EXCLUSIVE: Whistleblower Cites Explosive Document and Describes the CIA's Secret JFK Archive

Source says the agency showed 'intent to deceive' assassination investigators

The entrance to the CIA facility in Herndon, Virginia, where secret JFK assassination records were held, according to a whistleblower who worked there. (Credit: Chad Nagle)

[Margot Williams, news research director for JFK Facts, contributed to this article.]

The CIA once housed its most sensitive secrets about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a two-story brick office block ringed by a chain link fence topped with barbed-wire along a busy boulevard near Dulles International Airport in suburban northern Virginia.

An authorized visitor to the building recalled entering the CIA Declassification Center on the first floor of the building, a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) that contained a room dedicated to records related to the murder of JFK on Nov. 22, 1963, an event that still reverberates in the fierce 2024 presidential campaign.

The room was guarded, the visitor said, by a voluble receptionist from New York City, who checked security credentials and required entrants to sign a log-in book. The woman never spoke of the material she guarded, the source said, probably because she had no “need to know.”

The visitor described the room as approximately 8 by 10 feet, “like a little public library,” lined with shelves holding books, banker’s boxes of documents, and artifacts related to JFK’s assassination, such as a gray plastic video case.

“It was labeled ‘Oswald in Mexico,’ or ‘Oswald in Mexico City,’ and it was dated September 1963,” the visitor recalled.

The detail is significant. If the CIA possesses film or video that depicts JFK’s accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, it would rewrite the JFK assassination story. The CIA has long denied it obtained any photographic imagery of Oswald during a visit to Cuban and Russian diplomatic offices six weeks before JFK was shot and killed in Dallas.

But the agency’s claim to the Warren Commission that its employees had only “minimal” knowledge of Oswald before JFK was killed has been called into question, most recently by the revelation last year that a CIA operations officer, reporting to counterintelligence chief James Angleton, had been reading Oswald’s mail for two years while Kennedy worked in the Oval Office. The existence of hidden photographic imagery of Oswald in Mexico City might be related to a CIA operation involving Kennedy’s accused killer that remains classified even today, 61 years after the shocking event.

The visitor says they did not open the video case or view its contents. Nevertheless their account is one of the most important stories I have come across in 30-plus years of JFK reporting. A CIA whistleblower is a rare thing, especially on the controversial, convoluted JFK story.

The visitor to the CIA’s JFK archive is not another Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who downloaded NSA files and shared them with reporters in 2011. The visitor said they did not remove or copy any documents from the room full of JFK files. The source asked not to be identified to forestall governmental retaliation.

“I wasn’t looking for JFK records,” the reluctant whistleblower said.

But they found one.

‘Blueprint for How to Hide Things’

Months later, the source said they inadvertently came across a JFK document that seemed disturbing. The document was not part of the JFK records room in the CIA Declassification Center that they had visited. Rather, it was held in another agency storage facility. The document concerned the JFK investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, known as the HSCA.

The HSCA was created in 1976 when Congress reopened the investigation of Kennedy’s murder amid revelations about CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders. After a three-year investigation, the committee concluded that “in all probability” JFK had been caught in crossfire and killed by conspirators who could not be identified.

The whistleblower said they read a 40-50-page report, produced by the office of the CIA’s Inspector General (IG) in the late 1970s. They said the document assessed whether the HSCA probe had compromised secret CIA operations. The source read the paper once carefully and returned it to an offsite facility, not to the JFK file room.

The classified IG report bothered the source because they felt it showed an “intent to deceive” the congressional investigators.

“It was a blueprint for how to hide things from the public and how to prevent investigative committees, appointed by Congress, from seeing documents that might incriminate offices of the government,” the source said.

“They conducted an investigation to see if they had succeeded in misleading the American public about Kennedy’s assassination and they concluded the lie had worked.”

No such document has been released in the thousands of pages of material made public since the 1990s, or in the JFK files declassified since 2017 on orders of Presidents Trump and Biden. No such document is listed among the 3,648 JFK records held by the National Archives that still contain redacted passages.

