Former CIA Director Reveals How Operation Dragon Lead to JFK Assassination

this country is in spite of our recent chaos is on balance pretty likely to go to the fbi compared to to most institutions and groups some people don't give in to the dollar sign they are booked by ideology athlete julie harvey oswald he was a very very pointed and enthusiastic killer and he was to assassinate kennedy and return back to moscow and have them be cheering and enthusiasm for him at the moscow airport how did stalin's leaders that were left after he died in the mid 50s how did they feel about kennedy kershaw he wanted kennedy dead but he realized that he might get caught and labeled as the assassin of the american president and that could mean nuclear war between the us and the soviet union interesting he changed and the decision was made by oswald not to listen and not to obey anybody and he basically executed him [Music] my guest today is the former 16th director of cia mr james woolsey and we have a lot of interesting topics and experiences that he's had that we're going to get into today with that being said james thank you so much for being a guest on valuetainment thank you great to be with you so it's it's uh you know any time i've had i remember one time i had a cia agent we were running a uh executive meeting with a company called vistage and i was the host i had to bring somebody in as a guest and it was a former ci agent he came in every single ceo and entrepreneur showed up because they just wanted to hear the different stories and uh it was by far the most popular guest we had where ceos wanted to hear from a ci agent go figure why a ceo but it's exciting to share your story with our audience so you know if we can go back on how you got started how does one go from you know graduating from high school to saying i want to go be a cia agent and not only that you get a phone call from bill clinton saying hey i want to meet with you and that leads to you being the director of cia so how did this whole thing get started for you well uh it was close to being an accident um what uh happened was uh that i was a conservative democrat um still kind of angry and uh i think the administration as uh the uh uh as the administration came into its position with the new administration uh they wanted uh to have probably all parts of the system of the political system represented and they didn't have any conservative democrats and so they named me but they hadn't done their research all that thoroughly and they announced me as admiral uh woolsey and um i said you know i never was an admiral uh uh never got a book captain in the army and uh they had a crowd gathered by that point uh to hear the announcement and they one of the staffers said whoops we better change the press release uh so i was a last-minute uh uh conservative democrat uh and uh that's why i think they uh searched for me and and found me it was not a real polished operation very very interesting by the way who would you say uh because you know you don't hear that term too often today who would you say is a current conservative democrat and would you put jfk as a conservative democrat i would have at the time yes uh the last one i i think probably was joe lieberman he's often often named as that but joe is retired as a matter of fact the last time i call myself a joe lieberman democrat joe was in the group with me he said jim you've got to stop saying that i'm not in politics anymore i said you know joe if i can't be a conservative democrat and call myself a lieberman uh democrat i'll i'll go back to harry harry truman was a good president why not use him so but any case conservative democrat it is conservative democrat conservative democrat do do we do we have a lot of current conservative democrats would you say maybe two not so much uh i think the democrats have yawed over into being progressives largely and uh the republicans uh have gotten very much into i think some of the innovations of how to how to create a new movement for themselves and i'm not sure uh there are many conservative democrats i think they're kind of gone with the win you said two of them is mansion one of them is that who you're thinking is one of them i would say mansion and i still count to lieberman okay got it okay very i mean you know if you think about it a lot of people would probably be uh america probably would be comfortable with uh someone more on the center left or center right than being far left or far right uh you know it would balance out the eagle's wings if somebody was more on the center left or right rather than going far to the right or left i think you're right yeah so so how was that phone call made when you got the call and saying hey the president wants to meet with you and were you expecting it i know you said it was kind of a surprise but was it something where you were on a short list of five names that you knew about not really um i was on a short list of people that they were talking to but i thought they were just talking to a group of people who were being considered to be director not uh who had already been chosen as an admiral to uh to be directed it was uh it turned out i was on the shorter list than i knew how was your first sit down with uh president clinton well we uh we really didn't uh sit down uh uh it uh it happened very quickly uh uh president clinton uh uh chatted with me uh at the inauguration uh ceremony for a few seconds uh that's about it yeah i heard you tell a joke one time you said you know in the two years of me being the director of cia you know the plane that tried to fly into the pentagon or white house that was actually me trying to get a meeting with the president because he wouldn't sit down with you well that's basically true uh bill clinton was was is a speed reader and uh so he didn't want to sit down every morning and hand the director of central intelligence read sheets of paper to him uh he can he could read a lot faster himself and so he would just let the system operate in his speed reader so occasionally you wouldn't know what he was reading but i remember one time he said jim have you read that new book uh on africa by uh so-and-so um what did you think of it and i i happily had read it uh but uh he was reading a lot of books as president and uh uh talking to people about him but uh it wasn't very formal and he didn't he didn't want there to be any nod toward toward having a system of reviewing is that is that a protocol like typically the president's first meetings to get a briefing by the