These Six Assassination Files Can Clarify the JFK Story in 2024
The government keeps these documents under wraps, while insisting there’s nothing to see.
“It’s unlikely that somewhere in a CIA vault they have a document that says we did it,” Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor told McClatchy News in December 2022 upon the release of several thousand JFK files that had long been partially classified. “So, I’m not exactly sure what people think they’re going to get.”
I have a pretty good idea of what we’re going get from the last of the JFK files: corroboration that certain top CIA officers were running a covert operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald when President John F. Kennedy was killed. Such disclosures will lend credence to Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien’s popular podcast “Who Killed JFK?” (7 million downloads and counting), which says the president was ambushed by enemies of his liberal foreign policies on Cuba, Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
What the Evidence Says
Reiner and O’Brien stand on solid factual ground in the telling of their tale. They show the preponderance of forensic and medical evidence that has emerged in recent years does not support the official version of the Kennedy’s murder — that the president was struck by two bullets fired from behind by an isolated sociopath.
On the question of the gunfire, the eyewitness testimony and the recollections of the doctors who tried to save JFK’s life indicate the president was struck by bullets from two different directions. Certainly, the evidence that Kennedy died in crossfire is stronger today than it was even 20 years ago. And so is the evidence that Oswald was monitored and used for clandestine purposes before November 22, 1963.
The government’s consistent record of destroying evidence is not irrelevant to Reiner and O’Brien’s judgment. The undeniable fact of persistent Executive Branch misconduct (as documented in Chad Nagle’s ongoing “Trail of Destruction” series on this site) further undermines the official story that the president was killed by one man who had no political motives.
After all, if one man alone killed JFK, one has to wonder why multiple government officials would repeatedly destroy records related to JFK’s assassination? Why would someone erase 14 minutes of a recording of a presidential conversation that took place the day after the murder? Why would CIA shred the assassination files of counterintelligence chief James Angleton who monitored Oswald? Why would Secret Service officials order the destruction of obviously relevant JFK records 30 years later?
I asked Uscinski, a scholar of conspiracy theories, why such secrecy persists, if not to conceal wrongdoing?
There could be lots of reasons that have nothing to do with wrongdoing. There is no way to know. There could also be, as you say, reasons having to do with wrongdoing. But even if it is wrongdoing, it might be some other wrongdoing that we might not expect.
Or it might prove that certain senior CIA officers were guilty of wrongdoing. That’s why we need full JFK disclosure: because we can’t be sure of what we don’t know.
The Good News
The good news is that the JFK assassination cover-up (and the fog of conspiracy theories) has been effectively pierced by something out of fashion these days: strong open government legislation passed by Congress.
The JFK Records Act, approved unanimously in 1992, forced the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Defense Department and other agencies to disgorge thousands of pages of assassination-related records they hoped would never see public view.
With the advent of the internet in the 1990s, the JFK files of these secretive agencies were digitized and made available to the world. The website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation has captured more than a million pages of searchable JFK files, most, but not all, of the government’s records on the subject.
With 99 percent of the government’s JFK files now nominally in public view (though not necessarily online), mainstream news anchors like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, CNN’s Abby Phillip, NewsNation’s Ross Couthart and NBC’s Chuck Todd have started to focus on the last one percent that remain redacted.
[Editor’s Note: “Redact” is a verb that means to censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.]
The Mary Ferrell Foundation, sponsor of the largest online collection of JFK records, is seeking three bodies of records via litigation in federal court: secret testimony of top CIA officials about assassination operations, the classified files of undercover officers who monitored Oswald and information about Secret Service records that were illegally destroyed in 1995.
Among those documents, a handful are especially sought by JFK researchers. This is what we think we’re going to get
Six Key Files
Of the more than 3,648 redacted assassination records known to be held by the government, I think six files are particularly important.
An entire page redacted from a 1961 White House memo details the secret CIA operations in Latin American that caused Kennedy’s aides, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Goodwin, to conclude the Agency had usurped the president’s foreign policy powers and should be reorganized. This memo marks the opening of a profound split between the White House and CIA that would only deepen over the next two and half years.
Several paragraphs blacked out in the plans for the Pentagon’s notorious Operation Northwoods detail a “false flag” scheme, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1963. The Northwoods plan, implemented by “the most trusted covert personnel,” called for staging a spectacular violent attack on a U.S. target and arranging for the blame to fall on Cuba. Northwoods, says Reiner, was the “template” for the Dallas ambush which was immediately blamed by CIA assets on a Castro supporter.
