Joe Rogan Discusses JFK Assassination with Former CIA Officer

Hello freak bitches. So speaking of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles and Conspiracies, last night I rewatched the episode of Geraldo Rivera's Good Night America when they introduced the Zapruder, because you know Dick Gregory just died. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They introduced this Zapruder film to the American public 13 years or 12 years, 12 years after Kennedy's assassination and then I went and read that paper, the articles that was printed a couple of weeks ago that you even tweeted about it, about the CIA questioning the official story of the JFK assassination. Yeah, that was interesting wasn't it? Yeah, Zapruder film. As a CIA guy, what do you think about that? Well, first of all that Zapruder film, that's the most watched piece of film in history of film. Is it really? Which is really interesting. But yeah, it was interesting that the, you know, as typical with a lot of these things that the headline doesn't necessarily actually match once you get into the body of the story, but the idea being that the agency had some concerns over the idea that perhaps Cuba was behind the assassination or the Russians to some degree or more likely in a combination of the two. Look, I think, you know, do I think that he could have taken that shot? Yeah, it was not, yeah, it was not, I said I've been up in that book depository from that point of advantage point. We did a story on the whole issue, the conspiracy theory and what could have happened and we tried to find some new witnesses and, you know, could he have made that shot? Yeah, that was a, that was, it was a straightforward, you know, effort for someone who had some training. He was, you know, he wasn't the world's best shot, but he had sufficient training to make that shot. Now, that's separate from, you know, his motivations and any potential support that he may have gotten during the course of that and, you know, I think that he, in his mind, he genuinely felt that this was going to get him into the revolution, right? That this was going to, he had a very unhappy experience in Russia when he was over there living, came back, saw what was happening in Cuba, desperately wanted to be part of that, took an unexplained trip down to Mexico, which could well have been in an effort to find somebody who could support his desire to take some sort of action, whether he had formed in his mind, that's what he was going to do at the time or not. So, you know, is there still a possibility that the Cubans, which would, the Intel service there, would have had the file on him. I mean, it's a very, very well-known quantity, obviously, by that time for the Russians. The Russians are solely responsible for training up the Cuban Intel service, so there's a massive file on him and they knew, you know, who they were dealing with. They knew his weaknesses. They knew his, they knew his motivations. They knew what to do in terms of trying to get leverageable, you know, information on him. So, I think that the jury's still out. I'm not, and I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I think there's enough there that says, you know, yes, it's kind of like what we're talking about with climate change. I believe this, but this is all, this also could be true. So, I think he could have taken that shot, for sure, and succeeded. I think it's also possible that he may have had the encouragement of, in particular, the Cuban Intel service through the Russians. Because at that time, in particular, they didn't do anything, the Cubans didn't do anything without the Russians' support, blessings, and direction. So, that is entirely possible. Do I think that there were a variety of other things at play, you know, was, did they help him get the weapon? Did they, I mean, you know, was there actual logistical support in there? I don't think so, but maybe, yeah, it's a fascinating thing. And, you know, again, nobody wants to think that something that impactful could have been just one guy who, you know, had a dream about being a hero of the revolution. They just, it's such an awful thing to think about. You want something bigger. You want something more behind it. And it's, I will say, the one thing that I think there was something else too was the MLK issue of Martin Luther King assassination. Well, let's get to that for sure. But here's the thing about the Lee Harvey Oswald assassination. You know, a lot of people think that there was people in the grassy knoll and that they shot at the president and there was more than one shooter. That's possible too. And here's the other problem with people saying that Oswald could have never made that shot. Of course he could have. A hundred percent he could have. Is it likely? Listen, people throw three-point shots that have no fucking business on a basketball court and they hit nothing but net. It happens all the time. It doesn't mean it's not likely that a guy could get off three shots that quick, but it is possible. There was more time