GR: Let me start with or go to the books for just a bit. Tell me about Our Man in Mexico. How does that set the tone for the understanding of the intricate nature of how the CIA operates so surreptitiously?
JM: Yeah, you know, I got a call from a lawyer friend of mine and he said, Jeff, I got a client with a, it's got a really good story. And his client was Michael Scott, the son of Wynn Scott, who had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City from 1956 to 1969.
And Mark, my friend, was representing Michael in a FOIA lawsuit to obtain his father's manuscript. And his father had written a manuscript about his career, which had been seized by the CIA upon his death. Seized by James Angleton. And so Mark said – and I'd heard that story about something about Wynn Scott, the Mexico City stage diva. I didn't know anything about it, but then I thought, well, this is the real – and with his son, there's the story, right? It's a human-interest story. It's not history. It's son trying to find out about his father. So, I wrote that story for The Washington Post.
And I thought it was a really good story and would make a really good book. And so, I shopped a proposal around and nobody was interested because it wasn't a Kennedy conspiracy book. It was just a book about how the CIA worked, about one guy in the CIA who was not particularly famous. So – but years later, an academic press approached me, Kansas University Press.
And they said, do you want to write a book about Wynn Scott? And I said, sure, here's the proposal. And they said, we'll take it. So it wasn't a great advance. It wasn't a commercial advance, but it was something. And, you know when it's quality press, I wanted to work with somebody who was going to do a good job. And so they did a great job in putting together, fact checking it, editing it, peer review, you know, had to run it by people who were in the subject. And so, it tells the story of this extraordinary man. And there's a couple of things that are extraordinary about it. First, we hear often that the early days the CIA is thought of as very Ivy League, know, elitist type institution. But there was one person who said, you know, the CIA was half composed of scions of the Ivy League and half of men who were one generation from the plow.
And I thought that was a nice expression, one generation from the plow. That was when Scott, his dad worked on a strip of railroad in rural Alabama. He grew up in a boxcar. I mean, he grew up under very humble circumstances, but he was very smart. He went to University of Alabama. He went to University of Michigan, got a PhD in mathematics, became an FBI agent, and that led him to the CIA. So he was an extraordinarily interesting character that way.
And then he served in Mexico as station chief for 13 years. And you know, a station chief is the CIA's top person in a country, right? So typically, the CIA will leave, a station chief will serve no more than three or four years in any given place, because you just want fresh blood in there. You don't want to be trapped by somebody's sources.
The longer you stay there, the more likely you are to be penetrated by the enemy, et cetera, et cetera. And when Scott hung onto his job in one place for 13 years, so that was very almost unprecedented in the history of the CIA. So even within the CIA, he was something of a remarkable character. Now, that became my modus operandi. Now, I was well acquainted with the JFK story and I wrote the Wynn Scott story. And one of the reasons I never sold it was because I talked all about Wynn Scott and JFK. And the editors were like, well, who killed JFK? And I said, I don't know. They said, well, tell us. I said, well, I can't put that in this book. It's like I couldn't construct a JFK conspiracy theory and embed it in the story of Wynn Scott. And I didn't know who killed Kennedy. I still don't know who killed Kennedy. So that's why the book didn't sell. And I think that detached approach is actually what makes the book really interesting. Because who cares what I think about who killed Kennedy? That's not an interesting question. More or less just another jerk who's walking along with an opinion. Who cares? But what did Wynn Scott think about who killed JFK? That's a really interesting question because he's a really consequential guy. He was a station chief in Mexico, powerful guy, well respected in the CIA.
And he had the front row seat on this character named Lee Harvey Oswald, who comes strolling through multiple CIA surveillance operations doing what, exactly? And so what Wynn Scott thought of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, that's really interesting, and that's the kind of way where I want to point people to in understanding the story, because that's how I understand it. I don't understand it because I'm a smart guy and I figured out a conspiracy theory, and I'm going to sell it to you.
No thanks. I'm not that smart or I'm not that dumb. I just don't want to do that. But I can point out the factual circumstances, the real -world circumstances in which the assassination took place and what the people who were closest to those events and knew the most about them.
That's really interesting. And so our man in Mexico started with that premise and the ghost, the story of James Angleton. So, yeah, what did Jim Angleton think about the assassination? And so, the interesting part about the Angleton book is not only did he seize Winscott's manuscript, but he's also the guy who controlled the CIA's file on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was the person at the CIA who was the most interested in Oswald. And if the official story's true, that one man alone killed the president for no reason, you know, if that's true, then Jim Angleton should have lost his job after November 22nd because he had been watching that guy for four years and had plenty of indications of his politics, his personal life. He knew a lot about him. And The Ghost tells that story. And again, it's not a JFK conspiracy book and I don't tell you who killed JFK. I don't say Jim Angleton had to do it, but I tell you exactly what we know for sure about what he did. I think Angleton's responsibility for the assassination is large, whether it was inadvertent or advertent. That's a key question, maybe the key question.
