It's one of the most popular conspiracy theories of all time, and one that is still believed by a majority of Americans.
In this episode, we take a look at some of the theories about who really killed JFK.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is a follow-up episode to the last one, where we looked at the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald - his troubled upbringing, his time in the Marines, and his defection to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:34] And of course, we looked at the event that he is synonymous with, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
[00:00:43] So, in this episode we will look at some of the most popular and most outlandish of the conspiracy theories about what really happened.
[00:00:52] Was Oswald really a lone gunman?
[00:00:55] Was he sent by the Soviets?
[00:00:57] Or perhaps the CIA?
[00:00:59] Was the American mafia involved?
[00:01:02] Ultimately, who killed JFK?
[00:01:06] On a quick “admin note”, if you haven’t listened to the last episode, the one on Lee Harvey Oswald, I would recommend you do that first, because we will be referring to the events of November the 22nd of 1963 in quite some detail.
[00:01:22] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about JFK conspiracy theories.
[00:01:30] In 2016, as Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination, he did a phone interview with his favourite TV channel, Fox News.
[00:01:40] One of Trump’s main rivals in the race at that time was a man named Ted Cruz.
[00:01:47] During this phone interview Trump attacked his rival and began making some bizarre claims, to say the least.
[00:01:56] But he didn’t attack Cruz on policy or campaign funding - he attacked his father.
[00:02:04] Here’s Trump, in his own words.
[00:02:07] His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being, you know, shot, I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? Right? Prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don't even talk about that. That was reported. Uh, and nobody talks about it, but I think it's horrible.
[00:02:23] Now, I know that wasn’t particularly easy to follow, but Trump there was claiming that Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the murder of JFK.
[00:02:34] As you will know, Donald Trump has what we might call a selective relationship with the truth, and indeed Ted Cruz would come back to Trump’s accusation saying “this man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies”.
[00:02:53] You may also recall that Ted Cruz would go on to become one of Trump’s staunchest supporters but that is a story for another day.
[00:03:02] What we are asking today is what was a potential presidential nominee - indeed, the future president - doing spreading conspiracy theories about Lee Harvey Oswald?
[00:03:15] He was, of course, trying to discredit his political rival, but perhaps it was more than that.
[00:03:22] Perhaps Trump was appealing to a specific section of the American voters - those inclined to believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the official version of events.
[00:03:34] And here he was talking about the most popular American conspiracy theory of all time, the theory that there was something fishy about the assassination of JFK.
[00:03:47] Now, in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, at the end of November of 1963, there was an official commission set up to investigate what had happened and how the former President was killed.
[00:04:02] It was called the Warren Commission, and was led by a man named Earl Warren, a highly respected US lawyer and politician.
[00:04:11] It concluded that both Oswald and Ruby were lone gunmen - that is to say, acting as two independent shooters. Oswald killed Kennedy and Ruby then killed Oswald without any outside help or bigger conspiracy.
[00:04:29] Yet as you heard in the previous episode, this official verdict was not accepted by everyone.
[00:04:38] Indeed, one survey now suggests that a whopping 81% of Americans don’t believe the official version of events.
[00:04:49] Even back then, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there were plenty of Americans who were sceptical of the official version of events.
[00:04:59] Polling based on data taken from December of 1963 - so, just weeks after Kennedy’s death - found that 52 percent of Americans believed more than one person was involved, and only 29 percent believed Oswald acted alone.
[00:05:18] Fast forward a decade or so to the mid-1970 and the distrust had grown even more following the Watergate scandal and release of the Pentagon Papers, which proved Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had lied to the American people about the Vietnam war.
[00:05:37] By the way, if you haven’t listened to episode number 238, which covers the Watergate Scandal in detail, you can do that after this episode to fully understand the collapse of public trust in American institutions.
[00:05:49] But back to JFK.
[00:05:51] After new footage of the shooting was released in 1975, which gave a clearer but also much bloodier view of the event, the government created another committee, somewhat ominously called the Select Committee on Assassinations.
[00:06:08] This committee was tasked primarily with taking another look at JFK’s assassination, but it also investigated another famous assassination, that of Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated in 1968, just a few years after Kennedy.
[00:06:26] Although the Committee concluded that there was no evidence of a Soviet or CIA conspiracy, it did state that there was, I quote, “probably” a second gunman on the “grassy knoll”.
[00:06:42] A knoll, by the way, is a slightly unusual term for a small hill, and it’s so linked to this historical event, in fact, that if you google “grassy knoll” most of the results will be about JFK.
[00:06:58] As you can probably imagine, this conclusion sent conspiracy theorists into overdrive and suggested to the country that something fishy, something suspicious, had happened and that the people had not been given the full story in 1963.
[00:07:16] Since then, hundreds of JFK conspiracies have emerged and it remains, to this day, one of the most popular events where the public don’t believe the official version.
[00:07:28] So, what are some of the most interesting and perhaps even believable about Oswald and Kennedy?
[00:07:36] There are some truly crazy theories out there, but the vast majority of JFK conspiracy theories have Oswald as the shooter - if not the only shooter - so in today’s episode we’ll be considering some of the more plausible, believable and mainstream, theories that involve Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:07:57] For our first theory, we’re going to look at the theory that Oswald was a Soviet hitman sent by the KGB to kill the American president.
[00:08:08] It does seem to make sense to start here because Oswald did, as we learned in the previous episode, defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.
[00:08:19] You can certainly see why people might believe this theory.
[00:08:23] It’s persuasive, and like all alluring conspiracy theories, it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
[00:08:30] That a trained marksman who defected to and lived in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could, in theory, be recruited by the KGB to become an assassin.
[00:08:42] Now, some believe Oswald was personally given the task by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and that he didn’t move back to the United States in 1962 because he wanted to, but to begin getting ready for his mission: the assassination of President Kennedy.
[00:09:02] The best or most popular evidence for this theory comes from Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in September of 1963, shortly before the assassination.
[00:09:15] Many people argue that there’s evidence that Oswald made contact with a Soviet spy in Mexico City, someone known as ‘comrade Kostin’, who one book claims was the head of “the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad.”
