BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, and then to hide them inside an operation which I think already existed in one way or another, called ZR/Rifle, where you could tell everybody: what we're doing is we're rifling through foreign embassies' desks and going to, you know, to look for codes and ciphers.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, I hear you.
BILL SIMPICH: And it was like the perfect internal way to not let other people in the know, even if they worked in close proximity with you.
ALAN DALE: So I'm always curious about the extent to which we can say anything with certainty about the relationship between Bill Harvey and Angleton; whether Angleton had any kind of operational authority over Harvey, specifically with regard to Staff D, and specifically with regard to ZR/Rifle, which we always sort of loosely refer to as being a 'vest-pocket operation'.
BILL SIMPICH: Well they were both - I think they were both GSA teams, which puts them at the top of the heap in terms of power and prestige. And Harvey had Angleton's job before Angleton did, so I think they were equals, and the question that I would pose – I'd put it a slightly different way: Were they in the same circles or not during the critical last two months of Kennedy's life, specifically in the Mexico City arena? Because it's my theory that – and I lay it out at the end of the book – that I wound up disagreeing with John Newman in an affable way. I could be right, or he could be right, or somebody else could be right, but I think the way it went down is that Harvey's circle out-maneuvered Angleton's circle.
ALAN DALE: I hear what you're saying, yeah.
BILL SIMPICH: I believe that Angleton set up the molehunt in a response to what Harvey's circle had done in terms of setting up the impersonation, and that that was bait itself to trap Angleton and his friends from being able to do any kind of effective investigation after Harvey's pals killed the President of the United States.
ALAN DALE: And chief maybe among the figures that we would associate as being a part of Harvey's circle would be David Sanchez Morales…
BILL SIMPICH: Right.
ALAN DALE: …who was an extraordinary guy in a number of different ways; in terms of his abilities, and his authority, and his experience.
BILL SIMPICH: And his confession, because, you know, Peter Dale Scott isn't convinced it is an admission of guilt, but I am. I affably disagree with Peter on that point: I think that he gave it up in a night of drunkenness to his lawyer and you’re generally allowed to say anything you wanted to say to your lawyer. His lawyer spilled the beans after he died, and so did other people in the room, like his best friend, Carbajal. He said: "Yeah, that's what he said." Carbajal has danced around a bit. I think Carbajal 's basically kind of given up David. And David's friend Tony Sforza as being people who were delighted to see the President's death and wouldn't have been surprised to have known they were in on the hit.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, the Carbajal stuff I think is well documented in David Talbot's wonderful book 'Brothers', and I know you referred to the work that he's engaged in right now: he's working on something that he intends to call "The Devil's Chessboard' and the focus there, really he's gone from the minutiae of the level of whatever we might conclude about David Morales; he's focusing instead on Allen Dulles and Dulles's maintaining more authority, certainly than I realized that he had, after he was allowed to sort of leave his position in the CIA; was given an accommodation by President Kennedy for the great service that he had given to his nation, and then according to David Talbot still maintained a lot of influence and was, you know, somebody who was still engaged, even after John McCone was brought in from wherever John McCone came.
BILL SIMPICH: Well between Allen and his brother, John Foster Dulles, they basically controlled large parts of the world for many years…
ALAN DALE: Yeah, oh, I know, I know.
BILL SIMPICH:…through Allen Dulles' law firm in New York. These two people had just incredible power, not just prestige.
ALAN DALE: I'll say. I don't want to blow past – I realize it's getting late really for us, but there are a couple of things that I definitely want to refer to. One is we know – we have reason to be fairly confident that there was something that happened in Chicago, or perhaps it would be best to say something that didn't happen, and I'm referring to this picking up of a guy named Thomas Arthur Vallee, who was a kind of a well-cast sort of a loner, pseudo-potential assassin kind of guy; picked up with lots of ammunition and weapons; had a job in downtown Chicago – this right before a planned trip of JFK's – and had a job, you know, where he would have had access if there was a motorcade and things like that, and he's picked up ostensibly because the Secret Service in Chicago has received a warning to the effect that there's a four-man hit team that's going to kill President Kennedy. Can you tell me a little bit about the Secret Service and that particular episode?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, it's a shameful story at the end of the day; in just a few words, the Secret Service picked up two men of a four – apparent four-man shooting team, let those two men go, didn't go after the other two men, left no records about any of these four men, and had this other guy arrested, who basically knew nothing, and I think was a patsy just like Oswald was.
ALAN DALE: Seemed like a simpleton.
BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, he was a bit of a simpleton, with a military background and a bit of a gun nut. And then if I can carry on for a moment here, you see a similar pattern in JFK's – one of his very next stops, which was in Tampa, you see, and a guy with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a guy named Gilberto Lopez, is in place, waiting for his call to go back to Cuba, in the very moments that JFK is doing a motorcade in Tampa, where everybody's very nervous because there's been death threats. And then this whole thing is repeated yet again in Miami…
ALAN DALE: Yeah!
BILL SIMPICH: …the next day, where this fella named Milteer, a southern racist who's, you know, hosting Cuban exiles at his hard-core right-wing conferences is saying, you know: "He's going to be shot from a window with a high-powered rifle and then somebody who doesn't know anything – some nut – is going to get picked up for it", and then after it's over he brags to the same informant: "See, it went just like I said it would." And to top it off, one thing that is in my book, about Miami, is that a fellow who worked for the State Department, who was a double agent; a guy named Santiago Garriga had just set up FPCC in Miami at the behest – and who's watching him closer than anybody else? Harvey's people. The gal who ran Staff D with Harvey.
ALAN DALE: Potocki.
BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, Anita Potocki. She's tracking this guy like white on rice. And who does this guy call the day of the assassination? He calls for Sylvia Duran, and he speaks to Sylvia Duran, and he's looking for a double agent named Apparicio inside the Cuban Consulate…
ALAN DALE: Right, that's a whole…
BILL SIMPICH: …who’s his handler, which is a whole other story.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, I'll say.
BILL SIMPICH: This is the milieu of the Kennedy assassination; it's spook city, and Oswald was basically being babysat by people who weren't able to join spook city, but were known well enough to spook city to be treated as left-wing intellectuals that could be trusted to not cause a lot of trouble.
ALAN DALE: We've heard – this is sort of a little bit out of left field, but I'm certainly very affected by your work, and listening to what you're saying, do we think that – you know, ultimately I think Angleton was forced to resign because of a domestic operation, when CIA theoretically is not supposed to do stuff, he was doing a – you know; intelligence gathering.
BILL SIMPICH: Chaos.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, right. Do we think that the signals intelligence apparatus is something that could have been utilized for instance to learn, to gain intelligence information about the attitudes of members of the Secret Service?
BILL SIMPICH: Secret Service? That's exactly what I think did happen. Near the end of the book - I've got more material on it now - you see Harvey's people all hunkered down around the Secret Service people in 1962, around one of Bobby's friends in particular, a guy named Aragon in Miami, who – and they just inhaled everything that he had to say about presidential protection, and they took more action in that line, and more action on that line. And then it got to a point – you know, it got to a point where Aragon’s colleague, a guy named John Marshall, finally turned to the HSCA and said: "I think the Secret Service was in on the hit." That's very, very, very strong language.
ALAN DALE: Yeah.
BILL SIMPICH: And when you couple that with the fine work of Vince Palamara, who has established, I think beyond any question of a doubt, that Secret Service men were pulled off the running boards on the Dallas ride that day, and couple that with all the other security breakdowns, up to and including the fake Secret Service being reported by police officers as being on the Grassy Knoll that day and I say that – that they were fake - because the police officers reported being handed Secret Service credentials, and the Secret Service denied over and over again that any such thing occurred; that any of their people were located there, so, you know.
And then Bolden reports that the Secret Service people immediately changed their identification protocols, probably because their protocols had been compromised. And then the Secret Service destroys all of its records for that era between September and November '63 when called to produce it by the Assassination Records Board…I mean, you follow that line of evidence a few more lines and you got - not only are these people covering up, but they're covering up because they got penetrated.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, it's plausible.
BILL SIMPICH: We're not saying that all the Secret Service is corrupt…
ALAN DALE: Of course not.
BILL SIMPICH: …a couple of bad apples.
ALAN DALE: And certainly not someone like Clint Hill, or probably John Ready or those guys that were profoundly affected for the rest of their lives.
BILL SIMPICH: Right, but you look at the guys like Greer and Kellerman.
ALAN DALE: Yes, I know.
BILL SIMPICH: And Greer in particular, because he was the driver, who brought the car to almost a complete stop while the firing was going on, and whose family made no secret of the antipathy between Greer and the Kennedy family. You know, Greer was a Northern Irish guy and didn't like him. Anyway, all I'm saying is, there's a lot of stories there, and the Secret Service, I think, is at this point, I think, probably the most important place for people to put their research energy. And I say that as somebody who wrote a book, really not for the public so much at this juncture than for the researchers, because the researchers deserve to have this material: worked long and hard for it, and we should be spending more time building our evidentiary base before we try to convince the public of any new fork in the road in the ongoing resolution to bringing this case to rest.