in there than they originally thought. There's some misinformation out there about how condensed that time frame was and now after they've, you know, researched this into a fairly well, that time frame extended a little bit. But he had, more importantly, he worked up there. So he had the opportunity to rekey that site. Right. So he, it was like he was sitting in a blind waiting and figuring out, you know, what am I going to be doing here? And that's a tremendous advantage and clear daylight targets moving right in the line with you. There's no wind. Not only that, it's not that far a shot. No, it's not. It's not like everybody thinks it's like, you know, half-mile away or something like that. I mean, how far was it? Was 150 yards or something like that? Yeah, I'd have to go back and it's been a while now. But I've stood on that spot where the limo was and hooked up at the site and stood up there. Not that far. Look down and it's not that far. It's a total makeable shot on a deer. Yeah. Like if you were going to shoot a deer with a rifle, you'd be like, oh yeah, that's definitely in my effective range. Yeah, no, there was no, how far is it? There we go. 265 feet, 81 meters. That ain't shit. Yeah. That's a bow shot. Yeah. You could shoot an animal with a bow from 80 meters if you're really good and there's no wind. Yeah. So that's a really close shot. So the idea that he couldn't make that shot, he's a bad shot, that is so fucking stupid. He absolutely could make that shot. Anybody could make that shot from 81 meters. That's nothing. We looked at the grassy knoll issue. We looked at what the train yard engineer reported seeing with a sort of a puff of smoke that he thought he saw over by the fence line. And we looked and he thought, yeah, you could, you know, from that position, they opened that place up and we were able to go back up there and you could see it. We ran a couple of tests and fired off a few shots and that's always fun. If you want to have a good time, take a rifle to Dealey Plaza and fire off a few shots without the tourists knowing what the hell is happening. And the Dallas police, by the way, were tremendous during the course of that. But, um, when did you guys do this? We did this a while back for a show called America Declassified, which isn't running anymore. Um, but it was on, uh, on a travel channel. Jesse Ventura did that. He went up there with a man linker, carcano, same rifle. And I was like, this is an impossible shot. No one could make the shot. Can't be done. I love Jesse. I think he's awesome. But I'm like, he wants everything to be a conspiracy. Right. Right. He's significantly on that side to the point where, you know, that's, he's leaning always towards a conspiracy. What you want to do is you want to do every investigation. I, you know, this company that I've got, we, we do a lot of investigations and we, and you've got a bill just like with a homicide case or anything else, you've got to build it on stable ground, right? Right. So you have to start from, you know, the very basics, because if you start building ideas and investigative inquiries on something that's not sturdy underneath it, you know, not based on evidence and fact, then you got a problem. The whole thing becomes suspect and usually comes toppling down. So, you know, I, you got to keep an open mind about all these things. And I think it's important. Um, right now people are going, well, I'm sure that agency, the CIA was involved. So I'm a terrible source of information. I've heard that before. So you can't talk credibly about this because, you know, the CIA was involved. But here's the thing. If the CIA was involved, it's not you, you weren't there in 1962. Last time I checked, I was not there in 1962. And, uh, and also I will tell you this much. Or was it 63? It was 63. If the agency had been involved, this is the honest to God's truth. There's no way that secret is still kept. People can't keep their yap shot. They can't. And secrets have a way of coming out and certainly a lot quicker now than they used to. So now, the secrets then, I mean, we're talking about so long ago, how much we're talking about more than 50 years ago, like, it's like, you know, it's like, get out. It's like the DB Cooper issue. My biggest reason for believing DB Cooper died and his shoot is hanging off a tree. And that's a vast wilderness up there. Yeah. Is, uh, is that people just, they can't help themselves. At some point people talk or somebody talks, somebody associated with her, someone nearby or somebody involved or somebody on their death bed or somebody says something they shouldn't have. Um, it's, you know, the idea that they've maintained this sort of secret over a period of time, I find hard to believe. I'm not discounting it. And again, you've got to leave a little space open for something that could be just amazing. But, you know, anyway, so that's, that was that. But I, yeah, I agree. That shot was not, uh, was not a tough shot. 81 meters ain't shit. That's nothing. And particularly in those conditions. And I will say