JOHN NEWMAN - JEFF MORLEY - JIM LESAR
John Newman, Judge Tunheim and Dr. Wecht
Dr. C. Wecht - Now I want to move ahead then
with a wonderful panel of three people who have been deeply involved for many,
many years with the JFK assassination and whose contributions have been
extremely important in figuring out information and in trying to get things to
disclosed, separate and apart, from which has been referred to.
Dr.
John Newman is a former military Army analyst. He was for many years a
professor at University of Maryland, he is now at James Madison University. He
has written many books and three just came out quite recently. One on JFK and
then one which he actually published before, he may tell you about that, that
was held back and now republished by him. And two volumes on what's going to be
a five volume set covering the entire span of JFK preceding assassination and
then thereafter.
We
have Jefferson Morley who is a reporter and litigant expert. He has written
several books and has many articles on this matter too; and was for many years
a very highly respected correspondent for The Washington Post.
James
Lesar, interning here in Washington D.C. has been handling more FOIA requests,
I don't know if Jim has the world record or not, gotta be pretty close to it.
He is the president and founder of the Assassination Archives and Reserach Center
- AARC. Jim continues to pursue these efforts to obtain that kind of
information.
So
these three gentleman have really been respected among the Warren Commission
critic researcher community. So I'm gonna start off, I think Dr. Newman will be
first and the gentlemen to keep their remarks to about 10 to 12 minutes and
then we'll have a couple questions for each of you. I suggest that we do it
that way and then we'll move right along. Okay? You want to come up here.
JOHN NEWMAN
Dr. John Newman: Judge Tunheim, I want to thank
you for your service and to CAPA for organizing this event. A couple of real
quick amplifications – A needle in a haystack? A needle in a haystack?
Okay, for example, as an informant for the CIA
in Cuba there was Emilio Emberto Rodrigues. There's about 500 pages in the
national archives, but his name is redacted every single time, his name is
redacted every single time, his identifying numbers are redacted every single
time. His name is redacted every single time, except
the one time the reviewer-redactor must have a big lunch and got tired, and
this one time his name is there in the clear - and you can take that little
needle and go through all 500 pages and put his name in each blank slot and get
the full story. So that's a needle in a haystack, and I love needles in
haystacks.
One
thing the judge was talking about is cryptonyms and pseudonyms, and they are
very important to me in my current book and I am anticipating three more, but I
have to know who these people are and what operations he is working for.
They're not all released by any stretch of the imagination, the two volumes
that I've just completed in the last four years, I myself have broken about two
hundred plus cryptonyms and over seventy to a hundred pseudonyms, and they're
in the appendices in my books. I'm not the only one, there's a couple other
real researchers - Bill Simpich out there on the west coast has been very
helpful to me in this regard.
So we need cryptonyms and pseudonyms in order
to understand the story. Pseudonyms are important because one person can have
2, 3, 4, 5 pseudonyms and the story gets broken apart into pieces and if you
can reduce all those names into a single person then you can tell the story.
I
really don't want to talk too much about my own work.
I really want to just amplify and agree with Judge Tunheim. The CIA has
resisted and it’s been mentioned in some cases they’ve subverted investigations
by our elected officials. Maybe Jefferson will tell you a little bit about
that. And Jim (Lesar), - he's the one who handles
litigation, but I'm not gonna talk about that.
The FBI is also resisted from the very start
that I can remember where they began their work. I gave you guys a whole
bunch of file numbers and that was sent over to the FBI and we didn't get
anything and these were Oswald files. I
think that, I'm very interested in what's in these files. They would be helpful
to me in my work. But honestly It’s more important that what's in the files
that we should get them. They belong to us, they belong to our elected
officials and the idea that our current government is continuing to block this
information is not going to help the public trust. So for that reason alone we
need a full release.
