The JFK Facts Podcast

Rami Smatt, JFK Facts Helsinki Correspondent, joined our weekly live call to discuss his recent piece, The Finland File: How Did Oswald Get to the Soviet Union?

The declassified file that Rami discovered sheds new light on young Lee Harvey Oswald and how he got to the Soviet Union. Further study of the file begs the question: how did Oswald get to Finland?

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In our first episode of 2025, author and podcaster Aaron Good joins our show to talk about how the JFK assassination fits into the broader story of empire and covert power in the 21th century.

You can follow Aaron’s unique work on his podcast, American Exception.

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We return with a live show from earlier this month. Co-host Jefferson Morley spoke with listeners in a freewheeling discussion about The Oswald File, a new course that begins Wednesday, Oct 23rd. The group also discussed Dr. Jolly West and his strange place in the JFK assassination story.

If you would like to join the live call-in show, it is recorded each Thursday at 8 p.m. EST. JFK Facts emails a weekly reminder and the link to join the live call every Thursday afternoon.

The recorded version usually posts the following Tuesday.

If you want more information on The Oswald File course, please visit https://www.morleycourses.com/

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Steven Grant, creator of critically acclaimed comic books like Whisper, joins the JFK Facts Podcast to talk about “Badlands,” his fictionalized comic book series centered around the JFK assassination and its aftermath. Grant has many intriguing things to say about the mileu in which JFK was killed and the power of fiction to tell the truth.

You can read Grant’s insightful Afterword to the “Badlands” series here.

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[note: the original audio posted stated the date of LBJ and Hoover’s phone call incorrectly, this audio has been corrected. The correct date of the conversation was November 23rd, 1963.]

On today’s podcast, we play the entire 14-minute erased phone conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, while host Jefferson Morley puts the deleted recording in context.

This phone conversation was almost certainly deliberately erased, but more than 60 years after JFK’s death, we can still learn something from the eerie hiss of this destroyed historical record.

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JFK Facts and the Mary Ferrell Foundation are currently exploring ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) might be deployed to search, sort, and analyze the vast record of President Kennedy’s assassination. With its incredible capacity to synthesize information, AI chatbots seem to have great potential for historical research, especially in the JFK story where many questions remain about how a popular American president was shot dead in broad daylight and no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.

AI’s potential, alas, is not a deliverable.

The AI video firm Synthesia is offering a snippet of a virtual talking head (circulating on Twitter) who declaims about JFK’s assassination. Is she a real person or a CGI robot? The latter I think but who knows. She starts by saying, cryptically, “The future is overrated,” adding “Trust me I should know,” which sure sounds like the prelude to a scam, especially when followed up with a reference to Gerald Posner’s outdated book “Case Closed,” and concluding with this ungrammatical pensee: “The future knows it is Oswald alone.”

Come again, my little avatar? The future isn’t a person or a being so how can it know something? And, if this future-with-a-consciousness is “overrated,” then maybe its knowledge of the JFK story may be overrated too. Or maybe just non-existent.

In this case, AI is merely AI: Authenticated Ignorance.

JFK Facts and the Mary Ferrell Foundation will continue to explore how Large Language Models can assist in understanding the clandestine events culminated publicly on November 22 and the CIA coverup than followed. In recent years, JFK researchers have made a great strides in understanding the role of certain CIA officers in monitoring and manipulating Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing the president. There is more work to do and perhaps AI technologists can help.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation hosts an large, up-to-date, OCR’ed, and clean data set. We have useful prompts derived from years of JFK research. We have a vast international audience eager for JFK news and insights. We’re asking ourselves, “What can AI help us achieve?”

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[Note: An earlier version of this post mistakenly contained a different group discussion, which will be re-published at a later date]

Each set of circumstances surrounding the destruction of JFK assassination-related records — whether by a government agency or an individual — tells its own story. Taken together, these stories (as told in Chad Nagle’s ongoing series “Trail of Destruction") illuminate the extraordinary and disturbing lengths the U.S. government is prepared to go to advance the official narrative of the “lone gunman” in President Kennedy’s murder.

This week’s story comes from Hunter Leake, the CIA’s number two man in New Orleans, who disclosed he used Oswald for intelligence purposes.

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Fingeroth, the biographer of Marvel Comics mastermind Stan Lee, excavates the life and times and troubled mind of the man who committed murder on national television.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jfkfacts.substack.com/subscribe

On this week’s episode, I talk with James DiEugenio, author of five books on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, about a lesser-known aspect of the JFK story: Kennedy’s principled support for nationalist movements that threw off colonial rule after World War II. From Vietnam to Laos to Algeria to Congo to Cuba, Kennedy spoke eloquently for a new approach that supported the aspirations of colonized people to escape the old colonial powers, especially in Africa. It’s not a well-known story, so listen up.

JFK Facts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jfkfacts.substack.com/subscribe