Program Transcript: Bill Simpich - Part ll

[Alan Dale]

Transcription courtesy of Mary Constantine

JFK LANCER: CONVERSATIONS WITH ALAN DALE

Welcome to JFK Lancer Conversations, an on-line interview program featuring discussions with prominent authors, historical researchers and notable personalities associated with the study of President Kennedy's assassination.

NAME: BILL SIMPICH – PART II

DATE: JULY, 2014

DURATION:  1:11:59   


ALAN DALE: Welcome to Conversations. My name is Alan Dale. We have a special privilege to speak for a second time with Bill Simpich. Bill Simpich is a Civil Rights Attorney in California. He is one of the world's leading scholars on the infrastructure and he complexity of the CIA. He is the author of a book called 'State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald', which is available at no charge through the Mary Ferrell website.

I'm very hopeful that all who are interested in these subjects, and who are interested in progress, will avail themselves of this extraordinary gift of being allowed access to this material at no charge: 'State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald' by Bill Simpich, at the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

It's my pleasure at this time to introduce Bill Simpich, and to welcome you back to Conversations. Bill, thank you for being with us.

BILL SIMPICH: Thank you for having me, Alan.

ALAN DALE: You know I personally am trying to come to a deeper understanding, and for me the path has led really from Professor Peter Dale Scott; his great work 'Deep Politics and the death of JFK' and 'Deep Politics' II and III, and then the work of Dr John Newman: 'JFK and Vietnam' 1993, and in particular his 2008 edition of 'Oswald and the CIA', which I think is also essential reading.

All of that leads me to your work 'State Secret' and I wonder if you can tell me if you had a similar sort of path; if the work of those two scholars was also influential in terms of getting you to this point.

BILL SIMPICH: Well, let me put it this way: John Newman's book, specifically the epilog he wrote in 2008, was the final thing that spurred me on to begin my book in 2009. The challenge he put forward was: "Does the Mexico City story tell us something very important in terms of how Kennedy was killed?" and he concluded yes, it does. And he concluded that James Angleton was actually the mastermind behind the assassination.

ALAN DALE: Mmmhmm. Yeah.

BILL SIMPICH: And I found that – he's like - he was pretty high up in the NSA; he was like an advisor to Bobby Ray Inman.

ALAN DALE: He was an executive assistant to General Odom I believe.

BILL SIMPICH: Odom! Thank you, yeah. And so I take John's sober side and approach very seriously, and for him to make that kind of claim I thought was extraordinary, and I said, you know, this is a guy who’s zeros and ones like me, and he feels that some of this stuff is knowable, so I said: "Well, you know, I've been reading his book for 15 years at this point: I think I owe it to myself to do some writing myself, and see where it leads me." And he led me on a journey, which I expected. What I didn't expect was that the journey would be as much fun as it was. It really was, it really was; it was not a bleak landscape for me, it was enriching beyond measure.

ALAN DALE: Well you know I've quoted the Leonardo da Vinci line that the greatest pleasure is the joy of understanding, so if this brought you to new places where you hadn't anticipated I'm glad it was exhilarating.

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, it was. I've always studied the NSA for example, like James Bamford has been like a lodestone for me for thirty years.

ALAN DALE: Oh, yeah, 'Puzzle Palace' and…

BILL SIMPICH: 'Puzzle Palace', mmmhmm, right. 'Puzzle Palace' is what really did me in. And before that I was really interested in military programs for the same things. But you know it's kept secret from the public stuff that we need to know. But my belief is that it's much more important to know this material and be sharing this material than it is to vote. Important as voting might be, I think understanding what you're voting for is about 100 times more important. Also, given the fact that most of these programs are things we can't vote on, because they’re black budget etc, all the more reason to educate ourselves so we can educate other people so we can at least start moving in the right direction towards approaching these programs. There's got to be more and better ways of educating ourselves and taking decisive action about these programs.