those conditions were ideal, unfortunately for that event. But people are like, there's a video of me shooting a fucking hard drive at a hundred yards, a hard drive. You must have hated that hard drive. On the edge. Oh, we were just getting rid of some hard drives. Thought it'd be fun to take it to the rifle range. So I take it to the rifle and obviously we're dealing with modern rifles are probably more accurate, but I'm shooting something that's basically two inches high, laying it down on the ground at a hundred yards and blowing it to smithereens. That's how accurate a rifle is at a hundred yards. You tell me he couldn't get a head shot at 81 meters. That's crazy. Again, no wind. Of course he could. Good light. Did he though? Who did he? That's right. And also the question is, you know, um, we have some pretty good indications as to what he was thinking and what is obviously what his motivations were. And that's important. Well, he definitely was in with the Russians. He definitely was involved in a lot of weird shit with communism. Who knows what his entire full background was? There was a lot of covert shit going on. And did he, did he express a desire to do something like this to the Russians at some point? And they, you know, that, okay, well here's an interesting opportunity. Well, yeah, they would have, they would have sparked on that and they would have thought about it. They, you know, would they have actually, you know, no, no play on what's intended, but would they have pulled the trigger on an operation trying to push him into doing an act like this? Maybe. Indirectly through the Cubans. Exactly. Especially if they thought like this crazy fuck might go ahead and do this for us. Yeah. Yeah. So this is after the Bay of Pigs. People have to realize there was a lot of people pissed off at Kennedy. We lost a lot of people. We should have hated everybody. Khrushchev hated Kennedy. Yeah. And so. Well, that infamous video where he's banging his shoes down on the table, we will bury you. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was, it was, the environment was right for them. And they, and again, the Russians, it shouldn't be any surprise to anybody when you talk about what they did during this election. I mean, they've been doing this forever. Right. You know, they've been, you go back to 1940s and the Russians were, you know, spending a lot of time and effort and money here in the States trying to keep us out of the war back before Hitler invaded Russia and when they were allied with the Nazis still. So they spent a lot of time, they set up, you know, independent associations supposedly. They paid off a lot of unions and union members. They, you know, journalists, I mean, they were doing everything they could to create this or to strengthen the idea of isolationism just to keep us out. They've been doing this for as long as they've been around. Right. So anybody who says, I can't, you know, it's shocking the Russians would be engaged in this. It's ridiculous. They've always been engaged. And we, by the way, have been engaged doing that with them. What? That's what I hear. I've heard that online. I find that. Alex Jonestorm. Hard to believe. You know, the thing that bothers me the most about the Kennedy assassination is the universal support for the magic bullet theory. I think that fucking bullet is ridiculous. I've shot things. I've shot a lot of things. I know what happens to bullets. Everybody that I know, that's a marksman, everybody know that's a hunter, they see a bullet that is hit bone. It fucking never looks like that. When a bullet goes through two people and comes out looking like you shot it into a pool of water. That's what it looks like. I don't buy that at all. And the convenience of finding it on Connelly's gurney when they roll them into the hospital. Oh, look guys, we found the bullet and it's perfect. I don't buy that for a fucking second. And the problem is there's more metal fragments in Connelly's body than we're missing from the bullet itself. I think that bullet itself, look at that bullet. Get the fuck out of here. That thing didn't hit shit. No, it's exactly right. I've argued with people that have never shot guns and they've actually proven that they broke bones. When a bullet breaks bones, they get fucked. Well, it's a jacketed bullet. When it's a jacketed bullet, breaks bones, it gets fucked. You're talking about something that's going, I mean, how fast is a bullet from that rifle go? It's got to be. That would be an interesting thing to pull up. I would imagine it's in the thousands of feet per second. It's got to be. When it hits bone, it's just going to blow all over the fucking place. But the point being is there's always distortion, even if you're, I mean, so I, I don't buy that bullet. When you have a conversation about this and it is somebody who has no shooting experience or it's just, you think, all right, that's fine. I understand why you're fascinated by it, but when you do your research, it's like with news, read everything. Right. Read the Wall