director of cia every morning is that typically historically what it's been what's been the case or no it's happened and it has been the case several times i think but it's it's there's nothing required about the president designates the director as director and the director uh gets briefed on this kind of panoply of the briefs and then start or started the meeting with the president the next day and but that's that changed uh in part with me yeah that's what i wonder i mean if you're a president you would want to meet with the director of cia to kind of see what's going on if it's not once a day maybe once a week to just kind of be briefed uh especially when you say in two years you never got a chance to meet with them uh were you reporting that kind of like you know how you run a company and sometimes you put your org chart together and you say look i'm the ceo i have the cfo the ceo the cio the cto whatever and i got five direct reports typically the ceo doesn't want to have more than five reports sometimes it's seven but let's just say five's the magical number were you reporting to the chief of staff did he want you to go through another layer before you go through him who were you directly reporting to functionally yes chief of staff uh and he uh he liked it the president would report to him and that was kind of the way it worked out it wasn't absolutely a rule and when we would go in together uh tony and i to uh say something uh to the president i was it was okay with them as we walked out if i stopped by the president's desk and said mr president you want to pay particular attention to x and y the report today it was that sort of thing was fine got it so day before you became the director of cia versus the day after the day you became a director cia what were some of your responsibilities how dramatically did your responsibilities change the day after becoming the c director of cia well i think the main change uh is the change from being just a reporter of intelligence to being in a situation where you can recommend and sometimes get approved covert actions covert action uh is an event that's put together in order to try to influence what the policy is rather than just report on it and it's not there's nothing sneaky about it from the point of view of the president not knowing about it the president's fully briefed and he gets a signed uh recommendation for from the director and uh it all is proper and done but it um is it it's an action item and that sometimes those are successful and sometimes they're not and bill clinton was very uh disturbed he said one time in a close meeting that he had not gone into rwanda uh and uh stopped the uh hutus uh killing of the other rwandan tribes um it was uh really uh the tootsies uh were massacred essentially during the rwanda killing fields of eight to 93 94. and um that uh what i think president clinton didn't want to have is that he did not want another uh event like the black hawk down where american troops got killed uh on the ground in somalia and and so he was being very cautious and he did not stop the uh rwandan hutus from killing the tutsis and he was very as he thought about it over time he decided that had been a big mistake and he would often tell people and this is one thing i i rather admire about clinton he would tell people okay you need to know the biggest mistake i made as president it was going not going in and protecting the the tootsies i should never have let them massacre the hutus um and most all presidents don't do things like that they they don't say write out in the national security council meeting you know i made a big mistake and here's what it was because that was close to a million people that died um as a result of that decision of his and it's um um something that uh has come up in time a number of circumstances uh but uh it's um an important issue and and it's something that he had the the manhood and grace to uh to deal with uh straightforwardly was was that during your time when a million people died during his watch was it when you were his director of ci was it afterwards uh it was largely uh during about 94 and i was director in 93 to 95. got it do you think it could have been prevented if he was communicating with you more often and getting updates or it wouldn't have made a difference i don't think uh the decision about going in to protect the tootsies or not would have changed based on who was director he just didn't want to do that so uh so it wouldn't have made a difference whether you would have given him the briefing or not because he was determined not to make the move and but he admitted to the fact that that decision was a decision he made that cost a million people's life so he took responsibility for it which is what great leaders do so you know prior to being a director of cia how much experience did you have being a cia agent yourself when i went on active duty in the army uh to um pull out fulfill my requirements as a infantry officer uh in the reserve officers training corps requirements uh i had a choice whether to work on intelligence issues or work on issues related to the vietnam war since i had been a founder and president of yale's citizens for eugene mccarthy for president and had opposed the vietnam war i i picked intelligence rather than the vietnam war and uh i uh worked on intelligence matters largely um having to do with satellite design reconnaissance and i did that for close to two years and then after that i began doing some national security council work for uh brent scowcroft and uh worked in the pentagon uh so um it was in the technical side of things uh and was relatively short a couple of years uh but uh uh i uh that's that's what my experience was yeah i mean i look at your resume advisor during a military us delegation for strategic arms limitation talks in vienna 1969 to 1970 general counsel to u.s senate committee on armed services 1773 under secretary of the navy 77-99 delegate at large of the u.s soviet strategic arm reduction talks and nuclear and space arms talks geneva 1983-86 ambassador to the negotiation on conventional armed forces in europe vienna 89 to 91 so it's interesting that you had a variety of background on different things today does that kind of give you an edge on why they thought about recruiting you to be the director of cia it's possible uh that reasonably broad experience uh although not uh deep and not real lengthy i mean it was screened over a two three year set of assignments when you became a director of cia were you given some