ALAN DALE: You remind me of a conversation I had with Larry Hancock recently, where he has written a new book on covert action and undeclared war, not merely since the end of World War II, but throughout American history [Shadow Warfare]. And I quoted for him something I found very interesting, which was a statement I found made by former Secretary of Defense and ultimate Washington insider, an attorney named Clark M Clifford, and Clark Clifford was brought I think before the Church Committee, and he spoke about revising the National Security Act of 1947, and he spoke about the dangers of these systematic elements being unsupervised in any constitutional sense, and I know that if we are to read much out of the two publications that Harry S Truman authored, in December '63 and then the following spring, apparently President Truman had second thoughts as well about the ramifications of the National Security Act of 1947.

BILL SIMPICH: Well, this is the kind of thing that David Talbot is writing about for example, you know, about Allen Dulles and all the terrible series of decisions that we made as a country in abandoning our fundamental democratic principles around governance. We've always had terrible problems, of course, around economics and about second-class citizenship being bestowed upon a large segment of the population.

ALAN DALE: Right.

BILL SIMPICH: But the essential governance was I think fatally damaged after 1947, and I am wondering what can be done to get us back on track, and it's very difficult given the history of the last sixty years.

ALAN DALE: Yeah. So the real question is if it can be done.

BILL SIMPICH: Right! That's the question.

ALAN DALE: That's the question, yeah. When we spoke last year we spent quite a bit of time on Mexico City, which of course is really the essential center of action seven weeks and six weeks prior to the assassination. The seven weeks refers to the fact that someone claiming to be Lee Oswald walks into the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy on September 27th 1963, and then there are – we're familiar – we don't have to repeat all of what's familiar to us about that. But maybe the more interesting focus of your work, I think, is in concentrating on how the CIA responded to that during the following week. So how the CIA responded to what happened the previous week in terms of the intelligence, the routine surveillance which had picked up this figure, the recording and transcription of tapped telephone lines and all of that. Tell me where you are now that you would not have imagined before you started this journey.

BILL SIMPICH: Well, that's a big question, but let me try to approach it this way. I never thought that I'd be able to weigh in with any kind of coherent, whole explanation of what happened in Mexico City. I thought I would, you know, uncover a few more little pieces. But I do believe that I've got a coherent theory for the whole of what happened. And it starts with the fact that I think Oswald's file was used once again in a molehunt, like it was – and that takes me back for a second to 1960, because I think his file was used as a molehunt during that period as well.

ALAN DALE: And that's Ann Egerter's entrance into the Oswald file story?

BILL SIMPICH: Right, right, and I don't know how much of this we covered in our last interview, so I'm going to be kinda careful about diving headlong back into that. But suffice it to say that Egerter and friends, I believe, used his file to look for individuals trying to infiltrate the Soviet Union. That's what CI/SIG did. That was its job, was to prevent penetrations by enemy agents into the CIA.

ALAN DALE: And CI/SIG stands for Counter Intelligence Special Investigations Group.

BILL SIMPICH: Exactly, and that was their charge; they were the analysts, if you will, and they worked in coordination with the Office of Security. Office of Security gave them basically everybody's personnel files, so they knew what…

ALAN DALE: And Office of Security is – that's Paul Gaynor and Bruce Solie, are those the principal executives there?

BILL SIMPICH: No, but they were the principal operatives there. Their office – a fellow named Robert Bannerman was the chief in '63, and I just stumbled across the chief's name in '61 last night and for the life of me I can't remember. But Bannerman – it was very forthcoming for the record, I'm going to ask the right question and his attitude about Oswald's defection was that Jim Angleton knew everything, and he's the only guy I know of who actually said that Angleton knew about Oswald. And the question is, once Angleton knew about Oswald's defection in '59, what did he do? And I think the answer is that he had Ann Egeter on watch, and I've done a whole chapter in my book about the three counter-intelligence teams that tracked Oswald over the last years of his life, and Ann Egeter was the main one, because she controlled the file.

ALAN DALE: And we're talking about CI/SIGS - Special Investigation Group - which you're describing as analytical – analysts. Tell me, what is CI/SPG? Tell me about the Special Projects Group.

BILL SIMPICH: This isn't in the book; this is something I've come up with recently, and you'll see in Ann Egerter's documents in particular - last time we talked about the two memos that were sent in October of 1963, after Oswald – after the Oswald visit to Mexico City. I believe that what happened in Mexico City was that Oswald was turned down for a visa by the Cubans, turned down for a visa by the Soviets, and in frustration he ended his efforts and went home, but I believe that after he finished his efforts on the 28th, the Saturday, that he was impersonated on the telephone later on the 28th, with a claim that he was inside the Cuban Consulate with Silvia Duran, the secretary who worked there and had spoken with him the previous day, and that there's a second phone call on the 1st referring to this phone call on the 28th, which I think is also phony.

