Solving JFK

For sixty-three years, a shadowed figure has been standing in the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository, hiding in plain sight in the Wiegman and Darnell films of the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission never asked who he was. The House Select Committee on Assassinations never asked. The JFK research community calls him "Prayer Man" and there is now a serious, document-driven case that he is Lee Harvey Oswald, watching the motorcade from the front steps at the exact moment the official story says he was firing a rifle from six floors up. If that case is right, there is no case to answer.
In this bonus episode, Matt sits down with Bart Kamp, author of the 2023 book Prayer Man: More Than a Fuzzy Picture, for a deep dive into who Prayer Man is and into the second-floor lunchroom encounter between Oswald and Officer Marrion Baker that may never have happened at all. Along the way: the FBI agent who appears to have built the encounter from whole cloth, the smoking-gun Hosty interrogation note that has Oswald telling agents he went "outside to watch the parade," the Ochus Campbell quote in the New York Herald Tribune that puts Oswald on the first floor right after the shots, and the timing problem with the Hidell ID that links Oswald to the rifle. James DiEugenio called Kamp's book "a credible effort" that "goes literally to the heart of the basics of the JFK case." Hit play and judge for yourself.
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Author and researcher Larry Hancock returns to Solving JFK for his second Recap and Rebuttals episode, this time helping us pressure-test our five-part series on the Soviet Union as a potential culprit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We dig into Kennedy and Khrushchev's evolving relationship through Vienna, Berlin, and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie; the brink of nuclear war drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Cold War spy games surrounding Popov's Mole and Oswald's manipulated CIA file; JFK's late move toward peace and the limits of former CIA Director James Woolsey's theory that Khrushchev ordered the hit; and the newly released 350-page Russian document handed to Congresswoman Anna Paulina-Luna — including the bombshell that the "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter was a KGB forgery and the message Bobby and Jackie Kennedy sent to Khrushchev in December 1963 saying they believed the assassination was the result of a large political conspiracy.
Larry brings his document-grounded perspective to the question that runs through the whole series: did the Soviet Union have a hand in killing John F. Kennedy?

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In the final installment of our Soviet Union series, we examine a cache of newly released Russian documents handed to Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna by the Russian Ambassador in October 2025. These 350 pages, prepared under the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, offer a rare behind-the-curtain look at Soviet decision-making around Lee Harvey Oswald's defection, the Warren Commission, and the aftermath of the assassination. We weigh why Moscow released the files now and what they reveal about Khrushchev's private suspicion of a conspiracy.
Along the way, we unpack some genuine bombshells: a candid 1964 exchange between Warren Commissioner John McCloy and Soviet UN representative Nikolai Fedorenko, a William Walton memo carrying a message from Bobby and Jackie Kennedy to Khrushchev calling the assassination "the result of a large political conspiracy," and the definitive solution to the long-debated "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter, now proven to be a KGB forgery.

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We wrap up the Cold War context by looking at Kennedy's push for peace with Khrushchev in the final months of his life, including the American University speech, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and a secret Khrushchev letter proposing further cooperation that the State Department never even showed to the President. Then we stress-test former CIA Director James Woolsey's claim in "Operation Dragon" that Oswald killed Kennedy on Khrushchev's direct orders after meeting with Soviet assassination chief Valeriy Kostikov in Mexico City. The problem? FBI Director Hoover told LBJ the day after the assassination that the man at the Soviet Embassy was not Oswald. A suspicious letter to the Soviets contained information Oswald couldn't have known. And LBJ himself clearly didn't buy the Soviet conspiracy angle, but he used the threat of one to strong-arm Earl Warren into chairing the Commission and steering it toward the lone gunman conclusion.
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In Part 3 of our Soviet Union series, we dig into the Cold War spy games swirling around Lee Harvey Oswald and ask whether the KGB had a hand in JFK's assassination. The trail starts with Pyotr Popov, a Soviet military intelligence colonel who became a CIA defector-in-place in 1952 — and whose tip about a KGB mole hidden deep inside the CIA launched one of the most consequential mole hunts in Agency history. We trace how Popov was burned, how counterintelligence chief James Angleton became obsessed with finding "Popov's Mole," and how Oswald's strangely routed CIA file suggests he may have been used as "flypaper" by the Agency to smoke the mole out.
From there, we tackle the riddle of Yuri Nosenko, the KGB officer who defected just months after Dallas and conveniently insisted the Soviets had zero interest in Oswald. Was he a genuine defector — or a Soviet plant sent to clear Moscow of any role in Kennedy's murder? We walk through Pete Bagley's case against Nosenko, the bombshell 1994 admissions from former KGB chief Sergey Kondrashev, new evidence of real Soviet intelligence interest in Oswald, and Professor John Newman's startling theory about who Popov's Mole actually was — a man hiding in plain sight inside the CIA the entire time.
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