intel where you yourself were you thought the outcome or the blame was somebody and then you found that it was somebody else where you sat there and said this is pretty interesting on the intel that was given on what event took place here was there anything that you yourself were extra curious about that as a director of cia now you can have access to find out more about that information yes uh drones i uh was a uh enthusiast uh for uh making a transition for at least an important portion uh of the photo reconnaissance uh uh part of the agency and the pentagon uh that would have been backed up the idea of relying more heavily on on drones as a matter of fact in the early mid 80s um before i uh became the general counsel of the senate armed services committee uh i i was a private citizen doing one thing in another and i got asked to come over to israel to work with the idf and i did things like that from time to time and because i was over there i saw something that i was really impressed by which was a um essentially a group of very young israeli troops uh flying drones uh which i hadn't seen before in the american military flying drones and uh they seemed like they were just almost certainly too young to be doing things with military forces and so i asked the colonel who was in charge of the israeli unit i said colonel this is really an interesting operation you've got these young troops flying drones and they're shooting down [Music] tank ordinance from uh uh uh above above them uh there's just a lot here going on um what are what's going on why do you have just to be very young uh troops doing something like this it looks like it's hard to do and and important and and and difficult and the colonel grant and he said well he said they ought to be fairly young he said this is the uh israeli team that essentially does uh operations uh in training and uh the reason they're they're young is that this is the israeli model airplane club and we just put them into uniform and uh uh called them up and they're doing a great job i i remember thinking that's that that's smart that's uh you got a whole new way of using ordnance and different new ordinance so you go to the 14 year olds and sure enough they're doing a great job very interesting you know i recently interviewed the former director of a mossad shabtai shavit i don't know if you are familiar with shabtai shavit i just went to a conference there where he was speaking and i introduced him he was a good friend for the two years we were both heads of our services i bet and the question i have for you is when i asked him a question i said look everybody is trained by somebody right like i'm from iran so the savak was trained by mi6 and secret service and a little bit of you know the mossad you know you think about uh you know mi6 was trained by us cia and cia was also trained a little bit by mi6 and kind of share each other what they know maybe not all the secrets the question i asked them who trained mossad to be as good as they are you know so i'm curious you know who you would say train the mossad to be as creative and as uh you know some would say brutal as they are well i think it's more uh cross-referenced uh really than that uh i i i think the cia and including the nsa which does some very useful and important uh work that are code breakers um i think that they and uh the uh mi6 brits uh and uh cia work with one another very readily and very easily [Music] and uh they also work very closely with uh called the i-5 uh the commonwealth uh uh intelligence uh troops uh the australians and the new zealanders and the brits and so forth um so um it's more a group of six or eight that work together on all sorts of things all the time than it is a single sequence why would why would the secret intelligence groups teach each other their tactics of what they do basically it's because we have no major secrets anyway from the the brits and the canadians and the aussies uh we uh we're all in the same same ballpark who's one you wouldn't be comfortable sharing secrets with if you were to say there's no way in the world we would do anything with the following three who who would it be that would be iran iran iran [Laughter] so iran's at the top so you're more uncomfortable with teaching iran anything than china i think china's doing a clinic right now around the world with people no china is doing a lot and they are they worry me and the russians worry me i'd say i'd say realistically russia china uh uh iran um are uh syria any of the countries that are uh clearly uh at odds uh uh with us but that's four or five uh there are a few that would work with us even though not all the time interesting so before we get into your new book that's coming out operation dragon inside the kremlin secret war on america uh i want to kind of ask you maybe a couple other questions here regarding today's times you know i've asked this question from multiple different people to see what their answer would be uh being a director of cia 93 to 95 had different issues than we're facing today then maybe in the 70s then maybe in the 60s it's different challenges during different decades what what what concerns you the most today i mean i'm talking is it cyber warfare is it bionuclear is it nuclear is it you know bio warfare is it uh a uh oil war that could take place is it you know what what is the top concern that you have with all the different challenges we're facing today well it's tough because it's a combination on the one hand of intelligence forces or groups i mean i'm much more worried about iran than i am about most any other country and and but in addition to naming some names like iran um i'm i'm really quite concerned about especially specialities that have been adopted by russia and china which are are very very troubling because russia for example has been working very hard on cyber particularly artificial intelligence and that that is continuing source of uh confusion and uh difficulty for the united states because uh uh the russians lie cheat and steal about who they are and that makes it very difficult what do you do with somebody with a face mask that's extremely well designed and you're sure that uh he's uh uh a syrian in fact he may not be he may be opposed to syrians i don't so there are um um a lot of difficulties with masking and such uh technology uh cyber poor in all dimensions uh are is really hard to deal with uh and um i'd say uh that uh set of of technologies and that set of um governments uh are uh are six eight ten twelve uh really really