“The document sounds like it would fall within the statutory definition of an assassination record, so it should have been shared with the board,” said Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board. The ARRB, appointed by President Bill Clinton, reviewed and declassified more than a million pages of JFK records in the 1990s.

“If we had seen something like that,” Tunheim added, “we would have released it.”

Security is tight at the northern Virginia office building that held the CIA’s JFK assassination archive, according to a visitor. (Credit: Chad Nagle)

Memo for the Record

The CIA whistleblower said the IG report showed agency officials were concerned that HSCA counsel G. Robert Blakey, a former federal organized crime prosecutor, was demanding “a cache of documents about Mexico.”

The whistleblower said the document recounted how Agency officials had compiled three volumes of documents about CIA operations in Mexico City but removed certain documents while recognizing that they might have to disclose more if Blakey asked the right questions. When Blakey didn’t ask any questions, the CIA’s lawyers were relieved and caustic. The source recalled one CIA hand described Blakey as “the most intellectually uncurious human being I have ever associated with.”  

“Whatever it was they were concealing from the HSCA mattered a great deal to them,” the source said. “They were worried about the information in the documents withheld.”

In a 2021 telephone interview, Blakey, emeritus professor at University of Notre Dame Law School, confirmed that he reviewed secret files on Mexico at CIA headquarters in 1978, but rejected the idea he had been fooled.

"One of the first things I did was go over [to CIA headquarters] and get unrestricted access to everything," he said.

A Memorandum for the Record, declassified in 2005, lends credence to the visitor’s story. (This memo was not made public for 27 years after it was written, which gives you some idea of its sensitivity.) It summarizes a meeting in August 1978 between Blakey and the CIA’s deputy IG, Scott Breckinridge, in which Blakey was given a three-volume history of the CIA’s Mexico City station. The memo says Blakey “did not at any time raise any questions” about its contents.

The whistleblower said the IG report was probably written after this meeting. The document is “absolutely vital to correcting the historical record” of Kennedy’s assassination, they said. “It’s a real travesty it’s not out already.” 

‘Flat-Out’ CIA Breach

The CIA is known to have obstructed the congressional investigation in at least two ways.

In 2003, Blakey retracted his previous statements that the CIA had cooperated with the HSCA. “I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency cooperated with the committee,” he told PBS’ “Frontline” in 2003.

Blakey recalled that in 1978 Breckinridge had brought in a new Agency official, George Joannides, to serve as liaison to the committee without disclosing that Joannides had served undercover as the chief of covert action operations in the Miami station in 1963, and he had run a Cuban student group (code named AMSPELL) that generated propaganda within a day of JFK’s killing claiming Oswald and Cuban leader Fidel Castro were “the presumed assassins.” It was the first JFK conspiracy theory to reach public print, and it was paid for by Joannides and the CIA.

When, 15 years later, congressional investigators asked Joannides who was in charge of the group, he did not disclose anything about his handling or funding of the AMSPELL agents at the time of their contacts with Oswald. He was the answer to their question, and he said nothing.

“That the Agency would put a ‘material witness’ in as a ‘filter’ between the committee and its quests for documents,” Blakey declared, “was a flat-out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would cooperate with the investigation.”

George Joannides, CIA officer who duped JFK investigators in the 1970s. (Credit: CIA)

Joannides died in 1990. As I explained in a talk at the National Press Club in 2022, most of Joannides’ personnel file remains classified in 2024, with multiple memos about his “cover” and “intelligence methods” in 1963-64 and 1978 still
”denied in full” — for reasons of “national security.”

Breckinridge, a forceful career lawyer for the Agency, died in 2000. His papers, found in the University of Kentucky library, contain extensive criticism of the HSCA but no reference to Joannides or any IG report on how the CIA thwarted the congressional inquiry.

‘Coming and Going’

The CIA also told the HSCA that the agency had not obtained a photo of Oswald when he visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City six weeks before JFK’s assassination.