[00:09:31] Where this theory gets really interesting, however, is that there are some writers and journalists who claim that the Soviets then changed their mind about the assassination plot sometime between June of 1962 and April of 1963, and told Oswald the plan was off, they told him that he shouldn't kill Kennedy.
[00:09:55] But Oswald, who was keen to prove his loyalty to Kruschev and the USSR, went ahead with the plan and killed Kennedy anyway.
[00:10:06] As you probably remember from the previous episode, this version of events certainly lines up with the type of man Oswald was.
[00:10:15] He was an outsider, after all, a man always searching for his place in society.
[00:10:22] Believing that the emotionally unstable Oswald went ahead with the plan anyway to prove that he really belonged in the USSR is hardly difficult, and you can see why some people might believe it.
[00:10:35] This leads us to our second theory - that Kennedy’s assassination was an ‘inside job’, that is to say, a conspiracy not by Soviets or other outside forces, but by American political forces.
[00:10:50] And who are we talking about here?
[00:10:53] The CIA, of course.
[00:10:55] To put it simply, President Kennedy did not exactly have the best working relationship with CIA leaders.
[00:11:03] Before Kennedy arrived in the White House in 1961, the CIA had behaved as it liked without much oversight from the executive branch, from the president.
[00:11:15] This included all sorts of nefarious, criminal, behaviour all over the world, including working to overthrow governments, such as in Guatemala and Iran.
[00:11:26] Kennedy changed all of that, and preferred to take a more public, diplomatic approach to foreign affairs.
[00:11:35] In fact, it's even been reported that Kennedy once said he wished "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
[00:11:49] Though there are some who believe that Oswald was working directly with the CIA, if we consider what we learned about him in the previous episode, we know that’s probably unlikely - Oswald hated American capitalism and the US government, after all, and he was a loose cannon, he wasn’t particularly reliable.
[00:12:10] So where would the CIA fit into all of this?
[00:12:14] Well, first we must remember that all this happened at the height of the Cold War - a time when the threat of nuclear destruction made the Americans and Soviets incredibly paranoid and suspicious of one another.
[00:12:29] As we know, Oswald was interrogated when he returned to the United States in 1962, but there are several question marks over whether the CIA would simply have accepted that a former US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union had returned simply because he missed home?
[00:12:48] Several writers believe that the CIA was keeping a close eye, meaning carefully watching Oswald's movements in the U.S.
[00:12:58] They knew that he was involved in Cuban political activities and also that he had been to Mexico.
[00:13:05] So if they knew Lee Harvey Oswald was meeting Soviet spies in Mexico City, presumably to plan Kennedy’s assassination, why wasn’t anything done?
[00:13:16] Perhaps, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, the CIA knew about the assassination plan but did nothing to stop it.
[00:13:26] Perhaps they didn’t warn Washington and preferred to have Kennedy out of the picture, dead, and return to the previous non-interventional relationship between the White House and the CIA.
[00:13:40] Therefore, the CIA theory is less that they were directly involved in the assassination, and more that they knew it was coming and did nothing because it suited their political objectives.
[00:13:53] Clearly, the CIA has been involved in toppling many foreign leaders, so is it completely beyond the realms of possibility that it would also topple its own leader if that person was considered to be an inconvenience?
[00:14:09] For our third theory, we need to focus on Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald in the underground car park of the Dallas police department.
[00:14:20] As you may remember, Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner from Chicago who had settled in Dallas and made connections in the underground gambling, drug and prostitution markets, connections to the mafia, to the mob.
[00:14:34] But Ruby isn’t the only person with mob connections in this story.
[00:14:40] The Kennedy family was more than familiar with America’s criminal underworld.
[00:14:46] In fact, many believe that Kennedy’s father made his name - and most of his money - selling bootlegged alcohol during the Prohibition Era, and even that the mafia fixed the 1960 presidential election to ensure Kennedy’s victory.
[00:15:03] And if you know anything about Italian-American organised criminals, you’ll know they don’t do anything out of the kindness of their hearts, for free. They wanted a favour from JFK.
[00:15:16] And what they got was the opposite.
[00:15:19] The mob had extensive business ties in Cuba, which were put on ice after the island turned socialist. The mob hoped that Kennedy would overthrow Castro and they could open their hotels and casinos again, but what happened?
[00:15:36] Well, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a flop, it was a disaster. Kennedy was blamed for this.
[00:15:45] What’s more, Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, or Bobby Kennedy was closely investigating organised crime in his role as Attorney General.
[00:15:55] So, is it completely inconceivable that the American mafia had a hand in the assassination of JFK, as a sign of what happens when you don’t pay back your debts?
[00:16:07] In fact, it’s not just conspiracy theorists who believed this, JFK’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, according to one biographer, thought that the mob killed his older brother.
[00:16:20] So where do Oswald and Ruby fit into this?
[00:16:26] Essentially Oswald was the ‘fall guy’, meaning the scapegoat, or person to publicly take the blame, and in true Mafia style, Ruby would be the one to kill him, to silence him forever.
[00:16:39] Now, why would Ruby do that?
[00:16:43] Well, many believe that Ruby had more than mere connections to the mob, but that he had fallen deep into debt with Dallas’ criminal underworld and that killing Oswald was how he was asked to pay it off.
[00:16:57] This might sound like the plot of an overly dramatic Hollywood movie, but when Ruby was interviewed as part of the Warren Commission investigation, even though this commission had concluded that Ruby acted alone and shot Oswald as revenge for him killing JFK, Ruby told investigators that he was in danger and that he wouldn’t tell the truth until he was moved to a safe location.
[00:17:25] Ruby died a few years later, in January 1967, meaning nobody would ever know the extent of his murky mafia connections.
[00:17:36] Now, all of the conspiracies we’ve heard about so far put Oswald at the centre of a conspiracy - making him the gunman on behalf of someone, or something else.
[00:17:48] Many conspiracies, however, including these popular and perhaps more plausible ones, also suggest that Oswald wasn’t alone and that there was more than one gunman.
[00:18:02] This theory comes down to one thing: the infamous ‘grassy knoll.’
[00:18:08] As you heard in the previous episode, there was a small grassy knoll, a small grassy hill, beside the road where Kennedy’s limousine was driving.