ALAN DALE: Yes.

BILL SIMPICH: Both these calls were made to the Soviet Consulate, ostensibly asking for more information about his visa, which was already, a dead letter.

ALAN DALE: Well this is very important, and this is something that I think is maybe one of the most key moments in this entire episode, because of the two of – at least two of the conversations, one of which the recorded transcripts. In one, whoever is representing the Soviet side refers to "the American" but does not name this person, doesn't enter the name Lee Oswald into the written transcript of this taped conversation. In the second conversation there's specific reference to the name, and it almost feels – it certainly feels to me, and I've discussed it with other people – that maybe the whole point of the second was to embellish the first, because the first was inadequate if the objective was to enter the name "Oswald" into the written documentary record.

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, it appears that the purpose in the second call was to introduce the name of Kostikov into the documentary record, who was a Soviet officer who was believed to be involved in some nefarious activities.

ALAN DALE: Believed at the time by certain high officials to be involved in assassinations in Western Hemisphere and stuff like that. But you've told me that we have reason now to think that Angleton himself had debunked this claim, and that…

BILL SIMPICH: Yes sir.

ALAN DALE: And so now we're starting to think in terms of maybe an inner circle and an inner inner circle, and that the inner circle may not've been privy to absolutely everything that the ultimate inner circle had, and that it may be that a lot of what we have when we sift through all these materials is evidence of an inner circle, but not evidence of an ultimate inner circle. Is that a reasonable…

BILL SIMPICH: Well, let me offer this in a slightly different way. While I'm not disagreeing with what you’re saying, I think there are several circles, and I think where the circles led to after these two phone calls was that there was a molehunt initiated by both the Mexico City office and Angleton's office, and the reason I say that is because some phony information, which is – phony information for those of you who aren't familiar with the molehunt is basically the bait that's used to make a molehunt work.

ALAN DALE: A marked card.

BILL SIMPICH: A marked card is used, and when somebody picks up the marked card who shouldn't have access to the marked card, and commits themselves to that information in a subsequent memo, bait being exposed in black and white gives you a clue about where security's been breached.

ALAN DALE: Gotcha.

BILL SIMPICH: That's the purpose of a molehunt. And so, I think that Goodpasture – Anne Goodpasture, who worked as kind of an operations officer of the first rank…

ALAN DALE: In Mexico City Station.

BILL SIMPICH: In Mexico City Station. She caused a memo to go out on the 8th of October referring to a "Mystery Man", who was about – who she described as Lee Harvey Oswald, and she gave a description of him, but she didn't actually include the photo in her memo. She sends it to headquarters, and a couple of days later the memo comes back – two versions of a memo come back: one to Mexico City and one to FBI and other agencies that were tracking Oswald.  And this is where the Ann Egerter question becomes very interesting, because she's wearing her CIA/SIG hat, her analyst hat, when she writes to the third party agencies and describes to them a description of the mystery man; an accurate one – of him being six foot, and husky and this and that. When she writes to Mexico City she provides this Webster-like description, and...

ALAN DALE: Five ten, 165.

BILL SIMPICH: Right, right, and that whole story is very interesting, because again it's another example of a marked card. My point here is that not only is Egerter writing to Mexico City as an operations officer, she's wearing a different hat than her CI/SIG hat; she's wearing her SPG hat, which is the operations office for Angleton, and it's like she's letting Win Scott know that, yes, I'm working in an operation with you; in response to the molehunt material you gave me I'm giving you more molehunt material to work with. And it's quite remarkable what she's done, because now it means that she's wearing two hats, writing two memos giving different information to different agencies. And you've got to ask yourself what's going on here. It seems to me it's plain that it's a molehunt.

ALAN DALE: Mmmhmm. Two of the things that are of greatest interest to me have to do with my realization that the 5'10", 165 lb description, which is entered into the official documentation as associated with Lee Oswald, there are two factors that I'm curious about. One is that I've learned it was also built into some FBI files about Lee Oswald, and that the two guys handling the – CIA Integrated Records Division guy I think was Bill Bright. Is that correct?

