Building an atomic bomb during WW2 was even more complex than depicted in the move Oppenheimer. In fact, the nuclear fission material that fueled Oppenheimer’s famous Zarathustra moment, was actually made miles away in a government-created town–Oak Ridge, Tennessee–filled with mostly women hired and shipped into this ‘designed’ community.’

Project directors quickly figured out that female employees who obediently followed directions and just got on with the manufacture of the radiated balls were much easier to deal with than male scientists who questioned everything.

From her book “The Girls of Atomic City,” our guest Denise KIernan depicts what life in this top-secret, artificial community was like, and how the people working there felt when they discovered what their work was actually about following the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Retired FBI agent Pete Lapp helped capture Ana Montez, a Puerto Rican-born American and UVA alumna who was a senior analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency overseeing the Cuban account. For 17 years, she was also a spy for Cuba and was an avowed communist. Ironically, as many of four of Anna’s close family members worked for the FBI and despite Anna’s more extreme political views, assumed she was a loyal American.

From his book “Queen of Cuba,” Pete relates how Ana was identified as a potential national security risk, secretly investigated, and ultimately apprehended after years of committing espionage. He describes how she transmitted information and also shares his view of her psychology: Withdrawn, lonely, at odds with her father, and driven by her political convictions and personal disagreement with U.S. foreign policy (including its policy towards Nicaragua) rather than financial gain, by which so many other spies have been enticed.

Recruited while in college in 1983 during the Reagan administration by Cuban agent Marta Velasquez, (who was also a Puerto Richan-American) Ana’s steadfast career rise at the Department of Defense gave her increased access over time to information of value to Castro’s Cuba, stopping short of putting agents in personal peril. Cuban intelligence has been chronically underestimated over decades and makes Ana’s case a warning example of an organized program to infiltrate critical branches of the U.S. government, along with the recent apprehension of former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, whose been identified as a Cuban spy.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Part Two of this fascinating interview:

Douglas Horne is the preeminent JFK assassination expert and a former investigator with the official government JFK Assassination Records Review Board. He’s also the author of the five-volume book set titled: Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.

Recently he was one of the JFK Assassination experts who was called to testify before the House Oversight Task force on Declassification of Federal Secrets chaired by Congressman Anna Paulina Luna. Among his findings are shocking revelations about efforts by the government to alter the wounds to JFK’s head and body before the official autopsy, and changes that were made to the Zapruder film. For anyone seeking the truth about the Kennedy assassination and coverup, there isn’t a person who has done more investigation or delved deeper into that existing evidence than Douglas Horne.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com