Removing redactions in the testimony of CIA assassination chief William K. Harvey and in the personnel file of Cuba operations chief David Phillips will shed light on their role in the surveillance of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the events of 1963. Reiner alleges Harvey and Phillips, along with counterintelligence chief James Angleton, plotted to kill the president.
The classified personnel file of Miami-based undercover officer George Joannides, which former JFK review board chair Judge John Tunheim has asked President Joe Biden to release. This file does not name Oswald, but it does identify the senior CIA officers (possibly including Angleton) who approved a compartmentalized operation, code named AMSPELL, which publicized Oswald’s pro-Castro activities before and after JFK was gunned down in Dallas. The 44 documents in this file will also reveal why Joannides received a CIA medal after stonewalling congressional investigators in 1978.
Missing “situation reports” from the CIA’s Miami station to the Langley headquarters detail a previously unknown investigation of JFK’s murder that focused on anti-Castro exiles, not Oswald. This internal CIA probe apparently did not confirm the government’s lone gunman story. The results of the Miami station investigation have yet to be shared with anyone outside of the CIA.
Secret Service files, denied to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), will identify the senior officials who ordered the illegal destruction of two boxes of JFK evidence in January 1995, just days before they were going to be reviewed by ARRB staff. These files concerned threats to Kennedy in late 1963 and contained information about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. With full disclosure, we will learn will who wanted these records destroyed and why — and whether the records still exist.
Do these six files collectively add up to “smoking gun” proof that any one individual was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiring to assassinate JFK? Probably not
Does the CIA dispute any of the facts that Reiner & Co. (which includes me. I’m interviewed on the podcast) presented about Angleton, Harvey, Phillips, and Joannides? No
I asked the CIA public affairs office about the podcast. They did not respond on the record to any questions about the actions of specific CIA officers in 1963, only issuing a blanket denial asserting any suggestion of CIA complicity in JFK’s murder is “absolutely false.”
Do these files certainly contain abundant evidence of the CIA’s operational interest in ex-Marine Oswald, the alleged lone nut, on the eve of JFK’s trip to Texas? Definitely, yes.
Even Uscinski, a skeptic of conspiratorial explanations, thinks these files should be released.
“I assume that if something is being held back, that there is something in the documents that have yet to come to light,” Uscinski told me via email. “Otherwise there is no reason at all to hold them back. Thus, assuming there is *something new* [his emphasis] there, I can’t know since I don’t know what it is. … I tend to air on the side of transparency, so I would prefer they be released.”
And yet the CIA stands firm and opaque. Thanks to a CIA-authored transparency plan approved by Biden last year, the American people cannot see the entirety of these documents, even if they are obviously relevant and, in most cases, more than 50 years old.
Why the secrecy? Because the facts are embarrassing to the CIA.
The Rest of the Story
Wrapped in layers of obfuscation within the official story (one man killed JFK for no reason) we can discern the rest of the story as documented by recently declassified CIA records and interviews with credible sources: a still-undisclosed intelligence operation targeting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in early 1963, just months before Oswald went public with his support for Castro and the group.
This details of this operation remain classified to this day, thanks to Presidents Trump, who postponed release of thousands of JFK files in 2017, and Biden, who did the same in 2022.
The secrecy makes it impossible to answer the obvious question: Was the CIA’s Oswald-FPCC operation (if it existed) part of a covert operation to assassinate JFK and lay the blame, a la Northwoods, on Fidel Castro’s Cuba?
That’s what Reiner and O’Brien’s podcast says, and I think the evidence supports that interpretation. But I’ll be the first to admit I could be wrong. (It’s happened before.) Good friends — wise friends — tell me, get over it. The CIA just blew it. Oswald went to the sixth floor window and made history.
Maybe. But if that’s true, then the release of the last of the JFK files will yield no information to the contrary. The absence of incriminating evidence in this innocuous ancient files would exonerate the CIA and/or Secret Service from accusations of complicity or negligence in JFK’s assassination. Full disclosure would tend to discredit the likes of Reiner and me (and Lyndon Johnson and Fidel Castro and Robert Kennedy and Harry Truman and Jackie Kennedy and Robert Kennedy) and all the other millions of people who have concluded the Warren Report got it wrong.
You’d think the government would hasten to release such records with a shrug, Take a look. There’s nothing there. That was the promise of the JFK Records Act. The law mandated full JFK disclosure by 2017.
