Why Is the CIA Suppressing JFK Files?

by consortiumnews.com Sunday, Nov 18 2007, 9:44am

The CIA is withholding key documents in the JFK assassination case.

Editor’s Note: The CIA continues to resist the release of documents pertaining to a CIA officer who oversaw an anti-Castro Cuban group that had curious dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald in the run-up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Consortium News

By Lisa Pease

October 23, 2007


In this guest essay, historian Lisa Pease comments on how the CIA still is subverting the intent of the JFK Records Act:

As Jefferson Morley reports in the Huffington Post:

"Lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency faced pointed questions in a federal court hearing Monday morning about the agency's efforts to block disclosure of long-secret records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Morley filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for failing to disclose records about a CIA officer named George Joannides. Joannides was responsible for running the DRE, an anti-Castro CIA front group that had extensive interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy.

The CIA has consistently refused to release Joannides' records, even though they are mandated to by the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act.

What's at stake here matters greatly to all historians. If the government can simply choose which records to release, and which to withhold, they can pervert and deliberately misshape history to serve their purposes.

In this particular case, the CIA appears hellbent on ondoing the will of the people. The JFK Act came into being due to an enormous outcry from the public when they learned, at the end of Oliver Stone's film JFK, that many records relating to the assassination were still classified.

Congress passed what became known as "The JFK Act," which mandated the creation of a board to declassify records and, if necessary, seek out new and pertinent records and make them public.

The Board, officially named the Assassination Records and Review Board, put Joannides on the JFK assassination story map when it declassified five personnel reports of his in 1998. In addition, researchers learned that it was Joannides who had helped shut down an early investigation of the CIA's possible involvement in the assassination.

Joannides was responsible for kicking out two staffers of the House Select Committee on Assassinations who had been set up with full access at CIA to CIA records pertaining to that time period. When the records they dug up got more interesting in terms of suggesting possible CIA involvement in a plot to kill Kennedy, Joannides had the two staffers removed from their temporary office at CIA headquarters.

Morley discusses why Joannides records are of interest:

"Oswald approached the DRE's delegation in New Orleans and offered to train guerrillas to fight the Castro government. He was rebuffed. When DRE members saw Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets a few days later an altercation ensued that ended with the arrest of all the participants.

"A week after that, the DRE's spokesman in New Orleans debated the Cuba issue with Oswald on a radio program. After these encounters, the DRE issued a press release calling for a congressional investigation of the pro-Castro activities of the then-obscure Oswald.

"The CIA was passing money to the DRE leaders at the time, according to an agency memo dated April 1963, found in the JFK Library in Boston. The document shows that the Agency gave the Miami-based group $250,000 a year -- the equivalent of about $1.5 million annually in 2007 dollars.

"The secret CIA files on Joannides may shed new light on what, if anything, Joannides and other CIA officers in anti-Castro operations knew about Oswald's activities and contacts before Kennedy was killed."

Morley has spent several years now trying to obtain these records, and his frustration is palpable. But his frustration should be ours, as it's our history that is being hidden from us.

If the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, wouldn't that change entirely our understanding of events from that time forth, and wouldn't that call into question much of the reporting on the case, and the credibility of the media from that time forward?

And aren't laws meant to be upheld? As Morley writes:

"In my admittedly subjective view, the JFK Records Act is being slowly repealed by CIA fiat. In defiance of the law and common sense, the Agency continues to spend taxpayers' money for the suppression of history around JFK's assassination. In the post-9/11 era, you would think U.S. intelligence budget could be better spent."

Several former members of the ARRB, including its chairman, filed affidavits in support of Morley's request. Even anti-conspiracy authors Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi have sided with the law, calling for the documents to be released.

If our government can simply choose which laws to support and which to break, is it really our government anymore?


For more information on Morley's suit, click here.

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jefferson-morley/denied-in-full-federal_b_69414.html


Lisa Pease is a historian who has studied the JFK assassination for many years. [Her article first appeared in Progressive Historians.]

 http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/102307b.html







Where was Posada when Kennedy was killed?