ALAN DALE: Well we're approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Warren Commission Report, and I think it is time for us to get a little more aggressive in terms of really just promoting some of the work that is already done, and maybe becoming a little more serious; trying to get…
BILL SIMPICH: I feel…
ALAN DALE: Go ahead, go ahead.
BILL SIMPICH: I feel that you're quite right in that the forensic abilities of the American people, if you will, to understand forensic evidence has really just, you know, really gone way way way up, thanks to television.
ALAN DALE: Right.
BILL SIMPICH: I mean television is the great teacher, and notions of the chain of custody and the importance of sampling and testing; all that stuff that was esoteric to people just a few years ago, it's now just commonplace. And I think that's really where this case is going to take a big turn in terms of the people is that real simple evidence like the magic bullet; it's supposed to have the initials of the Secret Service chief on it, and those initials are not there. To me that's proof positive that the evidence has been switched up.
ALAN DALE: I'm very interested in that area. I was never drawn to it much, believe it or not, until Sherry Fiester published a book called 'Enemy of the Truth: Myths, Forensics and the Kennedy Assassination'. And, you know, she and I had a conversation; we discussed exactly what you've just referred to: that average Americans now for at least twenty years, I think, have been exposed to this whole CSI thing, and ostensibly that's really what even, you know, Perry Mason and all kinds of shows were always about; it's just it was never – you know, the science hadn't caught up to some of these issues, certainly not to the extent that they have now, especially during the first decade of the 21st century in terms of high-speed photography, and much more information that's peer-reviewed about, you know, head wound ballistics and skull fracturing and things like that; all kinds of stuff that I was never interested much in because I was confronted by the inevitable problem that we each are, which is that in areas where we have no expertise, and experts disagree, we're at a disadvantage.
BILL SIMPICH: That's why Perry Mason's so valuable as an object study. Perry Mason was always based – I just saw it again recently; first time in many years. I was really struck by how simply they told the story of deception. People love - I love stories about deception; many other people do as well because it's exciting. And that's where – you know, one of the things that – animals use deception to – you know, when they're hunting and humans, fortunately or unfortunately, are no different and, you know, when we're hunting for the truth; when we're hunting for justice, you know, it's a very powerful tool to be well-versed in, 'cos that's where – you know, everybody has a kind of a love of a good yarn that's easily understood, and stories about deception are exciting and easily understood.
ALAN DALE: Well this whole thing, I mean this whole extraordinary story is kind of an ultimate campfire story that has so many different layers and compartments and attributes and aspects that, any one of which you could launch a thousand stories from them, you know.
BILL SIMPICH: That's what makes it so satisfying, I think, to do this kind of work. Not just in the JFK case, which is very exciting in and of itself, but in other cases where, you know, there's been assassinations, or provocations that have led to the change of government or to wars. All these types of subjects are really important to study, because if we're going to evolve as a species we have to know how to respond when a sudden shock enters our lives and threatens its foundations. How do we respond in an intelligent way?
ALAN DALE: That's the Deep Politics!
BILL SIMPICH: It is.
ALAN DALE: Bill, I suppose we should close, but I could talk to you for hours and I'm hopeful I'll have the opportunity to continue to do so periodically. Is there anything else really that we should touch upon before the observable anniversary that's upcoming of the publication? I know you're an advocate for finding – you state in the conclusion of 'State Secret' that there are people; elderly people – I know Jeff Morley has been engaged in trying to speak to as many as he's been able to interview - who may have been affiliated with, you know, the CIA or National Security Agency or the State Department or other involved or, you know, areas of interest to us. Where do you think we should expend out focus right now in – at this particular stage, and to what extent should we be especially focused on the fact that JM/Wave had its own office in Mexico City, which I find truly astonishing?
BILL SIMPICH: Well look, let me kinda take it from that point and go backwards. On the JM/Wave being in Mexico City, to me, is one of the surest points that JM/Wave was involved in the Mexico City shenanigans. And I say it's particularly important because you see how JM/Wave was cut out of the most important communications in Mexico City, and I think it was because Mexico City had a molehunt and they were afraid it was coming out of Miami; that the interloper was coming out of Miami. So I think the more study we do of Miami, not just Mexico City, the smarter we're going to be in terms of the history of the Kennedy assassination.
