Jefferson Morley & Trevor Fitzgibbon on The Pelle Neroth Taylor Show - 25 April 2024

GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and veteran journalist whose novelistic non-fiction books explore untold chapters in the history of the American nation. A skilled investigative reporter, Morley combines granular detail with storytelling verve to capture unknown realities of subjects as disparate as the Central Intelligence Agency and America’s legacy of racial violence.

Morley’s newest book, Scorpions Dance: The President, The Spymaster and Watergate, excavates the untold backstory of Watergate: How the subterranean relationship of two master Machiavellians–CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon–culminated in America’ greatest political scandal.

Morley’s 2017 book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, tells the story of a paranoid genius who was perhaps the most powerful unelected official in the U.S. government. At the height of the Cold War, Angleton’s secret influence extended from Moscow to London to Jerusalem to the Vatican, to the White House. If there is a “Deep State” in American life as some contend, Angleton was one of its Founding Fathers.

Morley’s trilogy of spies starts with Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. his 2008 biography of an improbable American spy. Winston Scott was an Alabama math teacher turned FBI agent who joined the CIA at its founding, became close friends with Angleton and became the chief of the agency’s Mexico City station in the 1960s. “Every decade or so a talented writer provides a genuinely new glimpse of the Central Intelligence Agency,” said historian Thomas Powers of the book.

Morley’s second book, Snow-Storm in August, was described by best-selling author David Mariniss as “History so fresh it feels alive.” A vivid account of a white riot that swept the nation’s capital 25 years before the Civil War, Snow-Storm’s “plunge beneath the surface of history exposes realities more true to daily experience than executive proclamations or speeches in Congress,” said the Washington Post. The Minneapolis Star Tribune called it “elegant and readable.”

Morley is one of the world’s leading authorities on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is editor of the blog, JFK Facts blog on Substack.

GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Trevor Scott FitzGibbon is president of Silent Partner and an award-winning PR strategist with more than 20 years of experience. His work has primarily focused on defending human rights, whistleblowers, and exposing corruption throughout his career.

His clients have ranged from Google Foundation and Amnesty International to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange Legal Defense, Pearl Jam, the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, and its legal fight against Chevron for its destruction of the Ecuadoran rainforest.