[00:18:19] In fact, in the aftermath of the shooting, most witnesses said they thought the shots had come from the grassy knoll and not the direction of the Texas Book Depository.
[00:18:31] In 1965, interviews with 121 witnesses found that 51 believed the shots came from the grassy knoll, 32 from the book depository, and 38 could not say.
[00:18:46] As you might remember, the grassy knoll was also the first place the police on the scene searched, before they went up to the depository building.
[00:18:56] But who would the second shooter be?
[00:18:59] This is where we get into the complicated theorising of conspiracies - if there’s evidence of shots fired from the grassy knoll, then it could have been anyone.
[00:19:08] Was it a Soviet spy working with Oswald?
[00:19:12] A mafia hitman?
[00:19:14] A rogue CIA agent?
[00:19:17] Almost all the Kennedy assassination conspiracies use the grassy knoll as evidence to support their theory, but most seem to think if there was a second shooter it would likely have been part of the CIA or organised crime conspiracies, rather than any kind of Soviet assassin.
[00:19:38] Despite this, no evidence of any shooter on the grassy knoll has ever been found.
[00:19:43] Finally, our last theory is a little stranger: it's that of the so-called ‘umbrella man’.
[00:19:52] On the day Kennedy was killed, despite it being November, it was an unusually warm and dry day.
[00:20:00] Certainly not the weather for an umbrella.
[00:20:04] Yet photos from the assassination revealed a man holding an open umbrella in the air as Kennedy was killed.
[00:20:13] So, what was he doing there, and why was he holding an umbrella?
[00:20:18] Some conspiracy theorists believe that this umbrella wasn’t just an umbrella, that it was a James Bond-style weapon which could fire tranquiliser darts.
[00:20:30] The theory goes that this ‘umbrella man’ shot a dart from his umbrella to disable Kennedy, to stop him from moving, so that Oswald had an easier shot.
[00:20:43] As ridiculous or far-fetched as this might perhaps sound, in 1975 a CIA weapons expert testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA did have these types of umbrella weapons back in 1963.
[00:21:01] Other people believe that this ‘umbrella man’ was signalling to the shooter or shooters, but it’s not entirely clear why.
[00:21:11] And as entertaining as a poison dart shooting umbrella is, it’s one of the more fanciful, or unlikely, JFK theories.
[00:21:20] In fact, in 1978 a man named Louie Steven Witt claimed he was "umbrella man" and that it was all a big misunderstanding.
[00:21:32] The reason he had an umbrella that day was, he told the Committee on Assassinations, because he was going to heckle Kennedy, meaning to shout at him, taunt or jeer him.
[00:21:46] The umbrella, Witt said, was a way of mocking JFK's father for his support of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had made the mistake of appeasing Adolf Hitler.
[00:21:58] "Someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family," Witt explained. "I was just going along to do a little heckling.
[00:22:06] There are countless conspiracies about the killing of President John F. Kennedy, and today we’ve just heard about a handful of the more popular ones.
[00:22:16] This happened almost 60 years ago now, and anyone suspected of being involved in some conspiracy is now long dead.
[00:22:25] It’s perhaps no surprise that this is the mother of all conspiracy theories, the most seductive of them all, filled with strange clues and unusual happenings.
[00:22:38] Perhaps the reason it’s so seductive is that it’s a lot more exciting than the truth, or at least, the official version.
[00:22:46] The official version is that one man acted alone, he was simply a weirdo who failed to belong.
[00:22:55] The unofficial versions, the conspiracies, involve everything from the CIA to the Soviets, the mafia to poisoned darts.
[00:23:04] Perhaps it’s no surprise that we find these conspiracy theories so alluring.
[00:23:09] And with nobody to disprove them, to tell us otherwise, I think we’ll find them alluring for many years to come.
[00:23:19] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Who Killed JFK?
[00:23:24] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Kennedy’s death, and Lee Harvey Oswald, and the seemingly endless conspiracies theories people come up with, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:23:38] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:42] Which of the theories do you find most convincing?
[00:23:45] Do you believe the official version of events?
[00:23:47] Are there any JFK theories you know of that we haven't included and that you find particularly alluring?
[00:23:55] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:59] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is a follow-up episode to the last one, where we looked at the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald - his troubled upbringing, his time in the Marines, and his defection to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:34] And of course, we looked at the event that he is synonymous with, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
[00:00:43] So, in this episode we will look at some of the most popular and most outlandish of the conspiracy theories about what really happened.
[00:00:52] Was Oswald really a lone gunman?
[00:00:55] Was he sent by the Soviets?
[00:00:57] Or perhaps the CIA?
[00:00:59] Was the American mafia involved?
[00:01:02] Ultimately, who killed JFK?
[00:01:06] On a quick “admin note”, if you haven’t listened to the last episode, the one on Lee Harvey Oswald, I would recommend you do that first, because we will be referring to the events of November the 22nd of 1963 in quite some detail.
[00:01:22] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about JFK conspiracy theories.
[00:01:30] In 2016, as Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination, he did a phone interview with his favourite TV channel, Fox News.
[00:01:40] One of Trump’s main rivals in the race at that time was a man named Ted Cruz.
[00:01:47] During this phone interview Trump attacked his rival and began making some bizarre claims, to say the least.
[00:01:56] But he didn’t attack Cruz on policy or campaign funding - he attacked his father.
[00:02:04] Here’s Trump, in his own words.
[00:02:07] His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being, you know, shot, I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? Right? Prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don't even talk about that. That was reported. Uh, and nobody talks about it, but I think it's horrible.
[00:02:23] Now, I know that wasn’t particularly easy to follow, but Trump there was claiming that Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the murder of JFK.
[00:02:34] As you will know, Donald Trump has what we might call a selective relationship with the truth, and indeed Ted Cruz would come back to Trump’s accusation saying “this man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies”.
[00:02:53] You may also recall that Ted Cruz would go on to become one of Trump’s staunchest supporters but that is a story for another day.
[00:03:02] What we are asking today is what was a potential presidential nominee - indeed, the future president - doing spreading conspiracy theories about Lee Harvey Oswald?
[00:03:15] He was, of course, trying to discredit his political rival, but perhaps it was more than that.