BILL SIMPICH: He helped incorporate it in the CIA documents, which went to the FBI.

ALAN DALE: And John Fain is the FBI guy?

BILL SIMPICH: Exactly.

ALAN DALE: So the two – so now we cannot – see, I realize I'm jumping all over the place, but I'm ultimately most affected by the process by which some – within 14 minutes of the assassination; at 12.44 pm on November 22nd 1963, a police radio dispatcher in Dallas gives that description of the shooter. And so that whole part of what you cover in 'State Secret' – I think it's in Chapter 6 maybe, but in any event that whole thing – see for a while I thought: "Well here it is, right on a silver platter. We're being handed something that traces whoever is the source in the field, on the scene, operational objective: introduce the description of what whoever is making this claim believes is incriminating of Oswald, when in fact what it really indicates is that whoever has this material that they have gotten this material, I thought from the ultimate interior of Special Investigations Group or some other part of James Angleton's counter-intelligence division, but they might also have gotten it from whatever part of FBI John Fain was handling that included the same description. Is that correct?

BILL SIMPICH: All that is absolutely correct, and here's the most interesting thing of all to me, Alan, which is this: we have access to many years' of CIA and FBI documents after the assassination where they did their own internal thinking and mulling over about what happened where and the rest. There's never been any reflection about - connecting the fact of the 5 foot 10, 165 report on the radio and saying: "Gee whiz, that's the same inaccurate description that we had in our files for three years." - CIA and the FBI.

ALAN DALE: What a coincidence! It's probably just a coincidence; no big deal: nothing to see; move along.

BILL SIMPICH: This is the description that was passed round in the minutes before Officer Tippit was killed. Which is where I want to move to next.

ALAN DALE: Five times! Dallas Police Department's dispatchers – guy's name's Murray Jackson; he probably sits down all day. And five times he's announcing across the radio – the Dallas Police radio – on five separate calls between 12.44 and 1.08, and we think that – the most recent thing that I believe I understand is, we believe that Tippit may have been shot at, as approximately as possible, 1.09. So five times between the assassination – starting 14 minutes after the shooting – 12.44 – and five times prior to Tippit being shot, and if somebody sees Oswald walking down the street, do they think he looks 5' 10" and 165 pounds?

BILL SIMPICH: He's a little guy. You know, he weighed 30 or 40 pounds less than that at the time of his death, so not only is the description inaccurate, and people really did not focus on the inaccuracy of that description enough, but more important than the inaccuracy of the description is the absolute incuriosity of the CIA and FBI of this five-times repeated description being identical to what's in their files. They've never talked about it; they've never analyzed it; they've never mentioned a word about it. That doesn't make any sense. But that's the kind of – those kinds of absence of evidence is what you look for in a case. The absence of evidence is often more important than the evidence itself.

ALAN DALE: Oh, yeah, the negative template that Professor Scott talks about. What's not there that should be.

BILL SIMPICH: That's right, that's right.

ALAN DALE: There are plenty of examples of those; same is true with regard to…

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, another example of it is the description given by Howard Brennan, and the description given by the unknown man that went on the radio. In both instances neither one of them offered any description of the man's clothing: it makes no sense whatsoever to be describing minutiae like 5 foot 10 and 165, as Brennan supposedly did; I don't believe it happened…

ALAN DALE: Oh, yeah; it's absurd.

BILL SIMPICH: But more to the point, neither one of them could offer a description of what he was wearing. That's what people notice, is the color; the plumage. That's the first thing that's described. When you don't see that it's a strong, strong indication that the information you're receiving is bogus.

ALAN DALE: We could spend probably an entire program just on the Tippit shooting.