The congressional investigators doubted that claim after interviewing two retired CIA officers who said, independently, that Mexico City station chief Win Scott had shown them surveillance photos of Oswald. Their testimony led the committee to conclude that the CIA “probably” had obtained photos of Oswald in Mexico City.

The HSCA’s conclusion was corroborated last year. In an exclusive interview with JFK Facts, Andres Goyenechea, a former CIA employee who lives in Washington state, said he worked in the surveillance base overlooking the Soviet Embassy. His mother Greta Goyenechea (code name: LIEMPTY-14) was chief of the base for a decade and praised for competence by her CIA handlers. Goyenechea recalled that his mother told him that she had taken Oswald’s picture “coming and going” from the Soviet Embassy, and that she had delivered the film to the CIA’s courier.

Now we have another possible clue from the whistleblower: a video case, possibly from Mexico City, marked with Oswald’s name, contents unknown.

The CIA’s claim that its operatives did not photograph Oswald in Mexico City is less credible than ever.

She Took Lee Harvey Oswald’s Picture for the CIA

JFK in 2024

That JFK’s assassination still figures in campaign discourse is a testament to the legacy of political violence in America. Six decades after the attack in Dallas that claimed Kennedy’s life — and killed his evolving policy of winding down the nuclear arms race and Cold War conflicts in Cuba and Vietnam — JFK’s assassination still matters somehow.

The two recent attempts on the life of former President Donald Trump have only heightened interest in assassinations, the nature of conspiracies, the capabilities of law enforcement, and the need for transparency and accountability. Some lament the influence of “conspiracy theorists.” Others point to abundant evidence of high-level malfeasance in JFK’s assassination and speculate about official complicity in the attempts on Trump’s life. Today’s headlines explain why an ancient event like JFK’s murder is still relevant to our politics.

Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump deferred to the CIA on the last of the JFK files. Kamala Harris is not known to have a position on the issue.

Biden and Trump

And the JFK story is not just a matter of rhetoric and theories, but law and policy.

President Biden felt obliged to weigh in on the JFK files in June 2023, issuing a White House memo that ceded all decisions about the release of the remaining records to the CIA and National Security Agency, with no deadline for full disclosure.

Biden’s rivals have challenged that decision. In dropping his presidential candidacy in August, JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Trump had promised him he would if elected, release all of the files related to his uncle’s murder. At a campaign rally with Kennedy, Trump shouted that he would release the JFK files, reaping a round of sustained applause.

Skeptical JFK researchers noted that the 45th president could have released all of the files with a stroke of the pen in October 2017. Instead, he tweeted that all the JFK files had been released (they hadn’t) ahead of schedule (they weren’t).

And, in a second tweet that both his followers and detractors prefer to forget, Trump claimed he released the JFK files “in order to put any and all conspiracy theories to rest.” Yes, at least for a nano-second, Trump wanted the world to believe he was a good anti-conspiracist like his enemies at the New York Times and CIA.

Donald Trump, anti-conspiracy theorist. (Credit: Trump Twitter Archive)

Needless to say, Trump did not put any conspiracy theories to rest. Long after his forgotten tweets of October 2017, the debate about the causes and consequences of JFK’s murder still simmers in the media, new and old, from Politico to Tucker Carlson to Max Blumenthal to the Times itself.

What Is the CIA Hiding?

People often ask, why is the CIA still hiding anything about JFK’s assassination?

Well, when the CIA makes a false or misleading public statement, sometimes the purpose is to protect the confidentiality of the agency’s operations, to insure the U.S. government can “plausibly deny” involvement. So, the CIA surveillance photos of Oswald (taken by Greta Goyenechea and controlled by Mexico City Station Chief Win Scott) were most likely suppressed to prevent exposure of the “sources and methods” used in the operational activities involving Oswald. George Joannides’ personnel file is probably redacted for the same reason: to enable the CIA to plausibly deny knowledge of Oswald’s movements and motivation.

If publicly acknowledged, the Oswald video case and the IG report seen by the whistleblower would confirm a broader pattern of CIA obstruction of Congress concerning JFK’s assassination, Oswald, and Cuba operations in the fall of 1963 that remain classified to this day.

