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Arcacha Smith just happened to have maps of the sewer system in Dallas right after the assassination of John Kennedy. What was that about? You know Lt. Frugé, one of the cops in New Orleans, reported that to for the HSCA, which never really followed up on that. So here you have again Oswald's supposedly procommunist hanging out with these two extreme right wing CIA assets.
And then Jim DiEugenio found out that the pamphlets Oswald was handing out, that particular set, by the serial number on the back, had been ordered by the CIA. So Oswald's handing out CIA printed pamphlets about Cuba. I mean how could anybody look at this and not understand that Oswald was an intelligence agent. It just boggles the mind that any reporter worth their salt could not look at this evidence and figure this out and you know, my conclusion is they don't look at the evidence. They look at what the CIA tells them on their briefing sheet and then they go report that because there's no way for any honest person to look at this evidence and not understand that Oswald was a CIA asset.
OHH: Right. Well if their editors are controlled and the publishers are working with people like Angleton then like you said, it can kind of all can fall into place. So, the assassination occurs, Oswald's obviously set up to look like a communist. Then the Warren Commission starts in and you showed a lot of evidence in your talk about the way that the CIA was feeding information to the FBI. The way that Angleton was looking into a lot of things and he was in control of the CIA's communication with the Warren Commission itself. So do you want to talk about, you said he knew what to cover up even after the Warren Commission was finished and also during it. You want to talk about that?
Lisa Pease: And I'm going to back up just a little bit because interestingly enough, Angleton handed off Oswald's file to the, oh God I forget the name of it, but it was the group running Cuban operations. So, at the time of the assassination Oswald's file wasn't really a counterintelligence file, it was more a Cuban operations file. And Special Affairs staff maybe. I'd have to check.
OHH: Oh, okay.
Lisa Pease: But I think that's interesting, it's almost like Angleton was burning his own agent by handing him off to basically a group that David Phillips was going to be involved in. And then David Phillips is seen by Antonio Veciana, who has now confirmed in person verbally at a conference that I attended, that yes David Phillips was the Maurice Bishop, that he had known David Phillips was Maurice Bishop. And he had hinted that Maurice Bishop was David Phillips, but he has now confirmed 100% it was David Phillips. And he saw Oswald talking to David Phillips shortly before, as he was approaching him and Phillips kind of quickly finished his conversation. Oswald went away and then Phillips turned his attention to Veciana, but Veciana was 100% sure that that was the Lee Harvey Oswald then killed later by Jack Ruby in Dallas. So that's interesting.
And now, so we go to Mexico City, a month before the assassination Oswald supposedly takes a trip to Mexico City. I believe Oswald did go to Mexico City, I'm not convinced Oswald went to either embassy because the records that show him at the Soviet embassy or calling the Soviet embassy, John Newman in his book explained that the conversation that Oswald supposedly had, that the day he called, the Soviet embassy was actually closed and no one was there and they were all out having I think a volleyball game. So it's like that conversation could not have transpired, it had to be entirely fictionalized. Or taken from some other date and dressed up, but whatever, it couldn't have happened that way.
I also know that the Oswald sighting at the Cuban Consulate also probably didn't happen because the man who was the Cuban Consulate at the time, Eusebio Azcue, had told the HSCA that the guy who had come in did not match the guy who was shot on TV by Jack Ruby. That it was a different looking guy. Other people reported seeing a shorter, blonde haired guy go in and pretend to be Lee Harvey Oswald and make a fuss and be kind of overly dramatic. And they were suspicious of that because it just didn't seem to be behaving like a normal person would. And so again, it seems the CIA was framing Oswald in advance of the assassination in a way that Oswald himself apparently didn't know about or didn't recognize was happening.