Robert Kennedy was investigating the CIA and the Cuban- and Italian-American mafias in relation to his brother’s assassination.

• He was convinced, two months before he too was assassinated – when he won the Democratic nomination to the presidency and announced that he was to reopen the case – that attempts to blame Cuba for the murder were part of a conspiracy of these groups, the possible perpetrators, according to evidence that throws new light on the Bush family’s protection of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles


BY GABRIEL MOLINA


RECENTLY revealed suspicions of Robert Kennedy regarding the participation of Cuban- and Italian-American mafias working for the CIA in the assassination of his brother are shedding new light on the protection granted by the Bush family to terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.
The Chicago Tribune newspaper published an article on Sunday, May 13, revealing that Robert F. Kennedy suspected and began investigating from the first moment — Nov. 22, 1963 — that his brother’s murder was a conspiracy between those groups, given that he knew better than anyone else the motivations behind their actions, having been working with them to overthrow Fidel Castro and strangle the Cuban Revolution after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.


IT HAS HAD TO BE IN SILENCE


The May 13 article is an excerpt of the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot, published recently by the prominent firm Simon and Schuster.
Robert Kennedy had learned that in Washington, the best thing was to keep a secret when working on something important. That is why he gave misinformation for years, saying publicly that no investigation would bring his brother back. But in reality, his investigation was initiated the very afternoon of the assassination, and it is possible to trace back the time when he frenetically began using the telephone in his home on Hickory Hill to summon all of his top aides there to analyze the crime.
The younger Kennedy, who was Attorney General at the time, concluded that the path to the crime was distant from ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had already been arrested. That was how he secretly became the first – and most important – assassination conspiracy theorist.
“CIA sources began disseminating their own conspiratorial view of Kennedy's murder within hours of the crime, spotlighting Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his public support for Fidel Castro” claimed by “an exile group funded secretly by a CIA program code-named AMSPELL,” Talbot says. This group in New Orleans, which called itself the Cuban Student Directorate, released a recording that it said was of Oswald defending the Cuban president, and claiming that the alleged assassin had ties to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a solidarity organization.
“But Robert Kennedy never believed the assassination was a communist plot. Instead, he looked in the opposite direction, focusing his suspicions on the CIA's secretive anti-Castro operations, a murky underworld he had navigated as his brother's point man on Cuba. Ironically, RFK's suspicions were shared by Castro himself, whom he had sought to overthrow throughout the Kennedy presidency,” Talbot notes.
In these tasks assigned to him by President Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Robert learned about the sewer of intrigues comprising the elements who participated in plots to kill the Cuban president. He was particularly impacted by the plans organized by the CIA, along with Cuban gangsters and Italian-American mafia capos John Rossellli, Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante.
These and other “godfathers” had been pursued by Robert Kennedy in the late 1950s when he was chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee and during his years as attorney general in his brother’s administration. He also knew that all three groups hated the Kennedys and considered them traitors because of the fiascos of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Missile Crisis in 1962.


“SUSPECTED MIAMI NETHERWORLD”


“This Miami netherworld of spies, gangsters and Cuban terrorists is where Robert Kennedy immediately cast his suspicions on Nov. 22. In the years since RFK's own assassination [June 5, 1968], an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that suggests why Kennedy felt compelled to look in that direction,” Talbot says, including Congressional testimony, declassified government documents and even “veiled confessions.” The most recent was that uncovered by reputed spy E. Howard Hunt before his death in January, just three months ago. The man who organized the Watergate spies admits in his book American Spy, published posthumously, that the CIA could have been involved in Kennedy’s murder. In handwritten notes and a recording he left behind when he died, he went further, admitting that in 1963, he participated in a CIA meeting where assassination plans were discussed.