"We should see the document regardless of what it says," Blakey told me. "I’m unimpressed with the argument we can’t disclose these things.”

Fear of Prosecution

When the whistleblower first shared their story a few years ago, they declined to go public with the story on advice of legal counsel, which I understood.

Veteran national security lawyer Joshua Dratel told me Justice Department prosecutors “don’t like to look the other way” on potential violations of the laws governing the handling of classified information. “They don’t like to make exceptions,” he said. “They guard the franchise.“

Dratel cited the prosecution of former CIA director David Petraeus and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. They were insiders who took possession of classified documents without permission and faced criminal charges.

Since then, both Trump and Biden have been investigated for mishandling of classified documents. Trump defied law enforcement and willfully violated the law according to the Justice Department, and has been indicted on criminal charges, since dismissed by a federal judge. DOJ is appealing.

As for Biden, the Justice Department concluded he was a confused old man who had lost track of classified documents without intent to violate the law.

I asked Mark Zaid, national security attorney, if the JFK whistleblower could face prosecution. Via email, he replied.

“Any individual who has had authorized access to classified information is required by law to protect that information in perpetuity, unless of course it becomes declassified. That decision, however, is one for the government to make, not the individual. The potential criminal penalties that may apply do not distinguish between disclosing the actual document or verbally revealing its content.”

Nonetheless, the whistleblower changed their mind earlier this year. They told me that, as they get older and see the continuing secrecy around the JFK files, they are more disturbed and less worried. “I appreciate the legal concerns,” they said. “I’m not stupid. I don’t want to lose my job. But that’s not going to happen.”

“It’s important information,” they said of the document they read.

“Learning begins with figuring out what you don’t know. I don’t know the significance or the insignificance of the information I saw. It should be in the public domain. “

Doing Journalism

My reporting confirmed that the source had a security clearance, worked in the CIA facility, and had long experience in document retrieval.

In addition, I interviewed 10 current or former CIA employees, three former members of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB); two former HSCA investigators; and one State Department adviser to the CIA. All told, I spoke with seven people who said they had been in the CIA offices in the International Point office complex.

One of them corroborated the visitor’s story about the Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility on the first floor.

“I knew that there was a SCIF,” said a consultant who worked in the building and asked not to be identified by name. “I don’t know if there’s still a SCIF. I knew there was a SCIF for those [JFK] documents.”

Two other people who worked in the facility said there might have been a JFK archive in the SCIF but did not know of one. Four others said they had no knowledge of such a SCIF.

Carmen Medina, former director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. (Credit: US National Archives YouTube Channel)

Carmen Medina, former director of the Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, told me in a telephone interview, “whoever told you that may have been misinformed.”

“My recollection is that when a historian or a researcher wanted to look into a particular period of history of the agency, let’s say, that they would call up the records from the archives … it wasn’t like there were catacombs of information somehow available to people. That’s just not true as far as I’m aware.”

That may be true, but Medina’s explanation can also be heard as a “non-denial denial,” a statement that seems to dispute an allegation while deploying sufficient qualifiers so as to leave room for doubt.

Kenneth McDonald, the agency’s in-house historian in the 1990s, told me in a 2022 interview that he doubted there was a SCIF dedicated specifically to JFK records.

“I don’t think so, because a SCIF by definition is for code word, ultra-classified, material,” McDonald said. “As I recall, nothing much in the Kennedy records was code word material. I never heard of any SCIF dedicated to JFK records.”

I showed McDonald a 1979 CIA memo saying the agency’s JFK assassination files “should be kept and preserved within a segregated and secure area for at least 30 years.”

“I don’t recall it, but that sounds plausible,” McDonald allowed. “You want to sequester this stuff and make sure it was all there if you have to go back to it.”

Inspecting the CIA

I spoke with five former CIA officials who served in positions where they might have known about an IG report on the HSCA in the late 1970s. None said they knew of such a report, though none dismissed the possibility such a report was done.