So this was happening either with or without Angleton's knowledge, hard to connect him at that point. But then after the assassination, or again, so before the assassination the CIA then sends a note out to other agencies of the government saying, "Oh, this guy Oswald, he met with this Soviet assassin named, blah, blah, blah," and they kind of put out a high level alert on him, but they deliberately mis-describe him. And again is say deliberately because the same people who wrote that communication, also wrote another communication within a two hour period that described Oswald totally accurately. And that one went to a smaller group. So it's like they're raising the threat level on the Oswald name so that if people see that name later it will trigger a coverup, but they don't want him picked up in advance of the assassination.
So it's really sophisticated. So again, people who don't do crime for a living and don't study intelligence operations, this just sounds fantastical because it's like, oh my God all I do is I plan what I'm going to buy for groceries this week. You know, no one would plan an assassination plot to that great detail, but that's not most people's job. If it's your job and that's all you do, you're going to get as good at it as anybody else at their job. Like these people have PhD's in assassination plots. These people, they know what they're doing and they plan every aspect and every contingency. And what if this goes wrong, then this will happen. What is this goes wrong, well then this will happen. How do we make sure the other agencies will buy into the coverup? We'll feed them data in advance that will help make them look guilty and that will cause them to coverup any other records they have because they don't want it exposed that they knew this guy was meeting with an assassin beforehand and then didn't do anything about it. So all this data is kind of fed into the system, you know John Newman calls it like a virus, so that people are eager to hide what they knew about Oswald after the fact.
So now we cut to your question and so now it's the Warren Commission time and inside the CIA Richard Helms orders an internal investigation of what happened. You know it's kind of like, I think Helms wanted to know what could an outsider find out about the assassination and what we knew about Oswald and when. And he assigns a guy named John Whitten, who is in the files as Scelso, John Scelso, but his real name was Whitten. And he starts to write a very accurate report and he notices some weird things about the whole Mexico City episode and he's kind of questioning, it's like this guy doesn't seem to be like a real defector and so Angleton then kind of sets up Scelso and takes the investigation away from him. Because Angleton's whole point it seems, was to use Oswald as a wedge against the Soviet Union. Angleton didn't want to say it was a lone nut, he wanted to say there was a conspiracy. It was Oswald working for the Soviets and that's why we have to cover it up because if it gets out then we could be at a nuclear confrontation and we don't want that.
And somehow that's basically the word that gets to LBJ, President Johnson. And so he never doubts that it's a conspiracy, he just wants it covered up because he doesn't want to go to war with Russia over it. And that's kind of why, I believe, the Warren Commission came to the conclusions it did. They all probably knew and saw the evidence of conspiracy, but they feared that if they told the truth, again not understanding how the CIA was manipulating all this evidence, for them. They believed it was a Soviet conspiracy and they wanted to cover it up and make it look like just Oswald so we could live in peace and not fear a war with the Soviets.
And Angleton was the direct liaison to the Warren Commission and of course, who was on the Warren Commission? His long time buddy, he's patron saint, Allen Dulles. You know, who was head of the CIA and who had likely ordered the murder of President Kennedy. So you have Allen Dulles on the inside of the Warren Commission and then Angleton's on the inside of the CIA coordinating their story.
And one of the most interesting parts of this is that when it came to J. Edgar Hoover, apparently Angleton fretted for months, not days, not weeks but months as to whether Hoover would out Oswald as a CIA employee. Because Hoover already knew that somebody else had used Oswald's passport in the Soviet Union while he was there, which again bespeaks of intelligent operations. Hoover was suspicious of Oswald's connections with the FPCC, probably because Hoover knew the CIA was running operations against the FPCC. Hoover was a smart guy, he was a really smart guy and he'd been in intelligence longer than Angleton. You know it's like he saw what was going on and I think the CIA really worried, it's like is he going to expose us or not? And finally Hoover basically plays along and they agree that Oswald was not an agent of the CIA.
And this becomes a fantastic, I would recommend everybody read the transcripts of Angleton being interviewed by Senator Schweiker for the Church Committee. Schweiker finds this impossible, he's like well, "Why did you worry if Oswald wasn't an employee at the CIA, why would Hoover ever say that he was? And why would you worry about what Hoover said if you knew Oswald wasn't an employee?" This guy, because again the only way that makes sense is if Oswald was CIA and the CIA worried that Hoover knew this and was going to expose him in front of the Warren Commission.