troubling uh combinations of of uh individual countries and individual uh texts and and uh operators so when when you were director of cia from 93 to 95 uh obviously russia was probably your biggest threat would you agree russia would be number one on the list 93 to 95 as a nation i think probably so uh we we were not as uh worried about russia then as i think we should have been and uh we uh uh worked to some extent uh on uh the uh steps uh russia could could take uh in masking themselves and they did that a lot uh they uh the temp potemkin village uh history uh the disguise for a whole village uh by count potemkin who is sort of catherine great's uh male friend uh was uh one of the things the the russians did and it did going back to the 17th century um they they're good at deception and we we were always needing to penetrate that was not easy during that time was china at all even a thought uh you know was it even something where you woke up and you know hey we have to be careful what china is going to be doing next obviously russia was up there iran was up there was china still in the top three at the time or no i don't know that it was in the top three but it was very close it was it was in the top one or two or three uh you can't you can't really tell but uh they were a problem but not as serious the problem i think we thought as russia was now it may be different the ranking of the chinese and russians and iranians syrians is hard to parse but uh all four or five of those countries are worrisome so you know the one thing that sometimes i wonder about threats is when you were the director cia at the time you know the story of uh aldrich ames who was arrested february 21st you know in 1994 for treason spying against the united states et cetera was criticized for not taking action immediately and you came out and said i'm not the kind that's going to go out there and fire the guy let's investigate a little more before some find out who disguise if it's really involved and then later on that year december 20th 1994 you you resigned so the question i have for you with this is how you know you've heard the saying before alexander the great i have met the enemy it is i or america's biggest enemy is within the inside in a family the thing that could break up a great family is within the inside how much do we have to worry about another aldrich ames or 2 or 3 or 10 you know sharing some of our intel with our enemies today we have to worry about the inside um it's a serious problem uh most uh cia and uh dia and other uh intelligence uh people uh or other other people on the inside military officers and the like lee harvey oswald after all was a marine uh uh sniper so because of uh uh that scope we do uh have to uh uh uh be very careful with our people including very senior people who work on really important matters but um it's not something that we can readily brush aside and it's also something that you want to be careful not to get too fired up about it or you you know even paranoids have real enemies but you don't want to spread a doctrine throughout the intelligence community that you're suspicious of everybody uh you ought to be it's interesting we're concerned and attentive about everybody but uh we need our career people and we needed them badly yeah i bet that's kind of weird to s you know how do you [Music] how do you watch your agents and how do you you know have detectives to detect any signs of espionage from your cia agents who are professionals at kind of keeping things under cover and people not knowing what they do for a living it's a tough task i said to one of my successors and he didn't think it was a good analogy but i said it anyway in a meeting that we lived with a national security establishment in which we um send people abroad military usually to fight and die for their country we also sometimes send uh people from my organization abroad to lie cheat and steal for the country and i had one of my colleagues say we don't steal i said well you know what what do you call it if you get your hands on an enemy draft security set of files you don't uh just kind of smile and leave them there you uh uh give them to the boss find some way to use them uh and uh the the best thing that's ever been said on that i think is the wonderful winston churchill quote which is that it is uh so important to take very good care of intelligence that it's a essentially like a dominant dominant pattern of of of work what do you mean so churchill said it's important to carry your intelligence because they could they could do it because they could get the exact quote it's uh it's about uh oh i know what it is it's that it's uh so important it's uh intelligence is so important and must be protected by a bodyguard of lies when intelligence is so important that it must be protected by the bodyguard of lies and that's winston churchill wow and and uh he one of his books is called bodyguard of lies um and uh it's an important point uh churchill uh uh was very good on these issues to put him mildly yeah he's uh he's a obviously in in many ways he's seen as one of the greatest leaders of all time and he's hated and he's uh um you know a lot of misconception about him and people who didn't really understand his wiring because he was a pretty weird strong personality leader when you know wartime came they trusted him the most to want to execute and some of the other guys like chamberlain were not having the guts to go out there and uh do what the necessary work was required but going back to it so espionage cia agents flipping on us or dia or whoever it is that we're even some soldiers there right what is the common uh oh tipping point where somebody says i'm willing to flip is it a is it women where you know they end up meeting some you know the stuff they see in movies a red sparrow or something like that and all of a sudden like oh shoot i totally screwed up i gave too much intel to the wrong person because this woman really was able to woo me and i'm in too deep is it money because you know ci agents don't make a lot of money if you think about the kind of money ci agents make it's not like they're taking home a million dollars and you know rolling in the dough with a porsche 911 park that said that only happens in movies is it a deep hate for the institution and what america stands for what what typically gets somebody want to flip against its own nation well uh lots of uh people can show weakness and different types of people have and do uh ames uh uh uh came into his uh desire for a great