[00:03:22] Perhaps Trump was appealing to a specific section of the American voters - those inclined to believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the official version of events.
[00:03:34] And here he was talking about the most popular American conspiracy theory of all time, the theory that there was something fishy about the assassination of JFK.
[00:03:47] Now, in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, at the end of November of 1963, there was an official commission set up to investigate what had happened and how the former President was killed.
[00:04:02] It was called the Warren Commission, and was led by a man named Earl Warren, a highly respected US lawyer and politician.
[00:04:11] It concluded that both Oswald and Ruby were lone gunmen - that is to say, acting as two independent shooters. Oswald killed Kennedy and Ruby then killed Oswald without any outside help or bigger conspiracy.
[00:04:29] Yet as you heard in the previous episode, this official verdict was not accepted by everyone.
[00:04:38] Indeed, one survey now suggests that a whopping 81% of Americans don’t believe the official version of events.
[00:04:49] Even back then, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there were plenty of Americans who were sceptical of the official version of events.
[00:04:59] Polling based on data taken from December of 1963 - so, just weeks after Kennedy’s death - found that 52 percent of Americans believed more than one person was involved, and only 29 percent believed Oswald acted alone.
[00:05:18] Fast forward a decade or so to the mid-1970 and the distrust had grown even more following the Watergate scandal and release of the Pentagon Papers, which proved Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had lied to the American people about the Vietnam war.
[00:05:37] By the way, if you haven’t listened to episode number 238, which covers the Watergate Scandal in detail, you can do that after this episode to fully understand the collapse of public trust in American institutions.
[00:05:49] But back to JFK.
[00:05:51] After new footage of the shooting was released in 1975, which gave a clearer but also much bloodier view of the event, the government created another committee, somewhat ominously called the Select Committee on Assassinations.
[00:06:08] This committee was tasked primarily with taking another look at JFK’s assassination, but it also investigated another famous assassination, that of Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated in 1968, just a few years after Kennedy.
[00:06:26] Although the Committee concluded that there was no evidence of a Soviet or CIA conspiracy, it did state that there was, I quote, “probably” a second gunman on the “grassy knoll”.
[00:06:42] A knoll, by the way, is a slightly unusual term for a small hill, and it’s so linked to this historical event, in fact, that if you google “grassy knoll” most of the results will be about JFK.
[00:06:58] As you can probably imagine, this conclusion sent conspiracy theorists into overdrive and suggested to the country that something fishy, something suspicious, had happened and that the people had not been given the full story in 1963.
[00:07:16] Since then, hundreds of JFK conspiracies have emerged and it remains, to this day, one of the most popular events where the public don’t believe the official version.
[00:07:28] So, what are some of the most interesting and perhaps even believable about Oswald and Kennedy?
[00:07:36] There are some truly crazy theories out there, but the vast majority of JFK conspiracy theories have Oswald as the shooter - if not the only shooter - so in today’s episode we’ll be considering some of the more plausible, believable and mainstream, theories that involve Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:07:57] For our first theory, we’re going to look at the theory that Oswald was a Soviet hitman sent by the KGB to kill the American president.
[00:08:08] It does seem to make sense to start here because Oswald did, as we learned in the previous episode, defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.
[00:08:19] You can certainly see why people might believe this theory.
[00:08:23] It’s persuasive, and like all alluring conspiracy theories, it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
[00:08:30] That a trained marksman who defected to and lived in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could, in theory, be recruited by the KGB to become an assassin.
[00:08:42] Now, some believe Oswald was personally given the task by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and that he didn’t move back to the United States in 1962 because he wanted to, but to begin getting ready for his mission: the assassination of President Kennedy.
[00:09:02] The best or most popular evidence for this theory comes from Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in September of 1963, shortly before the assassination.
[00:09:15] Many people argue that there’s evidence that Oswald made contact with a Soviet spy in Mexico City, someone known as ‘comrade Kostin’, who one book claims was the head of “the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad.”
[00:09:31] Where this theory gets really interesting, however, is that there are some writers and journalists who claim that the Soviets then changed their mind about the assassination plot sometime between June of 1962 and April of 1963, and told Oswald the plan was off, they told him that he shouldn't kill Kennedy.
[00:09:55] But Oswald, who was keen to prove his loyalty to Kruschev and the USSR, went ahead with the plan and killed Kennedy anyway.
[00:10:06] As you probably remember from the previous episode, this version of events certainly lines up with the type of man Oswald was.
[00:10:15] He was an outsider, after all, a man always searching for his place in society.
[00:10:22] Believing that the emotionally unstable Oswald went ahead with the plan anyway to prove that he really belonged in the USSR is hardly difficult, and you can see why some people might believe it.
[00:10:35] This leads us to our second theory - that Kennedy’s assassination was an ‘inside job’, that is to say, a conspiracy not by Soviets or other outside forces, but by American political forces.
[00:10:50] And who are we talking about here?
[00:10:53] The CIA, of course.
[00:10:55] To put it simply, President Kennedy did not exactly have the best working relationship with CIA leaders.
[00:11:03] Before Kennedy arrived in the White House in 1961, the CIA had behaved as it liked without much oversight from the executive branch, from the president.
[00:11:15] This included all sorts of nefarious, criminal, behaviour all over the world, including working to overthrow governments, such as in Guatemala and Iran.
[00:11:26] Kennedy changed all of that, and preferred to take a more public, diplomatic approach to foreign affairs.
[00:11:35] In fact, it's even been reported that Kennedy once said he wished "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
[00:11:49] Though there are some who believe that Oswald was working directly with the CIA, if we consider what we learned about him in the previous episode, we know that’s probably unlikely - Oswald hated American capitalism and the US government, after all, and he was a loose cannon, he wasn’t particularly reliable.
[00:12:10] So where would the CIA fit into all of this?
[00:12:14] Well, first we must remember that all this happened at the height of the Cold War - a time when the threat of nuclear destruction made the Americans and Soviets incredibly paranoid and suspicious of one another.
[00:12:29] As we know, Oswald was interrogated when he returned to the United States in 1962, but there are several question marks over whether the CIA would simply have accepted that a former US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union had returned simply because he missed home?