In terms of the direction we should be going in, I'm hoping to offer a presentation in the next couple of months about the key items of evidence that have either been planted, or simply don't cohere with reality, and I'm looking at the shells from the shooting as well as the magic bullet itself and the wallet. And I want to offer them as a very tight presentation, that can be used to shift the dialog away from conspiracy, which is a word I don't like, and into what I consider is best described as the frame-up of Oswald, and how we can turn the focus onto the right people, such as Westbrook; such as Harvey's pals, whether or not Harvey was actually involved himself. And I think the way to do that is – I think Jeff Morley's convinced me – there's many documents that have been withheld, and many documents that haven't been analyzed, and many documents that should be added to the heap, and many redactions that should be unredacted.
But what we should be focusing on is those 1,100 documents which may contain thousands of pages in each one, that have been withheld till 2017. And if we don't fight for those particular documents, they could be withheld by the CIA and the President well into the future. And I think this should be, you know, this has got to be the emphasis of an ongoing campaign, up to and including 2017 And these documents include operational files of Bill Harvey, David Phillips…
ALAN DALE: Yes. Yes.
BILL SIMPICH: … several other people of great importance - Johannides - to this case. And then we can look for another marker after that and go forward from there. But I think Jeff is correct; he spent many years thinking about it and I think his analysis - after years, he's convinced me it's the sharpest and biggest bullseye to be aiming for.
ALAN DALE: I'm with you, I'm with you. I want to thank you so much for being with us, but before I conclude I really must refer to one quick thing, and really it's just your personal take on it, very briefly. You and I have talked quite a bit about an extraordinary book that was one of the very influential books – earliest days for me of becoming focused on some of these areas; David Martin's essential book 'Wilderness of Mirrors'. It was the first time that I was really introduced to William King Harvey; it gave me more on James Angleton than I had had up until that point; I'm sure lots of people feel the same. When you learned that David Phillips, we think – we have reason to feel fairly confident that we think David Phillips was the person responsible for referring David Martin to David Morales. Lots of Davids!
BILL SIMPICH: Morales.
ALAN DALE: What did you make of that? Doesn't that imply – and we realize that we, you know, somebody – we're talking about David Phillips; we're talking about somebody who – one of his wives - said: "He lies in his sleep." But is – what's your initial take on it? Do you think that that could possibly have been evidence of Phillips actually having been out of the loop with regard to the utilization of whatever the Oswald stuff was that he may have touched upon – we think he certainly did – but that Phillips himself, who's a very popular, you know, sinister figure among a lot of assassination researchers – he's a suspect, but doesn't that sort of imply that it's at least possible that he felt that probably Morales was someone close to the actual assassination, and that he was doing what little he could to try to focus attention maybe in the right direction?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, it's crazy, when you think about it. Why in the world would he point them towards Morales, who valued his privacy much more than most of these guys, and with good reason, because he was a hired killer? Why would Phillips do that unless he had some kind of antipathy with Morales? And then to – to kind of, you know, circle around a couple of years later; around the time actually that Morales died: I've got a book where Phillips makes Morales like the action hero of the book. By name: David Morales. So, one part I think – all I can come up with, and this is conjecture, but informed conjecture - I think Phillips was angry about something and he outed Morales, maybe it was about the assassination or maybe not, but he was angry about something and then, it seems also apparent that he was trying to make up to Morales in some way, and that's why he put him in the book.
ALAN DALE: Interesting.
BILL SIMPICH: That's as far as I can take it, but it's quite extraordinary and I betcha Phillips was delighted when Morales was dead.
ALAN DALE: [laughs]
BILL SIMPICH: 'Cos he was f’ng relieved.
ALAN DALE: He could take a deep breath [laughs].
BILL SIMPICH: Right.
ALAN DALE: That's right, yeah.
BILL SIMPICH: If Morales was still alive I wouldn't be talking with you right now.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
BILL SIMPICH: I think a lot of people – you know, I guess one of the main reasons this case wasn't solved in the early days was people were scared, and with good reason.
ALAN DALE: Mm-hmm. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. The book is truly valuable; I think it's where we are at the moment, and I want to propose that everyone with an interest in the assassination of President Kennedy invest the necessary time in 'State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald' by Bill Simpich. It's available at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, and thank you for being with us, Bill; I appreciate you talking to us.
BILL SIMPICH: Thanks Alan, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.