EXCLUSIVE: CIA Promises to Give Rep. Luna JFK Documents Within Weeks

The Florida Republican, chair of the House Task Force on Declassification, expects answers on assassination records

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

The CIA will release long-secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy within weeks, an Agency official promised Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets, on Friday.

In an interview with JFK Facts, Luna said she was told the CIA had located four of the five files that she demanded in a letter to CIA director John Ratcliffe last month.

“The timeline for release will be weeks,” Luna said. “The fact that they’ve delivered on what we asked for before is a good sign. I expect they will deliver again.”

Luna said the CIA official she spoke to told her he could not reveal which one of the files she requested has not been found by the Agency. The two-term Republican from Florida speculated that it was the personnel file of George Joannides, an undercover officer whose agents generated propaganda about Oswald before and after JFK was killed on November 22, 1963.

The Joannides file has been in the news since 2009 when the New York Times reported the CIA was “cagey” about its classified contents. In 2013, Associated Press and Fox News highlighted the continuing secrecy around the Joannides file on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death in 2013.

Twelve years later — and four months after Trump’s executive order on JFK files — the CIA is still unwilling to say publicly when it will produce any of the 44 top-secret documents in the file.

Luna said she has been working “diligently” with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to “close the loop” on the Joannides file.

Asked if the CIA was “slow walking” the release of JFK files, Luna replied she believes the agency personnel are acting in good faith to comply with Trump’s order.

Second JFK Hearing

Luna’s Task Force has scheduled a hearing on JFK files on Tuesday, May 20.

Witnesses include Judge John Tunheim, the former chair of the civilian panel that declassified millions of pages of JFK documents in recent years. In 2022 Tunheim called on President Biden to release the Joannides file in its entirety. Biden ignored the recommendation, the rare Biden policy that the Trump administration has continued to follow.

Dan Hardway, a congressional investigator who was personally deceived by Joannides in 1978, is also slated to testify at the hearing.

Abraham Bolden, a Secret Service agent who learned of a plot against JFK in November 1963, is also scheduled to testify remotely.

“We will address the documents that haven’t been disclosed at the hearing and hear from witnesses and then do a follow up once we find the remaining documents,” Luna said.

Biden pardons Abraham Bolden, the only Secret Service agent who sought JFK accountability

The Outstanding Files

Executive Order 14176, issued by President Trump in January, calls for “full and complete” disclosure of JFK records in the government’s possession. The 1992 JFK Records Act likewise gives all assassination-related material, “the presumption of immediate disclosure.”

Other documents that Luna says she has been promised by the CIA include:

• a 1979 report from the CIA Inspector General’s office about Congress’s JFK investigation which, a whistleblower told JFK Facts last October, showed an “intent to deceive JFK investigators.”

• The travel records of William K. Harvey, chief of the CIA’s assassination program in who reportedly visited Dallas in November 1963.

• The records of secret CIA program, code named AMSANTA, which a newly declassified record shows, sought to insert “controlled front penetrations” into a popular left-wing organization, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the spring and summer of 1963—the same period in which Oswald joined the group

• The file of Herminio Diaz, a Cuban gunman whose associates came to believe was involved in JFK’s assassination. In a newly released document, an FBI informant said four days after JFK’s murder that Diaz was working for the CIA.

“You can understand why everyone's pushing for this release,” Luna said she told the CIA official during the conversation on Friday. “It's been decades and previous directors blocked it. He was like, ‘No, no, the director is on board with full transparency. We are running these [documents] down. We've located them. We're going to be getting them to you.”

The Latest JFK Files

The release of JFK documents and testimony since the 1990s has undermined the official story of a “lone gunman.” While Rep. Luna was criticized in March for rejecting the “lone gunman” conclusion of the Warren Commission, she had solid evidence to back her position.

Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the Dallas doctors who tried to save JFK’s life, said in a popular YouTube video he was quite certain that JFK was killed by a shot fired from in front of his limousine—a shot that could not have been fired by Oswald, the accused assassin.

“That shot came from the grassy knoll,” McClelland said in a 2013 interview.

The full release of 77,000 pages of previously redacted JFK records on March 18 revealed new clues about the events that led to JFK’s assassination.

A declassified transcript showed CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton lied under oath about his mail surveillance of Oswald before Kennedy’s death, making him the third CIA official, besides Joannides and director Richard Helms, known to have lied about their knowledge of the accused assassin who denied killing Kennedy.

Another memo, long known but not fully declassified until March, revealed that Garret Underhill, an arms dealer associated with the CIA, told friends that a “small clique” in the Agency was responsible for JFK’s murder. When Underhill was found dead of a suicide, his friends doubted he had killed himself.