[00:12:48] Several writers believe that the CIA was keeping a close eye, meaning carefully watching Oswald's movements in the U.S.
[00:12:58] They knew that he was involved in Cuban political activities and also that he had been to Mexico.
[00:13:05] So if they knew Lee Harvey Oswald was meeting Soviet spies in Mexico City, presumably to plan Kennedy’s assassination, why wasn’t anything done?
[00:13:16] Perhaps, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, the CIA knew about the assassination plan but did nothing to stop it.
[00:13:26] Perhaps they didn’t warn Washington and preferred to have Kennedy out of the picture, dead, and return to the previous non-interventional relationship between the White House and the CIA.
[00:13:40] Therefore, the CIA theory is less that they were directly involved in the assassination, and more that they knew it was coming and did nothing because it suited their political objectives.
[00:13:53] Clearly, the CIA has been involved in toppling many foreign leaders, so is it completely beyond the realms of possibility that it would also topple its own leader if that person was considered to be an inconvenience?
[00:14:09] For our third theory, we need to focus on Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald in the underground car park of the Dallas police department.
[00:14:20] As you may remember, Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner from Chicago who had settled in Dallas and made connections in the underground gambling, drug and prostitution markets, connections to the mafia, to the mob.
[00:14:34] But Ruby isn’t the only person with mob connections in this story.
[00:14:40] The Kennedy family was more than familiar with America’s criminal underworld.
[00:14:46] In fact, many believe that Kennedy’s father made his name - and most of his money - selling bootlegged alcohol during the Prohibition Era, and even that the mafia fixed the 1960 presidential election to ensure Kennedy’s victory.
[00:15:03] And if you know anything about Italian-American organised criminals, you’ll know they don’t do anything out of the kindness of their hearts, for free. They wanted a favour from JFK.
[00:15:16] And what they got was the opposite.
[00:15:19] The mob had extensive business ties in Cuba, which were put on ice after the island turned socialist. The mob hoped that Kennedy would overthrow Castro and they could open their hotels and casinos again, but what happened?
[00:15:36] Well, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a flop, it was a disaster. Kennedy was blamed for this.
[00:15:45] What’s more, Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, or Bobby Kennedy was closely investigating organised crime in his role as Attorney General.
[00:15:55] So, is it completely inconceivable that the American mafia had a hand in the assassination of JFK, as a sign of what happens when you don’t pay back your debts?
[00:16:07] In fact, it’s not just conspiracy theorists who believed this, JFK’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, according to one biographer, thought that the mob killed his older brother.
[00:16:20] So where do Oswald and Ruby fit into this?
[00:16:26] Essentially Oswald was the ‘fall guy’, meaning the scapegoat, or person to publicly take the blame, and in true Mafia style, Ruby would be the one to kill him, to silence him forever.
[00:16:39] Now, why would Ruby do that?
[00:16:43] Well, many believe that Ruby had more than mere connections to the mob, but that he had fallen deep into debt with Dallas’ criminal underworld and that killing Oswald was how he was asked to pay it off.
[00:16:57] This might sound like the plot of an overly dramatic Hollywood movie, but when Ruby was interviewed as part of the Warren Commission investigation, even though this commission had concluded that Ruby acted alone and shot Oswald as revenge for him killing JFK, Ruby told investigators that he was in danger and that he wouldn’t tell the truth until he was moved to a safe location.
[00:17:25] Ruby died a few years later, in January 1967, meaning nobody would ever know the extent of his murky mafia connections.
[00:17:36] Now, all of the conspiracies we’ve heard about so far put Oswald at the centre of a conspiracy - making him the gunman on behalf of someone, or something else.
[00:17:48] Many conspiracies, however, including these popular and perhaps more plausible ones, also suggest that Oswald wasn’t alone and that there was more than one gunman.
[00:18:02] This theory comes down to one thing: the infamous ‘grassy knoll.’
[00:18:08] As you heard in the previous episode, there was a small grassy knoll, a small grassy hill, beside the road where Kennedy’s limousine was driving.
[00:18:19] In fact, in the aftermath of the shooting, most witnesses said they thought the shots had come from the grassy knoll and not the direction of the Texas Book Depository.
[00:18:31] In 1965, interviews with 121 witnesses found that 51 believed the shots came from the grassy knoll, 32 from the book depository, and 38 could not say.
[00:18:46] As you might remember, the grassy knoll was also the first place the police on the scene searched, before they went up to the depository building.
[00:18:56] But who would the second shooter be?
[00:18:59] This is where we get into the complicated theorising of conspiracies - if there’s evidence of shots fired from the grassy knoll, then it could have been anyone.
[00:19:08] Was it a Soviet spy working with Oswald?
[00:19:12] A mafia hitman?
[00:19:14] A rogue CIA agent?
[00:19:17] Almost all the Kennedy assassination conspiracies use the grassy knoll as evidence to support their theory, but most seem to think if there was a second shooter it would likely have been part of the CIA or organised crime conspiracies, rather than any kind of Soviet assassin.
[00:19:38] Despite this, no evidence of any shooter on the grassy knoll has ever been found.
[00:19:43] Finally, our last theory is a little stranger: it's that of the so-called ‘umbrella man’.
[00:19:52] On the day Kennedy was killed, despite it being November, it was an unusually warm and dry day.
[00:20:00] Certainly not the weather for an umbrella.
[00:20:04] Yet photos from the assassination revealed a man holding an open umbrella in the air as Kennedy was killed.
[00:20:13] So, what was he doing there, and why was he holding an umbrella?
[00:20:18] Some conspiracy theorists believe that this umbrella wasn’t just an umbrella, that it was a James Bond-style weapon which could fire tranquiliser darts.
[00:20:30] The theory goes that this ‘umbrella man’ shot a dart from his umbrella to disable Kennedy, to stop him from moving, so that Oswald had an easier shot.
[00:20:43] As ridiculous or far-fetched as this might perhaps sound, in 1975 a CIA weapons expert testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA did have these types of umbrella weapons back in 1963.
[00:21:01] Other people believe that this ‘umbrella man’ was signalling to the shooter or shooters, but it’s not entirely clear why.
[00:21:11] And as entertaining as a poison dart shooting umbrella is, it’s one of the more fanciful, or unlikely, JFK theories.