BILL SIMPICH: Well, my focus on the Tippit story is only this, as far as I – our purposes. One of the things that has impelled me in this case for the last 20 years is the wallet that was found on the ground at the Tippit shooting, and I've spent a lot of time looking at it, and a lot of time looking at videotape of the wallet that was actually found on the scene, as well as the National Archives photos of the wallet that is currently in the National Archives. The wallet is important for a couple of reasons: one was because the wallet at the scene supposedly contained Oswald's ID, and that's what led people to believe that Oswald was the shooter, of course, and why they felt like they had the right guy when they got to the Texas Theater. In fact there's a report saying that they knew his name before they looked at his wallet at the theater. Now of course one of the craziest things about this story is apparently – you know, there's two versions that have been going back and forth on this whole story, which is that – one version is that the wallets are the same, and there's really only one wallet, and the other version is that there's two wallets. And after looking at this exhaustively I am of the opinion that there are two wallets, and that the throw-down wallet found at the scene was in fact almost identical – it was the same manufacturer, same wallet-maker, OK?

ALAN DALE: Yes.

BILL SIMPICH: Just a couple of tiny details were different about the wallet, but those details can be seen. And what it illustrates to me is how carefully this planted evidence was set up.

ALAN DALE: Orchestrated, yeah.

[Alan Dale]

BILL SIMPICH: Orchestrated, yes. The other thing that's important of course is that this – the finding of Oswald's wallet at the crime scene - was suppressed for thirty-three years, until Jim Hosty, FBI officer, revealed it in his 1996 book. There's no paper trail of it; there's no mention of it except for this videotape that exists, and the people who were filmed in the videotape, and who couldn't deny it, had to at least talk about it.

ALAN DALE: We should clarify that part of the other reason that this is such a significant issue is because the rifle - the infamous rifle found on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository - was ordered through a mail order coupon to a place in Chicago, Klein's Sporting Goods, and it was ordered in the name of Alek J Hidell. And so this wallet that we're referring to, is the source of the place where we find an ID with that name on it. Is that correct?

BILL SIMPICH: That's correct, and what's particularly weird about that ID is it's a draft card, and it's got Oswald's picture on it, which means that, you know, it was during the Vietnam era if you will. Anybody who looked at that wallet would know immediately that this card was a phony, but the card nonetheless had Oswald's picture on it, and Tippit's name on it. I can't believe that Oswald used it himself.

ALAN DALE: Or Hidell's name.

BILL SIMPICH: Hidell! Yeah, beg your pardon; Hidell's name: Oswald's picture. I think it was used as a calling card by Oswald to show what he could do in the photographic world, and, you know…

ALAN DALE: Right.

BILL SIMPICH: …"Take a look at this. It's phony!" But it's…

ALAN DALE: Spycraft! Spycraft.

BILL SIMPICH: Right, right! "I'm a junior crime-stopper too."

ALAN DALE: That's right. [both laugh] That is so well said; I've never heard it put like that. A junior crime-stopper, boy, that is – well, you know, this is this thing – I don't know if Norman Mailer was the first to say it, but somebody certainly was…

BILL SIMPICH: Oh yeah. He was a spy in his own mind.

ALAN DALE: Exactly, but that doesn't mean…

BILL SIMPICH: People get furious when I quote Norman Mailer approvingly and I do.

ALAN DALE: Well see, this is still what I'm referring to as the deep end of the pool, because it takes patience and caution to start to think in terms of what did Oswald think he was doing, and how could others have utilized what Oswald thought he was doing in ways that were either operationally – were authorized operations – or in ways that were rather sinister.

BILL SIMPICH: Well that Tippit name now, I want to get back to that for a second because that Tippit name was used not only to order the rifle; but it was used to order the pistol that killed Tippit.

ALAN DALE: That Hidell name. The Hidell name.

BILL SIMPICH: The Hidell name, beg your pardon. The Hidell name was used on the card, and it was also used on the order for both the rifle that killed JFK – supposedly – and the pistol that killed Tippit – supposedly.

ALAN DALE: Right, we always forget about how he got possession of that rickety pistol that he had that had such a strange…

BILL SIMPICH: I’ll tell you something else nobody's ever thought about, I'll give you this one. When that pistol was… you know, the cops were more upset about one of their own being killed than JFK, which is, you know…

ALAN DALE: Absolutely.

BILL SIMPICH: Human nature, I guess.

ALAN DALE: Usually – yeah, but once the word goes out on a cop-killer that's a death sentence, almost without exception, right? And it didn't happen.