In
my experience of many years of dealing with these records, and I go back to
1992 and 1993 when the first records were released from what was then the
National Archives One downtown, an awful place. I copied documents along with
some of my friends that helped me and I have them today. Many of the most
crucial ones no longer exist in the NARA. That’s not to say they're not at the
CIA but they're no longer with the National Archives and Records
Administration.
They're walking out with documents under peoples shirts. I'll give you
one example, President Eisenhower instructed his subordinates to murder, not
one person, not just Castro but three - Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in order to
bring the Europeans on board to support our anti-Castro policy and Trujillo the
Dominican Republican in order to bring the organization of American states to
support our anti-Castro strategy. It was a triple play in terms of putting
together a coalition that would help Eisenhower get what he wanted, - to
overthrow Castro.
So
those documents no longer exist particularly ones that relate to the order that
Eisenhower gave for the assassination of Lumumba and then his national security
advisor giving testimony on one day saying that, no Eisenhower didn't have idea
of the assassination when five days earlier he told church committee staff
members that he had. Well, I have those documents, both of them and I have the
original RIF sheets, record identification forms. They no longer exist. And what
the staff discussion has been now been briefed from 9 pages to just 3, with the
pieces I just told you left out. It gets worse than that. The RIF record identification
database itself for that document how has from zero, to zero, date zero, number
of pages, everything is zeroed out. I have the RIF sheet, the original RIF
sheet that has all the information. How does that stuff disappear?
Somebody
has tinkered with the actual system, so one of the reasons I want full release
is I want to see what's in there. I want full release because I think we
deserve it but I also want full release because I think if we get it, it’s
going to help make the case to go back to these agencies and find the stuff
where it is and get it back into the archives where it belongs. This isn't unimportant
information, it’s information relating to assassination of foreign leaders and the
church committee investigation of that is critical, it’s crucial. That's the
kind of stuff, not innocuous stuff, that's the kind of important stuff that's
been gradually disappearing over the years. I want what's in the remaining
files and I want what was originally released as well. I think if we get a full
release it will help make the case.
While
I'm not wild about our current president I'm really hoping that his
relationship with the CIA continues like it is right now cause it's probably
the best, most luck we're ever gonna have to get this. I think the judge made a
good point in this post 9-11 atmosphere is gonna be a lot harder to get stuff
released so maybe Trump will do us a favor.
C. Wecht: Just to add then, the relationship
between the President and the CIA playing out to our favor. How about the
relationship with the President and Putin and you've got access to every God
damn thing that exists over there right now. Anybody have any questions?
J. Policoff: I'm not sure it's exactly
relevant, well, it is relevant.
C. Wecht - Make it relevant please.
J. Policoff: Its just regarding the stuff
you've been talking about. I've heard people talking about that and some
suggestions that they might be at Gettysburg at the Eisenhower library.
C. Wecht - Abilene, the library is in Abilene.
J. Policoff: Okay, and I live near there. If I
knew what I was looking for I'd love to go up there and look for it.
C. Wecht - …..national security advisor, lets
focus on that.
B. Kelly: What about some of the records that
are missing like the Air Force One tapes and the ONI records and the ONI
investigative reports? These are not part of the collection. Is anyone looking
for them?
J. Newman: Well, you are. I know that. Looking
hard for them. I don't think that they were in the collection in the first
place though. I don't know what to do about that. Do you judge?
J. Tunheim: Shrugs his shoulders and shakes his
head no.
C. Wecht - These remarks from someone who was
an Army intelligence officer, a professor and author and someone who devotes
all his time should really, really give everybody pause. Okay. Our next
presenter is Jefferson Morley. Jeff, please.
JEFFERSON MORLEY
Jefferson Morley: I've been at this longer than
I care to admit. I first met Judge Tunheim 25 years ago when he started this
job and I have incredible admiration for him. I was in the Washington Post
newsroom at the time the whole topic of the assassination of Kennedy was this
polarizing thing that made people angry and all that. Which is why I was very
impressed that some public official would come forward and treat it in this
very forward manner that it deserved and that he showed up here tonight so
thank you for that.
