Mike Benz: JFK Files Open A Rare Window Into Inner Workings Of Intelligence Operations
Mike Benz looked at what we can learn from the newly-released "JFK Files" on "Newsmax" Thursday night.
"I don’t think the documents are nearly as instructive about the JFK story as they are about the inner workings of the CIA, State Department, and what we now call USAID," Benz said. "There are certainly interesting tidbits that are dropped, but I don’t think that you can really expect a smoking gun in cables from within the agency accused... I doubt that there would be a classified CIA cable suggesting that. These would be off-channel, so to speak."
"We ourselves, at that time, were assassinating world leaders. We had effectively assassinated Lumumba in Congo. We had assassinated, effectively, Allende in Chile."
"It took 12 years after that assassination for the CIA to hold up its heart attack gun, showing that they had devised a way to shoot people and make it look like they died of a heart attack rather than a bullet wound, so that it would look like they died spontaneously of health issues rather than being assassinated by the CIA."
"I’ve personally read, on my own streams, the CIA assassination guide from the late 1950s, just a few years before this," he said. "So, you know, this was a world at the time where assassination was not an uncommon thing from any of these networks involved."
"What this shows is, to me, that the penetration of the intelligence agencies into institutions that we still see today—for example, the role of the AFL-CIO and the unions that are a constant part of the cast of characters in these documents, where the CIA is reaching out to its contacts in organized crime and in the unions, where the CIA is working with the student groups and the protest movements, where the CIA is working with the universities and the intellectuals, where the CIA is actually arranging for the arrest of individuals in foreign countries."
"I don’t think the documents are nearly as instructive about the JFK story as they are about the inner workings of the CIA, State Department, and what we now call USAID," Benz said. "There are certainly interesting tidbits that are dropped, but I don’t think that you can really expect a smoking gun in cables from within the agency accused... I doubt that there would be a classified CIA cable suggesting that. These would be off-channel, so to speak."
"We ourselves, at that time, were assassinating world leaders. We had effectively assassinated Lumumba in Congo. We had assassinated, effectively, Allende in Chile."
"It took 12 years after that assassination for the CIA to hold up its heart attack gun, showing that they had devised a way to shoot people and make it look like they died of a heart attack rather than a bullet wound, so that it would look like they died spontaneously of health issues rather than being assassinated by the CIA."
"I’ve personally read, on my own streams, the CIA assassination guide from the late 1950s, just a few years before this," he said. "So, you know, this was a world at the time where assassination was not an uncommon thing from any of these networks involved."
"What this shows is, to me, that the penetration of the intelligence agencies into institutions that we still see today—for example, the role of the AFL-CIO and the unions that are a constant part of the cast of characters in these documents, where the CIA is reaching out to its contacts in organized crime and in the unions, where the CIA is working with the student groups and the protest movements, where the CIA is working with the universities and the intellectuals, where the CIA is actually arranging for the arrest of individuals in foreign countries."
MIKE BENZ: What I find most fascinating about the declassifications here are the elements of the structuring of intelligence work and statecraft and its penetration into the institutions, more so than about the JFK assassination itself. I don’t think anyone could have reasonably expected, you know, smoking gun stuff about the technical operations directed against the sitting president in cables from that president’s administration.
Remember, these have been 60 years, about 40 years before the digitization process. These records passed through, not just the CIA, inherited by Lyndon B. Johnson, whose name is all over these documents, frankly. And it was not only his CIA who took control of these records right after, but then it was George H.W. Bush, who was the CIA Director in the late 1970s. George H.W. Bush is also, curiously, a supporting character, I should say, in these documents.
But we’re at a really interesting moment in history where we are restructuring the intelligence agencies and the way they do their dirty work after the weaponization of these intelligence agencies against our own domestic citizenry, particularly during the past 8 to 10 years of Trump’s rise, fall, and rise again. We saw FBI counterintelligence, we saw CIA, we saw, you know, DOD weaponization.
And what this shows is, to me, that the penetration of the intelligence agencies into institutions that we still see today—for example, the role of the AFL-CIO and the unions that are a constant part of the cast of characters in these documents, where the CIA is reaching out to its contacts in organized crime and in the unions, where the CIA is working with the student groups and the protest movements, where the CIA is working with the universities and the intellectuals, where the CIA is actually arranging for the arrest of individuals in foreign countries.
There’s an incredible example in the declassified documents here where there’s a Mexican clerk, effectively, at one of the embassies, who makes contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, and the CIA is afraid of what she might say or wants to get more information on her. And so, they effectively get the Mexican government to arrest her. While their own documents say that we have to make sure that it doesn’t publicly look like this arrest is coming from us, we can provide questions to the interrogators, and we can lean on the Mexican government to arrest her, but we have to make sure that neither she, nor the Cubans who were working with her, nor the local population, thinks that this arrest came from us.