[00:21:20] In fact, in 1978 a man named Louie Steven Witt claimed he was "umbrella man" and that it was all a big misunderstanding.
[00:21:32] The reason he had an umbrella that day was, he told the Committee on Assassinations, because he was going to heckle Kennedy, meaning to shout at him, taunt or jeer him.
[00:21:46] The umbrella, Witt said, was a way of mocking JFK's father for his support of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had made the mistake of appeasing Adolf Hitler.
[00:21:58] "Someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family," Witt explained. "I was just going along to do a little heckling.
[00:22:06] There are countless conspiracies about the killing of President John F. Kennedy, and today we’ve just heard about a handful of the more popular ones.
[00:22:16] This happened almost 60 years ago now, and anyone suspected of being involved in some conspiracy is now long dead.
[00:22:25] It’s perhaps no surprise that this is the mother of all conspiracy theories, the most seductive of them all, filled with strange clues and unusual happenings.
[00:22:38] Perhaps the reason it’s so seductive is that it’s a lot more exciting than the truth, or at least, the official version.
[00:22:46] The official version is that one man acted alone, he was simply a weirdo who failed to belong.
[00:22:55] The unofficial versions, the conspiracies, involve everything from the CIA to the Soviets, the mafia to poisoned darts.
[00:23:04] Perhaps it’s no surprise that we find these conspiracy theories so alluring.
[00:23:09] And with nobody to disprove them, to tell us otherwise, I think we’ll find them alluring for many years to come.
[00:23:19] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Who Killed JFK?
[00:23:24] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Kennedy’s death, and Lee Harvey Oswald, and the seemingly endless conspiracies theories people come up with, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:23:38] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:42] Which of the theories do you find most convincing?
[00:23:45] Do you believe the official version of events?
[00:23:47] Are there any JFK theories you know of that we haven't included and that you find particularly alluring?
[00:23:55] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:59] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is a follow-up episode to the last one, where we looked at the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald - his troubled upbringing, his time in the Marines, and his defection to the Soviet Union.
[00:00:34] And of course, we looked at the event that he is synonymous with, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
[00:00:43] So, in this episode we will look at some of the most popular and most outlandish of the conspiracy theories about what really happened.
[00:00:52] Was Oswald really a lone gunman?
[00:00:55] Was he sent by the Soviets?
[00:00:57] Or perhaps the CIA?
[00:00:59] Was the American mafia involved?
[00:01:02] Ultimately, who killed JFK?
[00:01:06] On a quick “admin note”, if you haven’t listened to the last episode, the one on Lee Harvey Oswald, I would recommend you do that first, because we will be referring to the events of November the 22nd of 1963 in quite some detail.
[00:01:22] OK, let’s get right into it and talk about JFK conspiracy theories.
[00:01:30] In 2016, as Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination, he did a phone interview with his favourite TV channel, Fox News.
[00:01:40] One of Trump’s main rivals in the race at that time was a man named Ted Cruz.
[00:01:47] During this phone interview Trump attacked his rival and began making some bizarre claims, to say the least.
[00:01:56] But he didn’t attack Cruz on policy or campaign funding - he attacked his father.
[00:02:04] Here’s Trump, in his own words.
[00:02:07] His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being, you know, shot, I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? Right? Prior to his being shot? And nobody even brings it up. I mean, they don't even talk about that. That was reported. Uh, and nobody talks about it, but I think it's horrible.
[00:02:23] Now, I know that wasn’t particularly easy to follow, but Trump there was claiming that Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the murder of JFK.
[00:02:34] As you will know, Donald Trump has what we might call a selective relationship with the truth, and indeed Ted Cruz would come back to Trump’s accusation saying “this man is a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies”.
[00:02:53] You may also recall that Ted Cruz would go on to become one of Trump’s staunchest supporters but that is a story for another day.
[00:03:02] What we are asking today is what was a potential presidential nominee - indeed, the future president - doing spreading conspiracy theories about Lee Harvey Oswald?
[00:03:15] He was, of course, trying to discredit his political rival, but perhaps it was more than that.
[00:03:22] Perhaps Trump was appealing to a specific section of the American voters - those inclined to believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the official version of events.
[00:03:34] And here he was talking about the most popular American conspiracy theory of all time, the theory that there was something fishy about the assassination of JFK.
[00:03:47] Now, in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, at the end of November of 1963, there was an official commission set up to investigate what had happened and how the former President was killed.
[00:04:02] It was called the Warren Commission, and was led by a man named Earl Warren, a highly respected US lawyer and politician.
[00:04:11] It concluded that both Oswald and Ruby were lone gunmen - that is to say, acting as two independent shooters. Oswald killed Kennedy and Ruby then killed Oswald without any outside help or bigger conspiracy.
[00:04:29] Yet as you heard in the previous episode, this official verdict was not accepted by everyone.
[00:04:38] Indeed, one survey now suggests that a whopping 81% of Americans don’t believe the official version of events.
[00:04:49] Even back then, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there were plenty of Americans who were sceptical of the official version of events.
[00:04:59] Polling based on data taken from December of 1963 - so, just weeks after Kennedy’s death - found that 52 percent of Americans believed more than one person was involved, and only 29 percent believed Oswald acted alone.
[00:05:18] Fast forward a decade or so to the mid-1970 and the distrust had grown even more following the Watergate scandal and release of the Pentagon Papers, which proved Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, had lied to the American people about the Vietnam war.
[00:05:37] By the way, if you haven’t listened to episode number 238, which covers the Watergate Scandal in detail, you can do that after this episode to fully understand the collapse of public trust in American institutions.
[00:05:49] But back to JFK.
[00:05:51] After new footage of the shooting was released in 1975, which gave a clearer but also much bloodier view of the event, the government created another committee, somewhat ominously called the Select Committee on Assassinations.
[00:06:08] This committee was tasked primarily with taking another look at JFK’s assassination, but it also investigated another famous assassination, that of Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated in 1968, just a few years after Kennedy.
[00:06:26] Although the Committee concluded that there was no evidence of a Soviet or CIA conspiracy, it did state that there was, I quote, “probably” a second gunman on the “grassy knoll”.