What
I would like to say about the coming release and what's gonna happen in October
2017. First of all you can see between two very well informed people - John Tunheim
and John Newman. We don't even know exactly what's in there. It’s not clear whether
all cryptonyms have been released and all that so that's another thing in favor
of full disclosure, the record itself is not transparent now. I think the most
important thing when people say, what's in there, what's coming, what are you
gonna find out in October 2017?
I
then say that the first question you have to ask is what do we know now, that
we didn't know then? When the law was passed. What do we know now that we
didn't know in 1992? We know an incredible amount and the JFK records
collection has transformed scholarship not only around the assassination but
around the Kennedy presidency, Kennedy in Vietnam, the Cuban Missile crisis, in
all of these areas, this very strong law of the JFK Records Act had this very
positive effect on the understanding of our own history.
What
do we know now that we didn't know in 1992? The thing that strikes me and I've
written a book about this and have a biography of James Angleton coming out
later this year, and as an author I would be remiss if not marketing at every
opportunity, so I'm starting right now with you. In the book I tell the story
that I think is really the most significant thing that we didn't know in 1992. Some
of us, as we began, and I met John Newman at the time, was the question - what
did the CIA know about Oswald before the assassination?
The
official story was that there was this guy Oswald and they paid kind of routine
attention to him and he did this and he did that and they knew this and that
and then he shot the president. Boy, everybody was really surprised. How did
this guy come out of nowhere and shoot the president? That was the story
according to the Warren Commission, the CIA and by the FBI. That story was a
lie. That story was concocted by Jim Angleton and Dick Helms and it was lie.
Oswald was watched closely from November 1959 when he defected to the
Soviet Union, his time in the Soviet Union was examined closely, - a group of
CIA officers anywhere from a minimum of six and probably as many as fifteen
people were well acquainted with his file. His file was handled in a very
unusual way. From the moment he defected all information about Oswald was not
sent to the Soviet Russian Division but was sent to James Angleton's (Counter-Intelligence)
office and Oswald's file was held very closely. None of this was known in 1992
and none of this was known to the Warren Commission.
This
is the story that we are beginning to piece together now. I tell a part of it
in my forthcoming book and John's telling the story in there somewhere, but
this is what we know now that we didn't know then. The CIA surveillance of
Oswald from 1959 to 1963, very close. These CIA officials and I can name them -
Jane Roman, Bill Hood, Karen Sina, James Angleton, these officials knew Oswald.
They were familiar with his biography. They knew his family. They knew about
his crazy mother. They were opening her letters to the state department. They
were getting the FBI reports on Oswald. They were getting the state department
report. All of that information was filed into the CIA and landed in the
counter intelligence staff in a very closely held office and the file was
controlled by a woman named Ann Egerter, who was totally unknown to the warren
commission. The story about how all of this information about Oswald was
totally unknown and now we begin to have a little bit closer understanding in
what that means.
I
think that's the base line that we are now working on. What will the files that
are now coming out tell us about that story? Which is a remarkable story, as if
it had been known in 1963, the whole investigation would have been quite
different. There's good reason to believe, in fact, the counter intelligence
staff even knew that Oswald was inept and I'll tell that story in my book.
So
the level of pre-assassination knowledge about Oswald was very great and the
work of the review board enabled us to start investigating that story. Thanks
to the records review release by the review board, we went out and I went out
and was able to interview people who had extensive pre assassination knowledge
of Oswald. Jane Roman who was a key aid to Angleton. I had two conversations
with Bill Hood who is a lifetime counter intelligence officer associated with
Angleton, Ann Goodpasture who worked for Win Scott in Mexico City, she had
worked for Angleton in the headquarters. We've really began to understand the pre
assassination monitoring of Oswald and that's the story that the releases later
this year hopefully can amplify and tell us more about.