And you see these arrests happening to political figures all over the world today. You had a strange situation where the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested. You know, Telegram was the darling of the intelligence community for about a decade before that because it was used to promote anti-Putin riots in Russia. It was used to promote the Hong Kong unrest in 2019 through 2021. It was used to promote the riots on Maidan Square after around 2014—or that was really when Telegram began to come into creation. But then there was fear that Russian propaganda was spreading on Telegram, and that maybe Russia had backdoor access to Telegram, and that it wasn’t really encrypted. And so, they needed to put pressure on Pavel Durov. The problem is, he lived in Dubai, which is a non-extradition country. And so, the moment he stepped down in France -- you know, 72% of Ukrainians use Telegram—the whole military uses it, the entire parliament uses it. This is a major diplomatic statecraft issue, when he was arrested, because it potentially undermines the security of communications of the entire NATO war, so obviously, French prosecutors would have a conversation with the U.S. Embassy in Paris before that.
But the question is, did the communications go the other way? Was there a runback there of what we did in Mexico City during the JFK assassination? Did the State Department or did the CIA lean on the French to arrest Pavel Durov? We know that this happens all over the world today.
I’ve talked very publicly about the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cutout of the highest order, was literally conceived in the office of the CIA, just five years after the Church Committee hearings, when the CIA’s name was dirt, and they published a letter effectively to the new government of Poland, telling them who they must arrest from the previous government in order to stamp out populism and prevent the party who was just in power from ever returning to power again. Now, that’s Poland—that’s a partnered ally country.
If they’re arranging for the arrest of the politicians there, did they lean, for example, on the arrest of Bolsonaro in Brazil? We know that Bill Burns, the CIA Director, made a personal trip to Brazil in order to tell Bolsonaro not to question the results of an election five months away. We know the State Department pulled favors with Taiwan Semiconductor to get them chips for the voting machines that they have now mysteriously destroyed, and that Bolsonaro didn’t even want. They diverted them from the U.S. to Brazil just to build these voting machines. We sent the Pentagon down there—Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense—in order to threaten the military that, if they, you know, had an issue with the results of an election that hadn’t even happened yet, that it might reduce the arms sharing and the joint military work with the U.S. and Brazil.
DAVID HARRIS, NEWSMAX: So, let’s pull this up to a 40,000-foot view, if you will, because we’re running out of time. Everything you’re saying is fascinating. It really seems like there’s way more of a web of interconnected agencies and coordination than, obviously, some lone gunman that was able to take out a sitting president. But if you could summarize what you’ve seen so far—and I know, I know you’re going through and you’re clicking as many pages as you can—this is just eye-opening to the apparatus that’s been in place and the mechanisms that have been there, and the inner workings of agencies to basically do whatever they want to do: topple governments, take out leaders, silence individuals that they fear may have some information. In your opinion, of what you’ve seen, is there any water to what we were told, what we were taught—that it was just Lee Harvey Oswald, lone shooter, able to take out JFK? Is that what we’re saying is completely now blown out of the water? We could start there.
MIKE BENZ: I don’t know. I don’t think the documents are nearly as instructive about the JFK story as they are about the inner workings of the CIA, State Department, and what we now call USAID. You know, there are certainly interesting tidbits that are dropped, but I don’t think that you can really expect a smoking gun in cables from within the agency accused of—I mean, if Trump were assassinated by his own CIA, God forbid, I doubt that there would be a classified CIA cable suggesting that. These would be off-channel, so to speak. These would be done through interlocking—
DAVID HARRIS, NEWSMAX: What about this? And go—what about this document that was exposed, and I’m running out of time. I’m going to have to have you back for two blocks next time. But there was the—a file in there released where a CIA agent came home to New Jersey. He shared with some people, you know, allegedly, “The CIA did it—they did it.” And then he wound up dead, shot dead in an apartment or hotel somewhere, and it was labeled a suicide. What’s your take on that—just even that document on itself? Is that something that can be believed or trusted in any way? Final thoughts?
MIKE BENZ: Yes, I mean, that’s the case of Gary Underhill. I believe Ramparts reported on that, I believe, in the 1970s, and it was a scandal at the time. And there’s more details that appear to be coming out.
But the fact is, if you look at the JFK assassination story, and these sorts of strange suicides of key witnesses happen all over, up and down—I think there’s been something like 26 or 27 key witnesses who have wound up dead throughout the whole story, people who were set to testify in front of the various commissions and committees that were stood up for two decades in the aftermath of that—witnesses, widows, friends, whistleblowers.
So, you know, this is one more in a very long line, but you’re dealing with a very dirty side of the world here, whether or not it was directly or indirectly the CIA. The fact is, whether you’re talking about foreign governments, or you’re talking about the anti-Castro Cubans, or whether you’re talking about organized crime in the mafia, wet work is not an alien concept there.
I mean, we ourselves, at that time, were assassinating world leaders. We had effectively assassinated Lumumba in Congo. We had assassinated, effectively, Allende in Chile.
This was—actually, it took 12 years after that assassination for the CIA to hold up its heart attack gun, showing that they had devised a way to shoot people and make it look like they died of a heart attack rather than a bullet wound, so that it would look like they died spontaneously of health issues rather than being assassinated by the CIA. I’ve personally read, on my own streams, the CIA assassination guide from the late 1950s, just a few years before this.
So, you know, this was a world at the time where assassination was not an uncommon thing from any of these networks involved. But the question was, was there a node within the CIA? Did it go all the way up to James Jesus Angleton? Did it go all the way up to the high levels? Was there a rogue cell? You know, these are—no smoking gun yet.
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