And because they also had that blackmail material of Hoover, but that's the kind of material you can only use once and it either works or it doesn't. And what if they released it to the press and it all came out and Hoover stayed in power? So it's like the CIA couldn't be 100% sure that their blackmail would work, but apparently it did because Hoover went along. Didn't expose the CIA, the coverup was complete. And then now we cut, you know the Warren Commission, the Warren report came out in '64, the end of 1964. Now it's like it's done, the media has all reported it was Oswald alone, it's done, it's done.
But in '65 Angleton is still worried and they find out there's Eusebio Azcue guy, that I talked about at the Cuban Consulate, who said the guy who came in with the name Oswald wasn't the guy he saw shot on TV. They find out that he's going to be passing through, I assume Mexico City and they're like, if he comes through, see if you can get access to him. And then in a separate communication they say if appropriate access is given, get him drunk and get him to talk about Oswald. In other words, maybe in a drunken state they can get some statement from him that they can use as support that it really was Oswald there at the Cuban Embassy. In other words get him drunk and convince him it was Oswald is kind of the implication. When I read that, that's what I got out of it. I thought they're trying to find a way to turn Azcue or get him drunk and compromise him in some way so that he can't say it wasn't Oswald.
And again, this is '65, it's before Time magazine publishes pictures of the Zapruder film. It's before Mark Lane is widely known. It's a kind of relative quiet in the case. Again, the public's told nope, Oswald did it, done. The conspiracy theorist have no real forum because mainstream media isn't reporting what they're coming up with. But Angleton is still worried, he's still tying up loose ends and I found that really significant.
OHH: And you also, am I right in that one part of your talk you said that Angleton also had background checks done on the jurors in the Jim Garrison case, is that right?
Lisa Pease: Yes and to me again, that's borderline jury tampering. The CIA was intensely interested in Jim Garrison's case. Jim Garrison was a New Orleans DA who found out Oswald had been there in New Orleans. He'd been on TV and in a fight with Bringuier and he knew that Oswald was working out of this kind intelligence nexus area and so Jim Garrison's like, gosh maybe the assassination plot was hatched right here under my nose in New Orleans, let's look into it. And he starts interviewing people and he finds a witness who said that David Ferrie and Clay Shaw and Oswald were at a party together and that the assassination was discussed. And that Clay Shaw said he'd be out of the city when it went down and David Ferrie talked about triangulation of crossfire. And if people have seen the film JFK there's a scene where this conversation allegedly took place.
And so Jim Garrison is like oh my gosh, something really serious is going on and quickly Jim Garrison finds out that a lot of these anti Castro Cubans in the New Orleans area are connected to the CIA. And so he's suspecting, and he knows David Ferrie's connected to the CIA. He's wondering if Clay Shaw is connected to the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA is freaking out, they're having meetings daily and they're talking about the threat coming from New Orleans.
And Bill Davy by the way, you've got to read Bill Davy's book and get him on your show, he's so, so underrated as a researcher and he's done such incredible work. I tell people if you don't know Bill Davy's work, you don't know the story of the Kennedy assassination. He's really good and he goes into great detail along these lines of what the CIA was learning about Garrison's investigation. When and why and how they were trying to sabotage Garrison's investigation. In fact the HSCA found out that there were 10 CIA plants in Garrison's office because when you do a big investigation you hire a bunch of people and they have to have a certain kind of background and easy for the CIA to get their people in. You know forge up, dummy up documents. Make them look like the right person and all it takes is one insider to bring in all the rest.
And so they were sabotaging his case from within and without, but Angleton specifically had ordered background checks of every juror. Now the only reason that would matter is if you're planning to do jury tampering right? You want to know is there anybody we can get to? Is there any leverage we hold on any [inaudible 00:54:39] and that's completely illegal. It's illegal domestic spying to even to look at their backgrounds. I mean he should have been arrested and thrown in jail just for that document.