The law, unfortunately, is now defunct. Seven years after the statutory deadline the government—lead by the CIA—is explicit in its plans to keep these six JFK files —and thousands of others — secret indefinitely, all in the name of “national security.” The message is this: We can’t show you the information that exonerates us from complicity in JFK’s murder. The facts would endanger you and secrecy will keep you safe. Trust us.
This sounds like gaslighting, namely feeding people false information that leads them to question what they know to be true.
But there’s another way to interpret the Agency’s actions. Perhaps, the CIA is telling us, accurately enough, that disclosure of these documents will corroborate claims that Oswald was manipulated and JFK was killed by his enemies in his own government in 1963, and that such disclosure would harm the national security of the United States in 2024 because it would damage, embarrass and otherwise discredit the clandestine service. America, in this judgment, cannot afford full disclosure about JFK’s assassination just yet.
It’s a familiar, self-serving, and arrogant argument that has been breeding public mistrust of the federal government for six decades, culminating in a widespread fears of a “deep state” and an enduring bipartisan belief in a JFK conspiracy. In other words, it’s not very convincing.
The CIA’s extreme, bizarre, and suspicious claims of secrecy only highlight the importance of the JFK records that remain redacted. If and when we obtain these files — and it is still a big if — our understanding of the tragedy of November 22, 1963, is sure to be significantly clearer.
It always amazes me that “wise” and “sensible” individuals claim “Oswald did it, get over it”. The fact is the federal government violated the rule of law. Secret Service had no authority to take the body. Dr. Earl Rose had full legal authority to complete the autopsy and actually had training in forensic pathology. Oswald received no due process. No trial and no defense. The Warren commission is a meaningless political report with no standard, certainly not reasonable doubt. They ignore anything, evidence or witness testimony, that does not support their preconceived conclusion. No “Conspiracy Theory” is required to express skepticism regarding Oswald as the guilty party. Anyone that suggested otherwise is an idiot, needs a 7th grade Civics class, or is being blatantly intellectually dishonest.
The ballistics evidence, as supported by the Warren Commision’s hired authority, Dr Joseph Dolce, undermines the single bullet theory that ties the recovered bullet to the crime. The expert medical commentary of Doctors and neurosurgeons immediately following attempts to save Kennedy’s life do not support Oswald as the lone assassin. Joseph Milteer’s apparent foreknowledge of the assassination and the government’s failure to investigate undermine any credibility they might have had in the matter. It compounds the tragedy that Oswald’s Rights as an American are completely ignored. Shame on the Corporate “Mockingbird” Media and the corrupt American Federal Government.
I find it ironic that University of Miami political science professor Uscinski is a conspiracy skeptic considering how many members of the CIA worked out of the University of Miami south campus conspiring to overthrow or kill Fidel Castro.
As Jeff previously wrote:
George Joannides’s “personnel file showed that he served in 1963 as the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA’s station in Miami. He had a staff of 24 and a budget of $1.5 million. He also was in charge of handling the anti-Castro student group that Oswald had tried to infiltrate in August 1963. They called themselves the Cuban Student Directorate [DRE] and it was Joannides’s job to guide and monitor them. Under a CIA program code named AMSPELL, he was giving $25,000 a month to Luis Fernandez Rocha and Juan Salvat, the Directorate’s leaders in Miami. That funding supported the Directorate’s chapters in New Orleans and other cities.
Fernandez Rocha and Salvat, who still live in Miami, confirm the story. Fenandez Rocha is a doctor. Salvat owns a publishing house. Both recall a close but stormy relationship with George Joannides whom they knew only a ‘Howard.’ The records of the Directorate, now in the University of Miami archives, support their memories. The group’s archives show that ‘Howard worked closely with the Directorate on a wide variety of issues. He bought them an air conditioner and reviewed their military plans. He was aware of their efforts to buy guns. He briefed them on how to answer questions from the press and paid for their travels.”
Members of the DRE worked with William Douglas Pawley on Operation TILT to discredit JFK and two months later debated Oswald in New Orleans.
While there is a Center named for William Pawley at Miami-Dade College, his longtime Executive Assistant (niece Anita Pawley) was deeply involved with the university’s Lowe Art Gallery and other family members attended the U as did the children and grandchildren of those involved in the failed conspiracy known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The University’s Richter Library (which I spent many hours in while earning a 1969 AB degree in American Civilization) houses perhaps the largest collection of anti-Castro documents. A significant resource within walking distance of the Professor’s classroom.