Yes, There Is a JFK Smoking Gun

It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still "Denied in Full"

As the 59th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy approached, I often hear the question posed last month by NBC News, “What are they hiding?”

With 16,000 plus documents in the JFK Records Collection still containing redactions—11,275 of them held by the CIA—the question is not only appropriate. It is troublesome. If the official theory of a lone gunman is correct, as our leading editors and academic historians insist, why doesn’t the government release all its records and prove it has nothing to hide? Why, pray tell, has the clandestine service blown two congressional deadlines for full JFK disclosure in the last five years?

In a memo last year, President Biden set December. 15 as the new deadline. A recent report in Politico shows that Biden’s order will likely to be resisted by the CIA, FBI, and Defense Department. Phil Shenon’s reporting shows these agencies don’t care if their defiance of the JFK Records Act casts doubt on the government’s credibility. They simply don’t care if their furtive actions stimulate conspiracy theorizing. They have secrets they want to keep, public interest in full JFK disclosure be damned.

Why is the CIA so recalcitrant? Some claim the blameless Agency has nothing significant to hide. With all due respect, that argument is simply wrong. The CIA does have something to hide, something significant, something embarrassing, something potentially explosive. Among the CIA’s JFK secrets is a proverbial “smoking gun” that demonstrates the official theory of a lone gunman is misleading, if not deceptive.

I don’t use the term “smoking gun” lightly. I’ve been reporting on the JFK story since I published a story in the Washington Post in April 1995, based on my interview with retired CIA officer Jane Roman. A declassified routing slip, shows Roman signed for an FBI report on Oswald just eight days before Kennedy was killed.

My Post story marked the first interview ever with a CIA officer who handled reporting on Lee Harvey Oswald while President Kennedy was still alive. In the tape recorded interview, Roman said that cables in the Oswald file indicated someone at the CIA had a “keen interest” in Oswald, held on a “need to know basis” in October 1963, six weeks before Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas.

[For more details about this interview, see my article, “What Jane Roman Said,” via Mary Ferrell Foundation/History Matters.]

Denied in Full

Now, after 28 years of reporting and reflection, I am ready to advance the story. Jane Roman was correct. A small group of CIA officers was keenly interested in Oswald in the fall of 1963. They were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year. One of the officers supporting this operation was George Joannides, a career CIA officer whose records I sued for in 2003.

(This 2009 New York Times story on my lawsuit is pretty good.)

The evidence of the undisclosed Oswald operation is found in one partially declassified document from 1963 and 43 additional documents found in Joannides’ personnel file that have been “denied in full,” meaning no portions of them have been made public.

According to a CIA document filed in my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, these sensitive records concern Joannides’ intelligence methods, his cover (meaning his false identity), and his travel in 1963-64, when he served as the chief of psychological warfare branch of the Agency’s Miami station, and in 1978, when he served as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassination.

(The CIA’s policy of not revealing the names of living agents and informants does not apply here; Joannides died in 1990.)

The partially declassified document, partially released in 2004, shows that Joannides was cleared for Special Intelligence in June 1963. “Special Intelligence” is the CIA’s term of art for wiretap information. This document raises a key question: Was Joannides cleared for receiving information from wiretaps in Mexico City?

Smoking gun? This key JFK file from May 1963 is still heavily redacted.

In October 1963, Oswald travelled to Mexico City and made a phone contact with a known KGB officer, Vladimir Kostikov. The conversation was overheard by a Special Intelligence collection program in Mexico City, known by code name LIENVOY. I believe that Joannides was cleared for LIENVOY material, as part of the undisclosed Oswald operation. Some will scoff at the notion. Only the CIA knows for sure.

In fifteen years of litigation in Morley v. CIA, the CIA refused to release these 44 records— despite the fact that three former members of the Assassination Records Review Board submitted sworn statements declaring the records met the legal definition of “assassination-related” and should be released immediately. (Earlier this month, former ARRB chair Judge John Tunheim repeated his call for release of the Joannides files.)

The CIA’s recalcitrance was blessed by the courts. In 2018 Judge Brett Kavanaugh tossed my case, ruling that the CIA deserved “deference upon deference” when it came to JFK files. Kavanaugh’s colleague, conservative jurist Judge Karen Henderson, denounced his arbitrary decision in a stinging dissent.

In June 2020, I filed a request for a Mandatory Declassification Review( MDR) of these 44 records. The MDR process is an established mechanism for reviewing decisions made under the Freedom of Information Act. In the past two and half years, I have been assured three times by CIA officials that my request is still under review. When these documents are released, as required by the JFK Records Act, I believe they will shed light on an CIA psychological warfare operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald that the CIA has never disclosed.

As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.

If I am engaged in unwarranted speculation—if someone says this is just another crazed conspiracy theory—the CIA is free to release these records on December 15 and prove me wrong. Unlike the CIA, I welcome full disclosure.

If the CIA doesn’t release these records on December 15, I think it will confirm the gist of what I am saying, and call into question President BIden’s authority to enforce the JFK Records Act.

I will be presenting the evidence for the undisclosed Oswald operation—including the testimony of living witnesses—in the near future.

[If you support full JFK disclosure in 2022, subscribe to the JFK Facts newsletter or support the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s lawsuit to free the JFK files.]