new car and a lot more money than he had some people don't um give in to to uh the dollar sign they uh they uh are uh uh hooked by by ideology on uh on the other side and uh that that happened again i'll use an example that heart happened to lee harvey oswald he uh was a very very pointed and enthusiastic killer and he was uh what he really wanted more than anything else was to assassinate kennedy and return uh back to moscow and have there be cheering and and enthusiasm for him at the moscow airport he said that on several occasions so um people operate for strange mixtures of reasons sometimes but it's not always uh uh the happy pleasures of uh of friendship or it's not always the the angry pleasures of getting an added salary in your pocket it's uh it's different things to different people it makes sense i mean it's it's similar temptations but you wonder how you're able to get somebody to stay loyal to an to a country and an institution when they're not making the money to not be tempted to do something otherwise um okay so so you know why don't we go and talk about your book uh and the jfk assassination and uh you know what your thoughts were on who was behind it based on access to research and folks you worked on with the book so when you when you and i go out there and read about jfk assassination there's a lot of different theories that come out and you've read all the theories probably way more than any of us because you wrote a book about this and you've had to do research on it so whether it's the you know the bullet was it him was it uh you know the mob was it the mafia was it uh johnson lyndon johnson was it a couple people that were missing politically later on maybe they were involved was it who was it so based on your research and theories that you have what really happened with the jfk assassination well uh first of all we call the book operation dragon uh and uh dragon in the russian terminology a lot of the time means very effective deception uh that's what they sometimes call their their deception operations and that um uh creates uh a a reason for them to move into both uh trying to self-aggrandize and trying to help the new country or institution or group of people that they have decided to unfortunately to help so there's two batches of people who get involved in working for the other side in intelligence and counterintelligence against them is uh what we in the intelligence business spend a lot of time and effort uh trying to force stall so what conclusion did you come up with when you wrote this book with uh former romanian spy chief yan uh mihai pasepa what conclusion did you come up with uh on who assassinated president kennedy it seemed reasonably clear to mike the chapa uh we all called him mike by the way because that his romanian name with eon mihai is mike and we uh uh i i think it's fair to say that uh mike uh was a romanian patriot and did not uh and and worked hard to help us uh during the post-war years the post-civil post cold war years and during the cold war he worked hard to help us corral and limit and penetrate and understand uh the enemy and uh he and he was at the thick of the fray at one point he was being chased uh i don't know if his wife was in that particular chase but she he was in a chase with carlos the jackal who had been tasked to kill him um and so uh this was a a ge engineer [Music] whose father was a general electric engineer he worked in in the establishment of infrastructure of the system uh but uh he had a flair and an ability for um counterintelligence that was uh very very effective and uh we ended up uh being able uh to uh use his skills uh effectively and uh he was a remarkable individual he passed away by the way a week almost exactly a week ago he passed away exactly a week ago wow um so so you know when you're sitting there and investigating this you know there's a lot of people again a lot of different claims have been made on who killed jfk why why specifically like maybe i ought to ask the question a different way what is your level of certainty on what you believe in with the events that took place with the assassination of john f kennedy um quite hard and i have a major reason for its being quite high and that's that i had mike and mihai pachepa um for years spending uh time and effort uh cozying up uh to the russian uh cabinet essentially uh uh chatting briefly with khrushchev during uh vodka breaks etc uh the uh the whole world of essentially intelligence was open to pachepa in ways that it was not open really to virtually anybody else and um so that's one one thing uh mike uh um was able to get into contacts and for example chesca the romanian intelligence intelligence chief and and and actually and and chief of decision making for much of the time in romania pachepa um was a uh just a great gate into into that world and uh i think that we were very lucky to have him and his very able wife as sources uh and and uh they they they served us extremely well got it so so the claim you guys make you and the co-author is lee lee harvey was a kgb associate who was personally instructed by soviet leader nikita khrushchev to assassinate president kennedy sometime shortly after the soviet changed their minds and oswald was told to drop the plan but oswald harboring a blinding love for all the ussr refused so that's that's the claim that's the pretty much the premise of the book but what what how did stalin view uh kennedy what was stalin's relationship and view of kennedy oh he hated him with a passion because kennedy had uh basically made him look foolish uh in the uh cuban missile crisis and and weak uh turning his own ships around so they wouldn't confront the americans uh he uh khrushchev was furious at kennedy and he wanted him dead and he wanted to have him killed is that stalin or is that khrushchev who wanted him dead that was crucial uh stalin died in what 53 um this this is all post-stolen but not by much early i guess the question i would have is stalin's camp you know the secret speech that khrushchev gave the four hours where he trashed stalin and stalin is this and stalin is that as stalin as this stalin's people were still in power obviously they were not running it was crescent but it was stalin's people i'm trying to find out how did stalin's leaders that were left after he died in the mid 50s how did they feel about kennedy well uh the book goes into that in some terrible mikes in my book they they uh also uh uh wanted kennedy dead and were extremely hostile to him and then what happened really