[00:06:42] A knoll, by the way, is a slightly unusual term for a small hill, and it’s so linked to this historical event, in fact, that if you google “grassy knoll” most of the results will be about JFK.
[00:06:58] As you can probably imagine, this conclusion sent conspiracy theorists into overdrive and suggested to the country that something fishy, something suspicious, had happened and that the people had not been given the full story in 1963.
[00:07:16] Since then, hundreds of JFK conspiracies have emerged and it remains, to this day, one of the most popular events where the public don’t believe the official version.
[00:07:28] So, what are some of the most interesting and perhaps even believable about Oswald and Kennedy?
[00:07:36] There are some truly crazy theories out there, but the vast majority of JFK conspiracy theories have Oswald as the shooter - if not the only shooter - so in today’s episode we’ll be considering some of the more plausible, believable and mainstream, theories that involve Lee Harvey Oswald.
[00:07:57] For our first theory, we’re going to look at the theory that Oswald was a Soviet hitman sent by the KGB to kill the American president.
[00:08:08] It does seem to make sense to start here because Oswald did, as we learned in the previous episode, defect to the Soviet Union in 1959.
[00:08:19] You can certainly see why people might believe this theory.
[00:08:23] It’s persuasive, and like all alluring conspiracy theories, it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
[00:08:30] That a trained marksman who defected to and lived in the Soviet Union during the Cold War could, in theory, be recruited by the KGB to become an assassin.
[00:08:42] Now, some believe Oswald was personally given the task by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and that he didn’t move back to the United States in 1962 because he wanted to, but to begin getting ready for his mission: the assassination of President Kennedy.
[00:09:02] The best or most popular evidence for this theory comes from Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in September of 1963, shortly before the assassination.
[00:09:15] Many people argue that there’s evidence that Oswald made contact with a Soviet spy in Mexico City, someone known as ‘comrade Kostin’, who one book claims was the head of “the KGB’s Thirteenth Department for assassinations abroad.”
[00:09:31] Where this theory gets really interesting, however, is that there are some writers and journalists who claim that the Soviets then changed their mind about the assassination plot sometime between June of 1962 and April of 1963, and told Oswald the plan was off, they told him that he shouldn't kill Kennedy.
[00:09:55] But Oswald, who was keen to prove his loyalty to Kruschev and the USSR, went ahead with the plan and killed Kennedy anyway.
[00:10:06] As you probably remember from the previous episode, this version of events certainly lines up with the type of man Oswald was.
[00:10:15] He was an outsider, after all, a man always searching for his place in society.
[00:10:22] Believing that the emotionally unstable Oswald went ahead with the plan anyway to prove that he really belonged in the USSR is hardly difficult, and you can see why some people might believe it.
[00:10:35] This leads us to our second theory - that Kennedy’s assassination was an ‘inside job’, that is to say, a conspiracy not by Soviets or other outside forces, but by American political forces.
[00:10:50] And who are we talking about here?
[00:10:53] The CIA, of course.
[00:10:55] To put it simply, President Kennedy did not exactly have the best working relationship with CIA leaders.
[00:11:03] Before Kennedy arrived in the White House in 1961, the CIA had behaved as it liked without much oversight from the executive branch, from the president.
[00:11:15] This included all sorts of nefarious, criminal, behaviour all over the world, including working to overthrow governments, such as in Guatemala and Iran.
[00:11:26] Kennedy changed all of that, and preferred to take a more public, diplomatic approach to foreign affairs.
[00:11:35] In fact, it's even been reported that Kennedy once said he wished "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
[00:11:49] Though there are some who believe that Oswald was working directly with the CIA, if we consider what we learned about him in the previous episode, we know that’s probably unlikely - Oswald hated American capitalism and the US government, after all, and he was a loose cannon, he wasn’t particularly reliable.
[00:12:10] So where would the CIA fit into all of this?
[00:12:14] Well, first we must remember that all this happened at the height of the Cold War - a time when the threat of nuclear destruction made the Americans and Soviets incredibly paranoid and suspicious of one another.
[00:12:29] As we know, Oswald was interrogated when he returned to the United States in 1962, but there are several question marks over whether the CIA would simply have accepted that a former US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union had returned simply because he missed home?
[00:12:48] Several writers believe that the CIA was keeping a close eye, meaning carefully watching Oswald's movements in the U.S.
[00:12:58] They knew that he was involved in Cuban political activities and also that he had been to Mexico.
[00:13:05] So if they knew Lee Harvey Oswald was meeting Soviet spies in Mexico City, presumably to plan Kennedy’s assassination, why wasn’t anything done?
[00:13:16] Perhaps, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, the CIA knew about the assassination plan but did nothing to stop it.
[00:13:26] Perhaps they didn’t warn Washington and preferred to have Kennedy out of the picture, dead, and return to the previous non-interventional relationship between the White House and the CIA.
[00:13:40] Therefore, the CIA theory is less that they were directly involved in the assassination, and more that they knew it was coming and did nothing because it suited their political objectives.
[00:13:53] Clearly, the CIA has been involved in toppling many foreign leaders, so is it completely beyond the realms of possibility that it would also topple its own leader if that person was considered to be an inconvenience?
[00:14:09] For our third theory, we need to focus on Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald in the underground car park of the Dallas police department.
[00:14:20] As you may remember, Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner from Chicago who had settled in Dallas and made connections in the underground gambling, drug and prostitution markets, connections to the mafia, to the mob.
[00:14:34] But Ruby isn’t the only person with mob connections in this story.
[00:14:40] The Kennedy family was more than familiar with America’s criminal underworld.
[00:14:46] In fact, many believe that Kennedy’s father made his name - and most of his money - selling bootlegged alcohol during the Prohibition Era, and even that the mafia fixed the 1960 presidential election to ensure Kennedy’s victory.
[00:15:03] And if you know anything about Italian-American organised criminals, you’ll know they don’t do anything out of the kindness of their hearts, for free. They wanted a favour from JFK.
[00:15:16] And what they got was the opposite.
[00:15:19] The mob had extensive business ties in Cuba, which were put on ice after the island turned socialist. The mob hoped that Kennedy would overthrow Castro and they could open their hotels and casinos again, but what happened?