So
one challenge is to understand what we already know and make that the
foundation of what comes out in October. We are assuming that the agencies are
gonna let this information be released because the law obliges them to, but
given their behavior, I'm skeptical. I worry that we are gonna have continued
obfuscation after or around the releases in October - but this is where the
roll of the president is very important because if the agencies want to do
that, if they want to do it lawfully the president has to sign off on it.
Will President Trump do that? We don't know, so there's a lot of
uncertainty going forward. We do know a great deal about what's in those
records. I think these are some of the records that shed some light on the
counter intelligence staffs extraordinary and intense interest in Lee Harvey
Oswald from 1959 to 1963.
I'll
just name a few that we know exist and we know that they are supposed to be
made public. First is the interrogation of Yuri Nosenko, who was a KGB defector
who defected in 1964 and said falsely that KGB had no interest in Oswald at the
time he was in the Soviet Union. Angleton didn't believe this, thought he was a
phony defector and threw him in jail. It was one of the first examples of a CIA
black site where somebody was detained beyond the law without due process.
There's about 2,000 pages, as far as we can tell of the interrogation of Yuri
Nosenko between 1964 and 1969. The interrogation of Nosenko about what he knew
about the Oswald file could be potentially very interesting. It may also, there
may be nothing about Oswald in there, it may be all about other matters. But
Angleton's conspiracy theory was that the KGB was somehow behind Nosenko and
somehow behind Oswald. The Nosenko interrogation transcripts will tell us more
about Angleton's conspiracy theory of JFK.
The
second category is the operational files of Bill Harvey who was in charge of
the CIA assassination operation from 1960 to 1963 and who was also a bitter
enemy of the Kennedy's. There's a couple hundred pages of material about Bill
Harvey to go through. David Atlee Phillips was chief of Cuban operations in
Mexico City then later when on to become chief of the western hemisphere
division of the CIA who was an object of intense scrutiny by the House Select
Committee on Assassinations. There's about 600 pages of material about David
Phillips operations in the withheld material. That might have relevant
information.
Before
I tell the story of George Joannidess - he was a counter intelligence
psychological warfare officer in Mami. He worked for David Phillips. My lawsuit
identified probably about 50 records, we don't know how many pages of his
operational activities in Miami in 1962 to 1964. One thing that we have learned
over the years, in fact this was not disclosed through the review board, not
only did Joannidess agents have contact with Oswald before the assassination
but Joannidess himself had a residence in New Orleans in 1963 and 1964. This is
a story that has never been explained by the CIA. Those records may be
relevant.
Finally
Ann Goodpasture who worked for Angleton and who worked for Win Scott, and who
wrote the CIA history of Mexico City station, there's a couple hundred pages on
her in the unreleased material. So you have this nexus of counter intelligence
officers, people who knew about Oswald and were interested in Oswald before the
assassination and people who were interested in assassination activities. In
this nexus is where I believe we will find the information that will tell us
more about the causes of the president’s death.
C. Wecht: Thank you, thank you Jeff. Just think
of where we would be with regard to the JFK assassination if Jefferson Morley
had been the editor of the Washington Post instead of Ben Bradley? He had a
tough row to hoe, I don't know any details but I know the Washington Post has
not been the forefront of ferreting out all the information about this. So
questions please for a few minutes, yes sir?
Speaker: I was wondering if you could discuss
for a minute the CIA, which you mentioned Richard Helms lied about the Oswald
investigation. He was also convinced or charged with perjury for lying to the
church committee about CIA involvement in Chile. His lawyer, Edward Bennett
Williams, remarked at the time that would wear that conviction as a badge of
honor. Its worth noting, they negotiated a plea bargain and was fined $2,000
and said some very defining things about congress after that. It’s also worth
noting that Edward Bennett Williams also represented John Hinkley, and the judge
that negotiated that plea bargain was the same judge that presided over the
Hinkley trial. Can you discuss at all this attitude by these very well known men
at the time blatantly lying to the public, proud of it and how that plays into
this situation.
