Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

Today's episode is episode 307.

In the Kennedy assassination, we tend to fixate on the bolder, more prominent topics,

the motorcade in Dealey Plaza, the shots from the book depository,

what happened at Parkland or perhaps at the autopsy at Bethesda.

But there are so many characters that lurk in the margins. You know that from this podcast.

And one more of those important characters is the subject of our podcast today. He was a young man

who seems scripted from a Cold War thriller,

a young man whose family emigrated from Latvia, made their way to Germany and finally to the

United States. And in those early immersions of different cultures, he would learn how to speak

five languages, fluently. And like me,

you may be wondering just exactly how he mastered all of these. Was there help, so to speak,

from somewhere? I'm not implying anything. I'm just saying it. But despite his mastery of linguistics at an early age,

he would ultimately become a troubled American youth. Living out a checkered set of early years in the

states, years that were filled with some brushes with the law, and at one point he was implicated

in a series of robberies, among other things.

It doesn't appear that he shed any of those bad habits before he joined the United States Navy.

It is clear that he learned some things about communications equipment that might, as a JFK researcher, give you some pause.

More on that in a minute. And finally, he's a man who went racing away from

Philadelphia and heading straight for Dallas, just as the president's fate was about to be determined

...