Review of 'Who Killed JFK' Episodes 5-6

Wikipedia says "sheep dipping is the immersion of sheep in water containing insecticides and fungicide." On another Wiki page, we learn that sheep dipping in military idiom is "to formally, and usually temporarily, transfer military equipment or personnel to non-military ownership for the purpose of its employment in covert action with less risk of triggering armed conflict."

Guess which kind of sheep dipping Episode 5 of Who Killed JFK? tells us the CIA did to Lee Harvey Oswald, to set him up as the "patsy" in their assassination of JFK? The answer is: all that sheep have to do with this is the American people and the world were led like sheep to believe that Oswald was the sole assassin in this horrendous history-changing crime.

Rob Reiner, Soledad O'Brien, and their experts give us painstaking details of how the CIA did this, making Oswald look like a supporter of Fidel Castro and his Soviet-allied Cuba when actually Oswald was just the opposite. And who do Reiner et al claim came up with this ingenuously devious plan? None other than James Jesus Angleton, aka the Poet Spy, the erudite, brilliant Chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA.

I have to say that this part of the incredible story the podcast is carefully telling is a bit less convincing than the forensic evidence laid out in prior episodes. The fact that at least one of the bullets came from the front not the back of JFK as he and Jackie and Connally and his wife rode through Dallas that day seems unimpeachable, unless all the experts talking in podcast are blatantly lying, which seems very unlikely. And if there was more than one shooter, that means 100% that the Warren Commission was lying, and at very least there was more than one person shooting at JFK.

But the CIA piece is important, because it seeks to establish or at least further demonstrate not only its motive in killing the President (anger over the Bay of Pigs and fury at the detente JFK was pursuing with Khrushchev) but the specific way they expressed that motive, and made his assassination actually happen, and in a way that didn't implicate the CIA.

Even as I write that, it seems like one tall order. I'm not completely convinced that Angleton was smart enough and powerful to pull that off (I certainly didn't know the man personally). But the evidence is piling up in this and the previous episode, and I'm 100-percent up to being further convinced.

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Episode 6 of the Who Killed JFK? podcast really hit paydirt with an account of Richard Case Nagell, given to Dick Russell, which provides the most convincing evidence I've heard so far that Lee Harvey was indeed a patsy, set up to take the fall for the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963.

Who was Nagel? He was a CIA double agent -- same as Oswald (according to Russell and this podcast), tasked by the Soviets, whom he wasn't really working for, to kill Oswald. Why? Reiner and Russell explain that the Soviets knew of the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and blame it on them (the Soviets), as a pretext for the U. S. to then invade Cuba and once and for all put Castro out of power. Extensively interviewed by Russell over a period 20 years before Nagell's death from a "heart attack" in 1995, Russell tells us in the podcast (and in his 2003 book about Nagell, The Man Who Knew Too Much) that Nagell was ordered by the Soviets to kill Oswald to prevent the assassination of JFK. This put Nagell "between a rock and a hard place," as O'Brien aptly puts it. If he follows the Soviet orders and kills Oswald, the CIA will likely kill him. If he doesn't follow those orders, the Soviets will do the same. Nagell tries to let Oswald know he's being set up, without being too specific, because Nagell doesn't want to bring CIA down on him. Oswald shrugs him off. So in a move that seems crazy if you don't know any of this background, Nagell walks into a bank in Dallas two months before JFK's assassination, and fires a gun in the air, twice. He wants to get arrested, because he figures that prison is the safest place to be, with potentially CIA and Soviet assassins both apt to kill him.

The CIA does eventually get Nagell with a "heart attack gun" (not science fiction, check it out online) in 1995, one day after the Assassinations Records Review Board (established by Congress in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992) sent Nagell a request for information. Fortunately for the truth, Nagell had already talked extensively with Russell in the preceding decades.

So where does this leave us? As I've said, earlier episodes of this podcast convinced me that, at very least, Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole shooter in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I'm now convinced that Oswald was far more than not the only shooter that day: he was indeed the "patsy," as Oswald after the assassination said he was, in the murder intricately plotted and carried out by the CIA to punish JFK for his failure to provide support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, prevent him from furthering peaceful relations with the Soviet Union, and we can now add, to provide a pretext for a US all-out attack on Cuba.

I'm looking forward more than ever to the next episodes in this crucially important podcast.