was that that khrushchev finally got a little bit of balance and sense into his thick skull um he was essentially ready he by the 60 early 60s um to move against oswald whom he knew about and and so forth to do something to to create a situation where the the the kennedy would be killed um and uh it was only really because of his hatred kennedy that he was willing to take that step and then when he did take that step and ordered it happened it was not necessarily face to face with uh oswald but but it was substantively easily known by the bureaucracy the party bureaucracy that he he had given the order he had so given the order in with such clarity that oswald learned that he was being tasked with this great marvelous wonderful job that he so wanted more than anything in the world and he essentially gets approval to move against kennedy and the um and what really happened was that oswald was picked and moved against kennedy and then khrushchev got a little bit of sense into his thick skull and he wanted very much more than anybody ever has wanted a president did he wanted kennedy dead but he realized that he might get caught and labeled as the assassin of the american president and that could mean war between the us and the soviet union nuclear war he decided he didn't want nuclear war so with with a sense a real sense of unhappiness he changed and pulled in and pulled back and um krushaw basically dictated that and that was where things were heading when the decision was made by uh by oswald not to listen and not to obey anybody oswald turned around essentially after having been part of the group that was ordered to kill kennedy mike believes that i believe i believe that was clearly a decision by oswald to continue on and kill kennedy under a a vague overall charge from krishna you know it's it's uh uh i've spoken to folks who have interviewed about this topic one is jim jenkins who was one of the folks in the room who held jfk's brain after he was assassinated and he saw cuts incisions and he saw bullet wounds from the back so for him you know he has no there's no way he believes anything that happened from the front you know where from the where everyone claims it was oswald lots of people think it was cia because it was an inside job because lbj hated kennedy and you know he just wanted him gone because lbj always was more aspirational wanting to be a president than than kennedy was and he couldn't stand a family he would always say i want those irish men out of there and you know i want to go in there and be the president and he was aspirational to want to be president lbj and we all know what happened when john f kennedy went up to him saying i want you to be my vp it was not the easiest conversation so but i i i don't think lbj was aspirational enough to do what kershaw did uh the uh the key uh thing here is if one did look at the brain of kennedy's brain one saw something that only the autopsy people who worked with the treasury department medical folks uh saw which uh was that the there's whole books on the autopsy by the way but the thing that you want to pay attention to is the treasury department study that was done in order to look at the brain of kennedy once he had been shot and to see whether or not the way the blood flow and the soft tissue flowed was consistent with one type of approach toward uh being killed by a rifle versus another type and the treasury department study of this is new enough now that it hasn't been relied upon particularly by the autopsy the anti-autopsy people and the other people the other members of the 3000 people who wrote books about about kennedy the killing of kennedy was consistent with soft tissue being at the front end of the brain and consistent with the type of entry wound whereas i'll let you read all this in the treasury book because it's it's the one that has the detail in it but but the the other sort of texts of um information essentially came from killing with a shot that ended up going through the much harder surface of the brain rather than the soft under the skull tissue and um i think uh it's clear from what mike has has told uh us and what uh i think it's clear from the from what chapter saw and and passed on that the death of kennedy was consistent and highly consistent with a bullet coming from where the bullet finally was was said to uh enter uh kennedy's uh skull so if if lehigh lee harvey oswald did it why would ruby kill him afterwards like what what connection does ruby have to russia i mean what does ruby have to do because ruby's connection was to the mob yeah ruby's connection was to the mob and the mob uh ordered him uh through cuba uh because they had the driving responsibility uh for this uh uh they had standing in line they had people who were willing to kill kennedy they were ready to go and uh they were ready and willing to to take a action against kennedy and that required them to take uh action against uh lee harvey oswald uh because if oswald and oswald was still alive at that point remember that's after one day uh and uh oswald is uh at the uh in jail and uh and a famous photo of ruby shooting him in the stomach um but what uh what happened was that uh uh oswald uh gets uh uh killed uh by uh ruby in the jail as uh they pass by uh one another and uh ruby is killed because neither the mafia nor the castro want him nor the russians want him alive talking to anybody do you have is this speculation or do you have proof of this communication i think it's pretty clear i'll let uh i i'm i have stayed away in the book and i will stay away from words words like absolutely clear and and and so forth but i think both motivation and the uh geography of where people were uh point very clearly toward uh ruby uh killing uh oswald and having done so uh because the russians and the uh and the uh cubans uh didn't want uh uh him or anybody uh to know what he was what he was doing um you know are you a sports fan are you someone who likes sports i've i have gone both ways uh when the redskins were were here i went to almost every game um other sports i i tend toward baseball but that's gone on evil days as a result of the virus so as soon as baseball comes back in a sensible way i'll be out there in the stadium soon so you you know how a kid is raised in a family in boston and he grows up hating the yankees right and he's five years old sitting next to his daddy and he's just watching the oh my gosh that's a d you know what these yankees are con artists and a kid grows up 30 years later these yankees are con artisan and