THE CHICAGO AND MIAMI MAFIA


The night the president was killed, Robert Kennedy made a phone call to Julius Draznin, an expert on trade union corruption in Chicago, to ask him about any connections in Dallas to the Mafia. He also called his top investigator in the Department of Justice, Walter Sheridan, who was in Nashville waiting for the trial of Robert’s old nemesis, Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamsters Union.
If Kennedy had any doubts about the Mafia’s participation in the assassination, they were cleared up two days later when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the basement of the police station where he was being held for the president’s murder.
Sheridan quickly supplied evidence that Ruby had been paid in Chicago by a close associate of Hoffa’s, Allen M. Dorfman, his chief adviser on the Teamsters’ pension funds and stepson of Paul Dorfman, Hoffa’s main liaison with the Chicago mafia.
Days later, Draznin — who had been Kennedy’s man in his old feud with Al Capone — provided more evidence with a complete report on Ruby’s ties to the Mafia. When he took him the list of phone calls that Ruby had made around the time of the assassination, Robert told his assistant, Frank Mankiewicz, that the list was “almost a duplicate of the people I called to testify before the Rackets Committee,” Talbot writes.
With respect to the CIA, Robert knew that its director, John McCone, did not have complete control over the agency. “...Dick Helms was running the agency,” was the comment by the attorney general’s aide, John Seigenthaler.
On the same day, the 22nd, he had a revealing conversation with Enrique Ruiz Williams, a friend and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion, who he left speechless when he told him “One of your guys did it,” Talbot says.
“The CIA and its anti-Castro client groups were already trying to connect the alleged assassin to the Havana regime. But as Kennedy's blunt remark to Williams makes clear, the attorney general wasn't buying it. Recent evidence suggests that Bobby Kennedy had heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald long before it exploded in news bulletins around the world, and he connected it with the government's underground war on Castro. With Oswald's arrest in Dallas, Kennedy apparently realized that the government's clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother,” Talbot says.
Members of the family and close friends say that on the weekend of the assassination, Robert, sleepless, pondered his brother’s death. “Bobby told family members that that JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government's secret anti-Castro operations. There was nothing they could do at that point, Bobby added.” Justice would have to be postponed until they could take the White House.
Over the years, Kennedy offered bland and routine endorsements to the Warren Report and its theory of the lone gunman. But privately, he continued working assiduously to clear up his brother’s killing, preparing to reopen the case if he were to obtain the power to do so.
After he left the Justice Department in 1964 and was elected senator for New York, Kennedy traveled to Mexico, where he looked for information on Oswald’s mysterious trip in September 1963, two months before the assassination. He and Mankiewicz came to the conclusion that it was probably a conspiracy involving the Mafia, Cuban exiles and CIA officials. In March of ’68, during his presidential election campaign, he addressed a raucous rally of students in Northridge, California, who shouted that they wanted to know who had killed the president, and “Open the archives!”
Robert knew that if he made reference to the subject, it would dominate his campaign instead of other campaign issues, like the Vietnam War and racial segregation. But he always addressed the students with “surprising honesty” and “stunned” his press secretary, Mankiewicz, when in response to a question, he replied “...the archives will be open” and “...there is no one who would be more interested...than I...”
Perhaps he was signing his death sentence. Two months later, he too, was shot dead.


CIA ONCE AGAIN


Recently, it was discovered that the group of CIA officials suspected of killing John F. Kennedy were present for more than their duties at the hotel where Robert, the candidate most likely to win the presidency, was killed.
When we recall that the case officer assigned to dirty work against Cuba was for along time George Bush Sr., it is easier to understand how Luis Posada Carriles, also a suspect in President Kennedy’s assassination, could blackmail Bush Jr. It is not just about the drug trafficking-for-arms scandal in Central America, something the self-confessed terrorist and fugitive of justice knows a lot about. It is also a matter of other unmentionable crimes of the CIA-Gate gang.



The original article of David Talbot is in the:

 http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/383811,CST-CONT-kennedy13.articleprint

Another of the BBC:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/11/who_shot_bobby_kennedy_1.html