Street Journal, read the New York Times, read the Financial Times, read the Economist, but read everything before you form your opinion. And everybody's so siloed nowadays and you get the same thing with conspiracy theories. I absolutely believe this and I'm not going to, I'm going to discount everything else that's out there and, or just not pay any attention to it. Yeah, but. It's hard to say. And here's another thing. The magic bullet path. People are like, well, how is that possible? Well, let me tell you something. That's the most believable thing about the magic bullet theory is the path of the bullet. Because bullets do wacky shit when they hit bone and you can't predict it at all. I know a guy who in Iraq, they shot a guy in the head from the front and it went out his eyeball. The bullet came out of his eyeball back forward. It ricocheted inside of his skull and came out his eye. Yeah. I mean, again, you can't, you're right, you can't predict it. That's right. Model these things and figure out. But, you know, there's an unknown there. And so, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that, again, it's one of those things where it's never going to get resolved and it's going to continue to live on because, A, it was such an important event in the history of the country. And B, I keep coming back to that same thing. People don't want to believe that really awful shit can happen sometimes in a very simple, straightforward way. And so, it's much easier to think it was a broad based conspiracy. There were lots of moving parts. Sometimes bad shit happens and it's just as simple as it seems. That is possible. Conversely, people don't like to believe in conspiracies, especially when it's involved in an assassination of a president. You know, the reason why they came up with the whole magic bullet theory in the first place is pretty shady. In fact, the reason why they did is because a guy got hit by a ricochet underneath the overpass and they blamed that bullet on one of the shots from Lee Harvey Oswald in the book depository. So they said, well, all right, so now we have less bullets that could have hit Kennedy. We have all these wounds and we have to tribute a series of wounds to one bullet. Right. So that was the thought process behind it. But the Zapruder film was the one that got people weirded out by it. But I'll tell you about it, man, I've watched that film a bunch of times. And one of the things that don't jive is if he did get hit from the front, you know, his head goes back to the left, why is the blood spray out forward? See, it's weird the way the impact of the blood is. It's like the blood sprays forward and then his head goes back into the left. It could have possibly been that he was hit from the front and the back at the same time. That's entirely possible. I mean, that is a tactic you would do, right? You would roll someone into an area where they would be in a crossfire and they would get shot from both sides. Well, if they came in, if there was, if the grassy knoll was in fact a second sight for a shooter, then by the time it hits that corner and starts its path just before the shots were fired from the book depository in Oswald, if you're going with that, if you had another shooter up on the grass, you know, you're basically looking right at the front of the vehicle. And because of the way that its position in the knolls kind of turned and then it's just that there's not a lot of concealment up there. Right. And they had the fence, the picket fence. It's not the original one that's there anymore, but it's basically in line with it. And you can, there's plenty of pictures of the previous fence that was up there at the time. And you did have the train yard engineer report sometime after the fact that he saw a puff of smoke, that he wasn't quite sure what that was all about. And he'd seen a couple of people back there. So that, you know, that was, that's an interesting thread to pull on. Right. And I think that that it's been, you know, it's been researched ad nauseam doesn't mean you couldn't still find something. It also doesn't mean anybody's going to really find a conclusion after the fact. Right. Especially today. Yeah. No, and that's right. And you know, it's like everything else is time marches on. You lose, you know, you lose witnesses, you lose, you know, people that were there on site. And even witnesses when someone gets shot, especially with the president, not credible, you'll have five different stories from five different people and gunshots heard from the moon. Nobody knows what the fuck's up from a robbery, just, you know, a car accident. You say, what did you see if you separate people out? You're right. You get five different versions from five different people. And, you know, so yeah, I was in the, I witnessed accounts that tend not to be particularly credible and you've got to, you know, you, you, you got to take them and then you've got to, you know, match it up with other information you can, you can pull together forensically. But it's, it is fascinating.