The CIA inspector general, charged with reviewing the Agency's activities, sometimes weighs in on controversial issues. The agency’s IG reports, while often unread by indolent Washington journalists, are sometimes revealing.

Amid allegations the CIA had condoned drug trafficking among its clandestine allies, a 1998 IG report found that the CIA did indeed do business with seven different drug trafficking syndicates in the 1980s, all of which were known for importing tons of cocaine into the United States. Likewise, a 2004 IG report revealed that future CIA director Gina Haspel oversaw a black site where a suspected terrorist was tortured.

I asked John Helgerson, CIA Inspector General from 2002 to 2009 if his predecessors would have conducted an investigation into the impact of the HSCA on CIA operations.

“Well, perhaps, but by no means necessarily,” he replied. “There would be other offices that might well do it. Congressional Affairs might look into it or have some operational component with knowledge of the subject matter look into it. Inspectors generals don’t usually get involved unless there’s reason to believe there’s malfeasance or wrongdoing or criminal activity. … I don’t know what the predicate would be here.”

Dan Hardway, a former HSCA investigator who now practices law in West Virginia., said he “would not be surprised” if the CIA had conducted a security review of the congressional probe. “They would normally do something like that,” he said.

Hardway recounted clashing with Joannides 46 years ago when Congress sought sensitive JFK records that the agency didn’t want to share. He described the CIA’s attitude toward the HSCA as belligerent.

“They didn’t like us. ... I think they considered me and Eddie [Lopez, a fellow investigator] as security risks,” Hardway said.

The CIA’s Response

I called the Public Affairs Office in Langley and submitted four questions concerning the JFK archive and the document described by the whistleblower. After a few days of telephone tag, I was told I could attribute the following to a CIA spokesperson:

“Since the passage of the statute in 1992, CIA has been committed to the JFK Act’s goal of ensuring maximum transparency with respect to Government records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination,” the statement said.

The statement said nothing about the location of the JFK archive or the document in question. When parsed, the CIA’s comment exemplifies the art of the non-denial denial.

“CIA believes all of its information known to be directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has already been released.”

The emphases I have added highlight the craftiness of this reply.

The CIA “believes” is a statement of opinion. So, if contrary information emerges tomorrow — let’s say the IG report surfaces — the CIA can say “we didn’t lie, we believed” it had already been released. So, caveat emptor: This statement is untethered to fact.

And contrary to the statement’s implication, the law does not just require the release of records “directly related” to the assassination. The JFK Records Act requires the release of all “assassination-related” records. The definition of “assassination-related” in the law (and practice of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s) is quite broad, including records directly and indirectly related to JFK’s death.

The CIA’s statement does not deny any of the facts reported in this story. It does assert, falsely, that the CIA has no obligation to release the document seen by the whistleblower. In the same way, the CIA asserts — again falsely — that it has no obligation to release the Oswald surveillance photography or the Joannides personnel file.

The results are plain. Sixty-one years after the assassination of a sitting president, key pieces of the JFK assassination story are still beyond the reach of the people and Congress in an election year.

Penetrating the CIA

This is not a story about a conspiracy or a theory. It’s not a meme or misinformation. It’s neither a TikTok post nor touted by an influencer. It is investigative journalism about secret documents held in a nondescript office block 17 miles from the White House, where John F. Kennedy lived for a thousand days.

It’s about how — and why and where— the CIA still conceals certain records related to JFK’s assassination. It is about operational activities involving the photography of the assassin cum patsy Lee Harvey Oswald that remain classified to this day. And, with former President Trump promising to release the last of the JFK files now blocked by President Biden’s June 2023 order, it is a story relevant to the 2024 election.

If the CIA cannot locate the report, the whistleblower expressed confidence that they could, if allowed back into the CIA offices in Herndon and given the proper security clearance, retrieve the document.

“It has an alphanumerical value assigned to it,” the whistleblower said of the report. “It is indexed somewhere. I know it.”

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Do you have access to classified or confidential information about JFK’s assassination that you want to share on a confidential basis? Email me here: morleyj@proton.me. Or call me on Signal.

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