And you know, no one in Congress, they're so afraid of the CIA, they know what they can do. They won't jail these people, they won't hold them accountable. And that's why I feel we're in serious danger as a country because we pretend to be this democracy, but there's this covert faction that really runs the government from the deep, dark recesses underneath in ways we don't see or control. And that's why I've spent so much of my life studying it. It's not about the past, it's not even about who killed Kennedy. It's like, what is happening today and why can't I get to the truth about it and why is Congress being so weak and spineless on certain issues. People really need to understand there's this whole subterranean other government that is going on under the hood that we don't see. And the Kennedy assassination, because there are so many files, I mean there are literally millions of pages of documents. It gives us this incredible window into how the world really works in America at least. And so that's why I study it and why I encourage other people to study it.
The more you know the less you can be fooled. The more you know the sooner you start to see patterns coming up. When I see the media suddenly, you know usually you turn to one station there talking about one news story, you turn to another station they're talking about a different news story. When they all start talking about the same story, all at the same time, it's usually some [inaudible 00:56:10] goings on. You know there was a time where suddenly, excuse me, all the news media was urging Obama to bomb Syria, bomb Syria, bomb Syria. It was everywhere and I thought Obama kind of handled that brilliantly and he threw it to Congress knowing they would not support him. And so that was his way out of bombing Syria. And that pissed off the CIA, but it worked.
And all credit to Obama, it was one of the few really great things I thought he did as president. It's hard to stand up to the CIA and he was wise to that and he found a way out. And if you don't study this kind of history, you can't find those back doors because if you don't understand what's happening you can't counter it.
So anyway, I digress a little bit, but.
OHH: No, no. I think that's a great way to wrap up to say, I mean a lot of people I think look at Angleton as sort of this uniquely evil and idiosyncratic guy, but that's really not the case. I mean he's left a legacy and that's kind of the logic of having one of these secret agencies right?
Lisa Pease: Right, right. And that's the thing, there are other Angleton's and we don't know about them. In fact, some of the spokespeople on TV have counterintelligence backgrounds. There's a guy, Malcolm Nance, who is frequently on as a commentator and he was head of like the counter-terrorism unit or something. It's like, these people, their credentials are not really explained. They're put on TV as an expert, but people don't understand, they are experts propagandist with a certain point of view to get across. And although it's illegal to propagandize America, again, people don't know it's happening and the people who do don't have the power to prosecute it even though it's illegal to propagandize your own people, but it happens every day. It's one of the reasons I find it really hard to watch the news now it's like I'm hyper aware of it as it happens. And it's like, well this is bullshit, this is bullshit, what's the real story here. And that's why I read books and go into the documents because the truth is not going to be told in the mainstream media, it's just not.
Anyway thanks for doing your show because the truth is available through services like this.
OHH: Right, no and you know so much about this stuff so it's endlessly fascinating. Is there anything else that you want to add before we go?
Lisa Pease: People need to look for my book in September, A Lie Too Big To Fail, The Real History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination. I have so much data that is not in anyone else's book, that no one's talked about before that's really going to open people's eyes to what really happened. And I just can't wait till people talk about it openly because I have to keep it secret until it's out. You know so that the book will sell because if I tell all the secrets in advance no one will buy the book right? But oh my gosh I can't wait to talk about that.
OHH: Well I know there's a lot of people that are really excited about it. So when, it's supposed to come out in September is that right?
Lisa Pease: Yes, the 50th anniversary is in June and I really tried to make that, but I just couldn't get it all written, you know it's hard when you work full-time to write a book on the side. I've had no life for like five years. So I'm starting to enjoy life again. My apartment looks terrible as you can imagine. Like three years of not cleaning it, it needs to be done.
OHH: Right, right. Well we wish you a lot of success with that and definitely look forward to reading that when it comes out. So thanks again for talking about all this stuff today. I really appreciate it.
Lisa Pease: Thank you, take care.