his kid and you know generationally they hate the yankees and it stays with them from a kid till later on even 70 years old they still hate the yankees magic till today when he hears about the celtics his body shivers because he can't stand the celtics because it was his number one enemy right and you go on and on and on and on and on how much of you you know knowing when you were coming up you know enemy the state number one was russia fast forward today how much of it has to do with you just despise russia where you think they would be capable of taking out kennedy because you had aspirations of kennedy because you're a conservative democrat and how much is it just logically you said you know what i just want to write a book about this because i'm certain lee harvey oswald was behind the assassination of kennedy none of the above um i uh went into the world of national security through uh interest and was developed when i was uh working on the reconnaissance satellite uh stuff for the pentagon uh that was two two two and a half years of basically technical research and understanding how the satellites work and so on um i i didn't feel an emotional uh requirement to do anything with the russians i as a matter of fact um when i negotiated the conventional forces in europe treaty back in the late 80s um i got along reasonably well with the russians they were uh uh not my favorites but uh i could get along with them and uh and and did what was the fabric of doing business with russians like what did you know they stood for dot dot dot here's what it was doing business with russians the thing that i found to be their saving grace in a sense was that they had a good sense of a lot of times they had good senses of humor i often look at people's senses of humor to make temporary judgments and um so on the whole had pretty good senses of humor my german friends in the negotiations uh didn't so much but my uh my russian acquaintances um i uh i could get along with um and uh in all of those cases the the best humor was certainly british i mean the brits just do that well um so um but i uh but i i did uh get along with the russians okay and uh i i neither sports nor that was really central to my uh decision making i i would do my best to have decisions come through in a way that let me have a lighthearted demeanor in dealing with the 27 countries that i had to deal with and uh i always tried to pay people compliments and so forth to keep things on an even keel so who told who told dirtier jokes british or the germans actually british or the russians this is a diplomatic uh core uh they were not not not good with dirty jokes although i think probably the the best ones uh would probably have been russian i can see that somehow i can say so were you a big reagan fan with him telling his sense of humor constantly telling jokes from stage well i didn't really know reagan i i i worked he was one of the four presidents i worked for uh and i enjoyed my one or two meetings with him but i i didn't know his personality or his personal style i was a the head of a negotiating team i was uh not a close confidant of the president last question for you before we wrap up if you were the enemy today okay say russia comes to you with a blank check they said james um we're going to give you a billion dollars china is going to give you a billion dollars iran's going to give you a billion dollars tell us what is the best way to attack america today what would you say it is excuse me i'll talk to you tomorrow and then i'll go right and say i'm going in to see a russian who's pitched me uh tomorrow um uh how do you want me to handle it i'll uh either play a game with them or i'll just say go to hell but uh if you want me to uh lead them astray let me know i respect that i respect that you know the the but but did you do you and you don't even have to answer this i'm just curious uh asking you this question would you know the best way to internally destroy america and if yes is it in the progress of that becoming a reality and we have to fight like hell to keep it or no the strategy you have no one's talking about it i think that uh the thing that would probably uh influence not me but uh but a potential person like who like ames decided to go with the russians because of money i think the thing that would most influence somebody like that uh would be his effort probably to please his wife and family and children and better just stack up money i mean if he can without people knowing about it if he could stack up tens of millions of dollars enough to lead a very wealthy life that would be the kind of person i think that would be most likely to uh to turn to the russians so the ideological folks who want to have a [Music] lee harvey oswald type life and climb onto the ladder of the arriving aircraft coming back to moscow and getting cheers and everybody loving them that that set of motivations um i think can be pretty hard for folks to come to now if only because it's hard to find people who are going to make decisions based on something like that because they're afraid to get caught but i don't think there are that many americans that would go [Music] the route of of uh uh leaning on the the the russians for the future there might be a few that would lean on uh a russian ideology as well has happened over history with a range of uh of people that took mainly payment in in affection and and uh uh and desire like uh uh like oswald so uh i don't know um i i think it might be more likely to uh find a chinese who was willing to do that because i think their numbers are so huge that the possibility they would come across someone who was willing to take either funds or uh uh ideology in a sense uh as their payment uh it could be a pretty substantial number of people i don't know if the chinese would because the chinese even if they pay you and you turned against them the government would take out your family's life they would the fear of taking out your life americans if you turn against the country the government's not coming out of your family because the government would still keep your family intact china they if you cross the country the country's above the individual and america at least gives you a little bit protection of the individual that even if you cross the line so that's why i think it'd be easier to turn against america than it would be to turn against china again i'm just a business guy i'm just speculating but uh uh you know i'm not the one that's the director of cia here i'm the one that's interviewing