BILL SIMPICH: Right. Now let's talk – they go to the theater, they get the pistol from Oswald, and did anybody in that place sniff it? I've a quote from Officer Barrett which I want to use in my next edition, saying: "I can assure you that no-one in that police station ever sniffed that pistol" - that had been used half an hour previously. Because if they had, they might have found out evidence they didn't want to know, which was: that pistol hadn't been shot. And the sniff test is the way to do it, and they deliberately did not do the sniff test. So there's great antipathy in the police station from Jump Street. You know, they want to be heroes; they want to solve this thing, and they want to make sure their man stays caught. And here's the other thing that really amazes me in this situation: the card that uses Hidell's name and Oswald's photo is not reported on as being found by any of the arresting officers in their reports, and it's like they didn't do it. [both laugh]

ALAN DALE: Well, who would think that that was relevant? I mean, we can understand that, right? [both laugh] There are so many parts of this that are actually mind-boggling, and of course you know, I mean we've all been dealing with some of this for quite a long time, and it never ceases to amaze me.

BILL SIMPICH: OK, well look, let me tell you the obvious conclusion. I mean the obvious conclusion is that Westbrook, the guy who found the Hidell wallet at the Tippit scene, was in on the assassination. I don't – there is no way, Alan, that I can reverse field on this, OK?

ALAN DALE: Yeah, yeah I hear you. I understand, I understand.

BILL SIMPICH: You know, it's just too daunting, and the arresting officer, Paul Bentley, I believe was in on it as well, and there's more to the whole Bentley story which is in my book. But I want to focus on Westbrook for the moment, because Westbrook was – he was like the Ann Egerter, in a sense, of the Dallas Police. He had access to all the personnel files in the shop over at Dallas. He knew what he could do and what he couldn't do, and he filled his colleague, Jerry Hill, with all kinds of information in the moments after Oswald came in, about Oswald's entire history as a defector in the Soviet Union, which Hill then went out and dutifully poured out in incredible detail to the press corps assembled from around the country before the afternoon was over on November 22nd. And then Westbrook went off to work in Vietnam in the Public Safety Division, where he was dealing with CIA and intelligence issues on an hourly basis.

ALAN DALE: Boy, what a…

BILL SIMPICH: The guy was a spook! He was at every crime scene; he was at the Tippit scene; he was at the theater…

ALAN DALE: Yeah, I know.

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, but I want to say this: he's controlling the action. I think the one thing that didn't happen that should have happened as far as Westbrook was concerned was for Oswald to get killed in the theater, and it didn't happen. And that's where things had fallen – fell apart; that's where Jack Ruby had to step in.

ALAN DALE: Bill, it's time for us to take a brief intermission. We're speaking with Bill Simpich, he's the author of 'State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald', which is available at no charge through the Mary Ferrell Foundation, so just search: "State Secret. Mary Ferrell Foundation".

BILL SIMPICH: And please give a donation if possible to the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

ALAN DALE: We'll take a brief intermission and we'll be back in just a moment.

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ALAN DALE: We're speaking with Bill Simpich, to follow up on our original conversation. Now 'State Secret' is available at the Mary Ferrell website; Mary Ferrell Foundation, an invaluable resource worthy of our attention and our support, to be sure; our friend Rex Bradford is such a superb scholar and is almost singularly responsible for the materials on the Mary Ferrell website.

Bill, we're talking about this idea that I first sort of was introduced to the possibility that there were elements of the Dallas Police that may indeed have had some kind of operational purpose, other than investigating this unexpected, catastrophic event, probably because of Professor Scott's references to the 488th Intelligence Unit, and the fact that there were members of the Dallas Police Department who were also members of this army intelligence reserve unit – is that what it was? I think so.

BILL SIMPICH: Right.

ALAN DALE: And this man Westbrook being on the scene – I know Gerald Hill was also, you know, strangely prescient about where to be at what times [laughs]. But I'm very interested in your – there's a man named Joseph McBride, who wrote a book called 'Into the Nightmare'; he's done a lot of stuff on the Tippit shooting. Can you tell me a little more about where you are at the moment on Westbrook in particular?