[00:15:36] Well, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a flop, it was a disaster. Kennedy was blamed for this.
[00:15:45] What’s more, Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, or Bobby Kennedy was closely investigating organised crime in his role as Attorney General.
[00:15:55] So, is it completely inconceivable that the American mafia had a hand in the assassination of JFK, as a sign of what happens when you don’t pay back your debts?
[00:16:07] In fact, it’s not just conspiracy theorists who believed this, JFK’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, according to one biographer, thought that the mob killed his older brother.
[00:16:20] So where do Oswald and Ruby fit into this?
[00:16:26] Essentially Oswald was the ‘fall guy’, meaning the scapegoat, or person to publicly take the blame, and in true Mafia style, Ruby would be the one to kill him, to silence him forever.
[00:16:39] Now, why would Ruby do that?
[00:16:43] Well, many believe that Ruby had more than mere connections to the mob, but that he had fallen deep into debt with Dallas’ criminal underworld and that killing Oswald was how he was asked to pay it off.
[00:16:57] This might sound like the plot of an overly dramatic Hollywood movie, but when Ruby was interviewed as part of the Warren Commission investigation, even though this commission had concluded that Ruby acted alone and shot Oswald as revenge for him killing JFK, Ruby told investigators that he was in danger and that he wouldn’t tell the truth until he was moved to a safe location.
[00:17:25] Ruby died a few years later, in January 1967, meaning nobody would ever know the extent of his murky mafia connections.
[00:17:36] Now, all of the conspiracies we’ve heard about so far put Oswald at the centre of a conspiracy - making him the gunman on behalf of someone, or something else.
[00:17:48] Many conspiracies, however, including these popular and perhaps more plausible ones, also suggest that Oswald wasn’t alone and that there was more than one gunman.
[00:18:02] This theory comes down to one thing: the infamous ‘grassy knoll.’
[00:18:08] As you heard in the previous episode, there was a small grassy knoll, a small grassy hill, beside the road where Kennedy’s limousine was driving.
[00:18:19] In fact, in the aftermath of the shooting, most witnesses said they thought the shots had come from the grassy knoll and not the direction of the Texas Book Depository.
[00:18:31] In 1965, interviews with 121 witnesses found that 51 believed the shots came from the grassy knoll, 32 from the book depository, and 38 could not say.
[00:18:46] As you might remember, the grassy knoll was also the first place the police on the scene searched, before they went up to the depository building.
[00:18:56] But who would the second shooter be?
[00:18:59] This is where we get into the complicated theorising of conspiracies - if there’s evidence of shots fired from the grassy knoll, then it could have been anyone.
[00:19:08] Was it a Soviet spy working with Oswald?
[00:19:12] A mafia hitman?
[00:19:14] A rogue CIA agent?
[00:19:17] Almost all the Kennedy assassination conspiracies use the grassy knoll as evidence to support their theory, but most seem to think if there was a second shooter it would likely have been part of the CIA or organised crime conspiracies, rather than any kind of Soviet assassin.
[00:19:38] Despite this, no evidence of any shooter on the grassy knoll has ever been found.
[00:19:43] Finally, our last theory is a little stranger: it's that of the so-called ‘umbrella man’.
[00:19:52] On the day Kennedy was killed, despite it being November, it was an unusually warm and dry day.
[00:20:00] Certainly not the weather for an umbrella.
[00:20:04] Yet photos from the assassination revealed a man holding an open umbrella in the air as Kennedy was killed.
[00:20:13] So, what was he doing there, and why was he holding an umbrella?
[00:20:18] Some conspiracy theorists believe that this umbrella wasn’t just an umbrella, that it was a James Bond-style weapon which could fire tranquiliser darts.
[00:20:30] The theory goes that this ‘umbrella man’ shot a dart from his umbrella to disable Kennedy, to stop him from moving, so that Oswald had an easier shot.
[00:20:43] As ridiculous or far-fetched as this might perhaps sound, in 1975 a CIA weapons expert testified at the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA did have these types of umbrella weapons back in 1963.
[00:21:01] Other people believe that this ‘umbrella man’ was signalling to the shooter or shooters, but it’s not entirely clear why.
[00:21:11] And as entertaining as a poison dart shooting umbrella is, it’s one of the more fanciful, or unlikely, JFK theories.
[00:21:20] In fact, in 1978 a man named Louie Steven Witt claimed he was "umbrella man" and that it was all a big misunderstanding.
[00:21:32] The reason he had an umbrella that day was, he told the Committee on Assassinations, because he was going to heckle Kennedy, meaning to shout at him, taunt or jeer him.
[00:21:46] The umbrella, Witt said, was a way of mocking JFK's father for his support of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had made the mistake of appeasing Adolf Hitler.
[00:21:58] "Someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family," Witt explained. "I was just going along to do a little heckling.
[00:22:06] There are countless conspiracies about the killing of President John F. Kennedy, and today we’ve just heard about a handful of the more popular ones.
[00:22:16] This happened almost 60 years ago now, and anyone suspected of being involved in some conspiracy is now long dead.
[00:22:25] It’s perhaps no surprise that this is the mother of all conspiracy theories, the most seductive of them all, filled with strange clues and unusual happenings.
[00:22:38] Perhaps the reason it’s so seductive is that it’s a lot more exciting than the truth, or at least, the official version.
[00:22:46] The official version is that one man acted alone, he was simply a weirdo who failed to belong.
[00:22:55] The unofficial versions, the conspiracies, involve everything from the CIA to the Soviets, the mafia to poisoned darts.
[00:23:04] Perhaps it’s no surprise that we find these conspiracy theories so alluring.
[00:23:09] And with nobody to disprove them, to tell us otherwise, I think we’ll find them alluring for many years to come.
[00:23:19] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on Who Killed JFK?
[00:23:24] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about Kennedy’s death, and Lee Harvey Oswald, and the seemingly endless conspiracies theories people come up with, or this was the first time you’d ever heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:23:38] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:42] Which of the theories do you find most convincing?
[00:23:45] Do you believe the official version of events?
[00:23:47] Are there any JFK theories you know of that we haven't included and that you find particularly alluring?
[00:23:55] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:59] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
