November 22nd, 1963

PETER: As of this year, an estimated 40,000 books have been written about the presidency of John F. Kennedy. We can be sure that a good percentage of them have at least addressed the question of Kennedy’s assassination. But it was one film that has had arguably the largest impact on Americans’ understanding of that day in Dallas, and that’s the 1991 blockbuster JFK. It portrayed a vast conspiracy to kill the president that involved the CIA, FBI, mafia, and even White House players.

BRIAN: In an attempt to address the public commotion that followed the film’s release, Congress passed what’s known as the JFK Records Act. It mandated the declassification of all government records relating to the assassination.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: That really became the point at which I began to go to the National Archives and read systematically through the new material and try to understand what was the story that had not come out before.

BRIAN: This is Jefferson Morley. At the time, he was working as a reporter for The Washington Post. Since then, he’s become an assassination maven of sorts. I sat down with him to talk about what drew him to the story in the first place.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: By that time, I really sort of had a fear and loathing of theories. And I decided I would never write about JFK assassination theories– and I never have– but rather that I would always try and just report new facts. And so I decided to focus very narrowly on the CIA and a classic kind of investigative reporter’s question– what did the CIA know about Lee Harvey Oswald, and when did they know it?

And in fact, what the records that I found showed is that the CIA had been watching Lee Harvey Oswald very closely for four years before President Kennedy was killed, from when he defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 until he returned from Mexico City in October 1963. And if it had been known in November 1963 just how closely senior CIA officers had been watching Oswald, a lot of people would have lost their jobs at the CIA. It was a remarkable intelligence failure by very high ranking CIA officials.

BRIAN: And is that the big takeaway from your research, from your perspective, a massive intelligence failure? Or is there more?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: It’s very hard to tell was their intelligence failure a matter of negligence or was it a matter of reckless disregard. And I think we don’t have enough information to answer that question. A lot of CIA files have been destroyed. But there still are 1,100 CIA documents related to the assassination that have never been made public. And so it’s possible that in that material we will get some decisive new insights into the causes of the assassination.

BRIAN: So let me ask you, who killed Kennedy?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: You know, I don’t know. And I get in trouble with my conspiracy minded friends for saying that. You know what I say? There’s a lot of implausible theories about who killed Kennedy, and the notion that one man killed Kennedy for no reason is one of them. I think it’s more likely that Kennedy was killed by his enemies within his own government, which is something that Bobby and Jackie Kennedy thought, that’s something that Fidel Castro thought. It’s not an irrational or crazy way to look at it.

BRIAN: And if you had to put money on it, it’s your bet that that is the case, that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that came from within the government?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I mean, I’m genuinely not sure. But I lean that way.

BRIAN: I understand.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I think that’s more than 50% likely. How much more over 50% varies from day to day. Sometimes I go up to 80%, and sometimes I go down to 50.5%.

BRIAN: What makes you go up to 80?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I mean, when you see the official malfeasance that followed the assassination, when you see how often people in the CIA hid things from the Warren Commission, people in the FBI destroyed evidence, to me, it’s very hard to believe that they did all of that to hide nothing. Yes, the counterargument, people say, oh, Jeff, you know they’re a secretive agency. They were just hiding the fact that they were embarrassed.

Really? I think when people go to that lengths, when they risk– destroying evidence, that’s obstruction of justice. When people risk a felony, they’re doing that to hide nothing important? As a reporter, I’m skeptical.

BRIAN: Jeff, we are in the midst of a disastrous rollout of the Affordable Health Care Act. The government, it would appear, can’t even build a website that works. My question about this has always been how could a conspiracy from within the government be carried out so efficiently and then covered up so effectively– perfectly, you might say– for 50 years now.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s been covered up perfectly. Because after all, most people think that there was a conspiracy, and they think that because of the evidence that they’ve seen about the government’s handling of the investigation.

BRIAN: But Jeff, I mean, you yourself really don’t know what happened. When I say “perfectly,” I mean if somebody like you can’t tell me who killed Kennedy, then– well, nothing’s perfect– but it seems pretty near perfect.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, what we have is we have a lot of evidence in front of us. And if you think of evidence as bricks in a wall and proof is the wall, we don’t have a wall of proof in the Kennedy assassination. But we do have these stacks of bricks which tell us, one, Oswald was the object of close and constant attention.

BRIAN: Yes.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Two, the people who were paying attention to him were not surveillance personnel. They were operations officers. And so their job was to mount covert operations. And covert operations, as one CIA man famously said, are secret from inception to eternity.

BRIAN: And along with that, it sounds like you are almost more concerned with the cover-up that followed whatever reasons Kennedy was assassinated for than the assassination itself.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yeah. I mean, the cover-up is what matters to us today. The intellectual authors of Kennedy’s death, if there were any besides Oswald, are all dead. So there’s not going to be a criminal trial.

One thing that’s very striking about the Kennedy assassination is if you look at Americans’ confidence in government over time, it’s very high from the end of World War II. And it begins to decline in about October 1964, when the Warren Report is issued.

BRIAN: This is when it declines.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: That’s exactly when it declines.

BRIAN: You’re absolutely right.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: And it goes down. And it hasn’t really recovered. And I think clearing the air, I think historical reconciliation around this would be a way of regaining confidence in our collective purpose.

BRIAN: Jeff, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory today.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Glad to be here. Thank you.

BRIAN: Jefferson Morley moderates the website jfkfacts.org. He’s the author of Our Man in Mexico– Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.

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PETER: That’s going to do it for us today, but we’ll be waiting for you online. Pay us a visit at backstoryradio.org and let us know what conspiracy theory best represents our current moment. As always, you can find a lot of other BackStory extras on our Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr pages. Our handle is BackStoryRadio. Don’t be a stranger.