BILL SIMPICH: Well I think, to sum up, my thinking on Westbrook is I think he was one of the main actors on the ground. He, as we mentioned before, was at both the Tippit shooting and the theater. He had no business being there; he was a – he didn't even – he wasn't in uniform; he had no history with working on a on-the-ground investigation whatsoever. He was a desk jockey doing personnel. Why is he leading the troops - and I mean leading the troops - within that critical hour after the most important criminal event that ever happened in the history of Dallas? It doesn't make a lick of sense.

ALAN DALE: You know you raised…

BILL SIMPICH: I'm sorry.

ALAN DALE: and I don't want to interrupt you, but this relates to the thing we were talking about; Murray Jackson being the dispatcher who theoretically has just been told what – somebody's putting a piece of paper in front of him and he's pressing a button and stating whatever – or reading whatever – he's handed. Who would have been in a position to get Murray Jackson to – I assume it was Murray Jackson, I don't know that this is certain.

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, it's Murray Jackson.

ALAN DALE: So somebody dispatched Officer Tippit and an officer named R C Nelson to Oak Cliff in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and so it would only be conjecture on my part to think that someone like Westbrook would have the executive authority to be able to make that order, to order those officers dispatched to Oak Cliff for reasons which are not clear to me, you know, do you have any thoughts?

BILL SIMPICH: Well, Murray Jackson's not - Murray Jackson's not talking; Murray Jackson said: "I was Tippit's friend, we just need to spread our officers out blah blah blah. Well that makes no sense at all; they needed all hands.

ALAN DALE: None! Good God yes!

BILL SIMPICH: They needed all hands and more; they didn't even have the Depository building closed for 30 minutes.

ALAN DALE: Yeah.

BILL SIMPICH: So Murray Jackson as far as I'm concerned is a liar. I think Murray Jackson was working with Tippit; they were close friends, and I don't think Murray Jackson did this to put Tippit in harm's way; I think he was horrified by what happened.

ALAN DALE: Sure.

BILL SIMPICH: But I think he was not horrified to see the assassination of JFK; I think he was in on the plot.

ALAN DALE: So really we're simply conceding we have no idea why Murray Jackson dispatched these two officers to Oak Cliff, and I don't know what happened to R C Nelson.

BILL SIMPICH: Oh well, no; I'll tell you - I'll tell you my thinking is that Jackson was told to send 'em there.

ALAN DALE: Right.

BILL SIMPICH: And I think Tippit was doomed to die. Period.

ALAN DALE: Makes sense to me.

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah, I mean when you read McBride's book [one of the things you find out from Tippit's father is that Tippit was familiar with – that Tippit's shooting had something to do with Oswald, and it's – he was looking for Oswald in Oak Cliff when he died. And nobody's ever said that; this is kinda like the wallet, you know; this is these little pieces of evidence that've been concealed from us. And it's my – affirmation if you will – that the Dallas situation has been covered up methodically for 50 years, and that if you look at the history of the witnesses that died in the immediate aftermath of 1963, the Tippit witnesses took an even heavier hit than the Kennedy witnesses did.

It's an appalling chronicle; it's an appalling admission of the lack of an effective media corps in Dallas, and lack of an effective investigative corps in Dallas. But I think a lot of it, in terms of the Dallas end of it; the Tippit end of it; is just pure, unadulterated fear. Nobody – nobody – has talked about Westbrook's role in this case, with the exception of a few dogged…
ALAN DALE: Yeah.

BILL SIMPICH: …researchers over the years. He's gotten a, he's gotten a pass, and it's a tragedy. It's not a tragedy that can't be fixed by history, and I think it is going to be fixed by history, because the elements are just too plain.

ALAN DALE: When we spoke last year we talked quite a bit about Staff D and William Harvey and – I guess his – was Desmond Fitzgerald his successor on Staff D or was it…?

BILL SIMPICH: Yeah.

ALAN DALE: Yeah.

BILL SIMPICH: No, I beg your pardon, Desmond Fitzgerald…

ALAN DALE: Task Force W.

BILL SIMPICH: Right, he was on the Cuban desk.

ALAN DALE: Right, that's right.

BILL SIMPICH: That was Fitzgerald.

ALAN DALE: Right. See I'm not 100 per cent clear in my own mind that I understand what we're referring to when we refer to as "Signals Intelligence". Can you tell me a little bit about what that means?

