<Rob Reiner, actor, film maker, podcast producer, CIA-did-it Conspiracy Theorist>
I'm continually disappointed while listening to Rob Reiner's new podcast, "Who Killed JFK?" because he cannot seem to swerve from his myopia that the CIA alone is the author of the JFK Assassination.
Many of the facts that Reiner reveals are valid. According to Dick Russell, an important source of data for JFK Assassination research, Richard Case Nagell was indeed a CIA operative who was in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, and probably did warn Oswald that somebody was setting him up for as a JFK Assassination patsy. Says Russell, the incredulous Oswald simply waved Nagell away.
In such episodes as "The Wilderness of Mirrors" and "The Lead Up," Reiner and his co-host, Soledad O'Brian have lined up CIA agents and chiefs, such as James Jesus Angleton and William Harvey, along with the evil CIA plan, "Northwoods," to blame the CIA for killing JFK. The Northwoods Plan to kill Americans and blame a foreign enemy to outrage the US to invade that enemy nation was indeed evil -- but it is a serious leap to use that evil plan to "prove" that CIA killed JFK.
It doesn't work because Reiner offers no smoking gun -- no final proof. It's innuendo after innuendo. That's no surprise, because Reiner's podcast has not delivered anything new so far. It's simply a rehash of CT books 30, 40, and 50 years old. It's not much different from Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, "JFK".
The problem I see with Reiner (as with Stone) is that he fails to reveal how closely CIA rogues and Mafia hoodlums in 1963 traveled alongside racist elements and other radical rightists in the US. They fail to point out the rabid racism of Guy Banister and David Ferrie, who guided Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) in his fake branch of the FPCC (Fair Play for Cuba Committee) in New Orleans.
Yes, the CIA was clearly interested in killing Fidel Castro in 1963. Yes, the CIA was clearly interested in infiltrating the FPCC (which was indeed celebrated by Fidel Castro). The CIA clearly gave Guy Banister money to infiltrate the FPCC and to send his double-agent, LHO, to Cuba to meet a team there. David Atlee Phillips wrote as much in his novel, "The Night Watch" (1988). But just because Oswald was hijacked by the US radical right to kill JFK over his Civil Rights Bill is no reason to jump to the conclusion that the CIA was behind that.
Such blind attacks on the CIA (of which I am not a member of any kind) is bad for America. It feeds the MAGA agenda. It feeds the Q-Anon agenda. I think Rob Reiner has made a terrible mistake by joining Oliver Stone in this continual drumbeat against the CIA.
Yes, I agree that some rogues from the CIA were clearly involved in the framing of LHO specifically for the JFK Assassination. But I say that these CIA rogues were reporting to SOMEBODY ELSE.
Take for example the brilliant writing of Bill Simpich, "State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City" (2014), which shows ample data that the CIA had no idea who impersonated LHO over the telephone at the Cuban Consulate to call the Soviet Embassy on October 1, 1963, to forever link the name of LHO with the name of KGB assassin Kostikov. The CIA translators only knew that it wasn't LHO, and they knew that whoever did it had to know: (1) that the CIA was fixated on Kostikov; and (2) that this telephone was the most wiretapped telephone on planet Earth.
So the CIA high-command in Mexico City started a Mole Hunt to find the culprit. Part of that Mole Hunt involved replacing LHO's bio file photograph with a large, muscular Russian guy. They also changed his middle name to "Henry." This was so that anybody who spread that false data had to be the Mole.
But JFK was soon assassinated in Dallas, making it an FBI problem, so J. Edgar Hoover immediately demanded that the CIA give him their file on LHO. The CIA clerk immediately handed it over, and it had that bogus photograph. Hoover had his own fat file on LHO, so he knew it wasn't LHO, and he never forgave the CIA for treating him so badly. He complained about this in his testimony to the WC.
Anyway -- none of that implicates the CIA in the JFK Assassination. On the contrary -- it should tell us (and it should tell Rob Reiner) that though CIA rogues and moles did join an outside conspiracy to kill JFK, they were not the leaders of that conspiracy. They took orders from outside the CIA. They were traitors.
So, I say that traitors killed JFK, not the CIA. My CT pinpoints the radical right in the US -- the same people making so much trouble today -- partly because they got away with murder in 1963.
By blaming the CIA and the FBI for the killing of JFK, the propaganda of Oliver Stone and Rob Reiner inadvertently supports MAGA.
That's all I wanted to say today.
Thank you,
--Paul
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