the director of cia so i uh okay you uh this country is in spite of our recent chaos is uh uh i think on balance uh pretty likely to go to the fbi um compared to to most uh i agree institutions and groups i i i totally you know i asked the question from you only because when i sit there and i strategize with my board or my executives and i ask you know the question comes up about if we were our own enemy and number one competitor how would we try to hurt us you have to think about that you have to ask that question because you learned that way i asked that question because i would hope you know and i would assume this is happening the folks in charge of the cia the whatever organizations that are out there that are trying to protect the country they ask the question if the enemy wanted to take out america how would you go about doing it you know what would that strategy be because that would be what i would be spending my time having almost like a blanket insurance policy around it to make sure that never happened and how i go about doing that would be you know the right execution i'll tell you one because i got clearance from the cia because i was writing an op-ed um some months ago i got clearance from them to write this up and have it published so i've got to say i think it would be pretty effective which is to put um into a early old division uh electromagnetic pulse warhead a emp warhead that could be detonated at a low level that could be detonated um with um a device that uh was a simple one like pretty much like the the nuclear device that was exploded that we used to hiroshima and nagasaki first time that was brought up was by newt gingrich by the way in the 2011 or 2012 debate when he brought up the emp and i was like what the hell is an emp it had been around for a while but no one when they ask what's the biggest threat everybody gave the general answer and then newt ginker shocked the whole world then everybody started googling emp yeah yeah no that's right that's right uh he and i've been on panels together and stuff right about this but the bottom line is just detonate a low yield nuclear uh device and you want to do it up at least let's say a mile or two you could probably still have an effect if you detonated it up several miles and it would um take out pretty much uh all of the electromagnetic devices including the the um the uh you know what am i thinking of uh the phone towers the servers the internet the electricity yeah all of those uh but also the electric grid if you may have mentioned it that takes everything uh within limits uh and so being able to detonate an emp is potentially devastating uh hopefully everyone's gonna play nice you know hopefully everyone's gonna play nice and hopefully everyone's rather than thinking about attacking each other they're playing a nice game of solitary or backgammon or spades or dominoes or whatever their choice and preferences of playing a game but knowing when you're competing in the game of power unfortunately they're spending more time thinking about tactics and strategies of protecting themselves against the war then worried about who's going to get the highest score on backgammon or solitary so maybe what we have to do is instead of sending that emp we send the biggest distraction of video games you know movies shows to distract the hell out of these leaders so they're consuming more entertainment than you know going out there thinking about attacking each other who knows maybe i watch too much cartoons with my kids and my mind is going into cartoon strategies than actually real life strategies you realize that uh uh we're being saved from the evil cartoons um by uh um just as of yesterday uh they're taking uh the um uh bugs bunny i saw that uh taking um uh half a dozen of the key characters because we're doing the evil thing by watching them with our kids sometimes you know the old dr seuss and pierce morgan yesterday got cancelled as a conservative democrat what do you think about the cancel culture absolutely idiotic really so you don't you don't agree with the fact that we cancel what people say that could potentially hurt someone else's feelings that that's right my response to that when i hear it is almost always get a life i appreciate that yeah it's uh it's definitely one of the scariest thing that's happening because it's the ultimate muzzle you know i left iran living in a country with a big muscle where you can't even think negative thoughts about the country and then you come to america that handcuff shackles and muzzles back on just in a different way and you can only listen to one way of thinking not the other way so who knows what's going to happen uh look i got to tell you i enjoyed it i uh uh got smarter i learned more uh of whether if i ever get the call to want to be the director of cia to turn it down indefinitely and you know stick to what i'm doing for living and for everybody that's watching this uh uh james we're gonna put the link to your book below that folks can go order specifically those of you that are very very curious about the jfk assassination highly recommend you go get the book and read it for yourself and if you agree or disagree tell us about it but with that being said once again sir thank you so much for making the time for being a guest on valuetainment many thanks appreciate it very much great interview appreciate you thank you so many different versions of the jfk assassination story what was your biggest takeaway and as well as what it meant to be a director of ci any of the strategies when he and i talked about as a conservative democrat how he viewed different topics i just want to hear your thoughts and if you enjoyed this interview i think i think i think you'll enjoy a short clip of a interview i did with jim jenkins who was in the autopsy room one of only four people who held john f kennedy's brain and this is what he saw in the autopsy room watch this short clip something tells me after you watch this short clip you're going to want to watch the entire interview thank you everybody bye

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 902,365

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, lisa mccubbin, five presidents book review, five presidents book, jacqueline kennedy secret service, zapruder film rare new, clint hill jfk, best clint hill interview, CIA, James Woosley, Russia, Cold war, Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America

Id: ZDutkudUdvg

Length: 73min 10sec (4390 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021