BILL SIMPICH: Sure. Signals Intelligence is the very fancy word – I don't like it either, but I understand why they use it, because you're talking about communications intelligence plus, if you will. It's not just telegraph and telephone and, now internet and all the rest of it, but it's also radio signals, telemetry signals, and satellites, rockets, missiles.

ALAN DALE: Everything.

BILL SIMPICH: You name it, right, everything that can be heard.

ALAN DALE: And that's what Staff D was.

BILL SIMPICH: Staff D

ALAN DALE: Staff D was Com/Int, Right?

BILL SIMPICH: Everything that can be handled.

ALAN DALE: Mmhmm.

BILL SIMPICH: And so my point with people like Mr Harvey, who were running Signals Intelligence for the CIA at that point was - you've got to think of it in several different ways. One was, they were the hand-couriers of material to NSA, which was a relatively young organization itself, not just in years but in experience. They didn't have a lot of covert operatives at that time; they had mostly geeks and analysts, and so if they had to lean on an old hand like Harvey to bring in the burglars, OK? who could break into a foreign embassy, and the safecrackers who could get access to the documents once you got inside. So you could obtain the codes and ciphers that you wanted to obtain about the other side's communications, so you understood how they ticked. And as I like to say, you know, the crown jewels of intelligence are three things, you know, you're not going after these codes and ciphers for no reason, OK? There are three essential things you want: one is, you want to be able to listen to their leaders so you know what they're saying.

ALAN DALE: Behind the scenes.

BILL SIMPICH: Right, behind the scenes: you know, face-to-face, real close and personal; what are they saying about you, and what are they saying about their plans? And then number two; you want to know how their presidential protection is set up. You want to know what kind of internal security they have to protect their president and other invaluable national assets, and that's very chilling when you think about the Kennedy assassination, because I have a lot of evidence now to show that Harvey and his pals knew everything he needed to know about the US Secret Service…

ALAN DALE: Yeah.

BILL SIMPICH: …which I want to talk about before we close. And finally, finally the third thing you get from signals intelligence is the military codes – you understand; their order of battle, how their troops are set up; how they're ready to, you know, be ready with operations.

ALAN DALE: What the protocols are in terms of the chain of command to – things like that.

BILL SIMPICH: Yep, all that stuff. And you can't get it any other way, right? These are the crown jewels. That's why signals intelligence is so important. Staff D and CI/Sig were the two most secret areas of the CIA.

ALAN DALE: Can you imagine the ZR/Rifle program being hidden in Staff D? It's just funny in a way, you know.

BILL SIMPICH: Well, it's funny in a way, but when you think about it that's the obvious place to put it. 

ALAN DALE: Makes sense.

BILL SIMPICH: If you put it in CIA/Sig for example; CIA/Sig is like the spies that spy on their spies. That's to make sure that nobody gets inside. These people are analysts, you know, they're doing this thing all day long, but the Staff D people are the action men and women. They're the ones who break inside; they're the ones who are like the expendables or whatever comic book heroes you like at the moment.

ALAN DALE: Yes.

BILL SIMPICH: They're like Sergeant Fury; they're superheroes. They not only are brainy, you know, because they've gotta do a lot of brainy stuff, but they've gotta do a lot of brawny stuff, too.

ALAN DALE: And the other thing that we don't ever really talk about, although it is implicit in studying the record of the years since some of these figures were called to testify – even sort of an unguarded moment and … depicted in Jefferson Morley and John Newman's conversation with Jane Roman. These people were fiercely loyal to each other, within these specific divisions; these specific compartments. I think they really thought of themselves as being defenders of the State, and that pesky Congressional investigations would come and go, just like temporary occupants of the White House would come and go and, you know, annoying press people might come and go, but mostly they were loyal to the nation in their own minds, I think; patriotically, in their own minds, and loyal to each other. Do you think that's a reasonable assessment?

BILL SIMPICH: Oh, I think it's a totally reasonable assessment, and I think they were also very clever, how they set these things up. What better place to hide the ZR/Rifle assassination plot – plots, I should say, because they were aimed primarily at foreign leaders.

ALAN DALE: Fidel.

[Alan Dale]

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.