J. Morley: Lets put the best possible face on,
which is what I think Helms or his admirers would do and there were many in
Washington, he was the CIA director for 7 years and I talked to many people in
the CIA who thought he was one of the best directors ever. The favorable way to
look at that would be - it was the cold war, these men were assigned to do
clandestine work, they worked for the president with the expectation that the
work would remain secret as one CIA officer said "their operations would
remain secret from conception to eternity."
J. Morley: That's the world that these men
lived in so that gave them a certain arrogance to do that. The striking thing
now, looking back, to me on it what we've learned since the review board, Helms
and Angleton both obstructed justice in a homicide case and they committed
perjury. Why, if the homicide case was so cut and dry, why would these men
obstruct justice and commit perjury? We still don't have a good answer to that
question. Maybe some of these records will begin to tell us what were these
operations were.
To
get to your point, even if we accept that the most charitable interpretation of
their actions that this was just the cold war and they were engaged in deadly
business and the government approved, now the cold war is over and national
security considerations that were in play there are totally irrelevant today,
the threats the country faces now are nothing like those threats, and so we
need not have excessive secrecy around this topic whatever the justification of
it once was, there is no justification now.
Speaker 4: Jeff, in fact, at the first meeting
of the warren commission didn't Dulles tell the rest of the commissioners, when
they asked that they would lie, even to the president if asked?
J. Morley: That’s Dulles, yeah.
Speaker 4: It seems to me somewhat problematic
that you have a review board that goes out of business before the time for
compliance with the law. I'm curious as to why nobody is proposing the calling
back the ARBD into existence to finish the job which obviously it did not
finish.
J. Morley: What I alluded to before, I think we
need something or some measure like that. An Independent board that can review
these records, who have the security clearances and can decide does this meet
the statutory data, is it assassination related or not? Because I expect some
confiscation, that's why I think we do need an independent board mechanism, it
doesn't have to be as big the review board, the remaining job is not huge, this
is not a huge batch or records that remains. Not like the original batch of
records that the ARBD dealt with. But there could be three people with the
requisite of security clearance or some familiarity with the subject who would
review these records and who would be independent of the agencies. Without an
enforcement mechanism we can expect them to confiscate and delay and conceal.
Speaker 3: One more, many times there are…..
even in the recent Paris attacks, the recent events in Brussels and those
people are. Why in this case that they feel that there is something beyond...?
J. Morley: That's quite possible. And when we
unseal the records we'll be able to decide that but until we have all the
records we can't decide whether, for example, Angleton could have been manipulating Oswald, he and his people could have been manipulating Oswald over
the course of those years. That's what they did, they ran secret operations
involving agents and they kept it secret. When we have all the records then we
can address the question of conspiracy. I'm not interested in questions of
conspiracy, I'm only interested in full disclosure. If we have that, then we
can talk about the theories.
C. Wecht - The news media can help us a great
deal in getting full disclosure something that they seek and dig something
which is representative by the affirmation of this week, national sunshine
week. Which reminds me of a wonderful comment made, by one of the most
distinguished supreme court justices of all times, Louis Brandeis, who said
"the sunlight is best disinfectant." Keep that in mind as we were
looking for this in the sunlight.
Jim Lesar: Thank you. I've prepared some remarks
but I have great difficulty in seeing. A great deal of what I have to say has
been covered today by the speakers who already spoke.
I
wanted to basically address a question that has been raised by Judge Tunheim
and by the others about what we do. First of all we need to thank Judge Tunheim
for his continuing and tireless efforts to deal with a difficult subject, far
more than most people would do. He has served the public interest well. What I
want to get into is, where do we go from here? Before I do it, I would follow
the practice of responding to, somebody raised the question about Trump's
position on the JFK act.
What
I can add to that is that you need to place that in context and ask - why
didn't Obama act to release these records? On the day that he took office he
issued a profoundly inspiring statement on the importance of the freedom of
information act that he directed his attorney general to instruct heads of all
executive agencies in purtenance to take measures to fulfill that. In 2009 he
issues a new executive order which profoundly changed the previous practice
regarding secrecy and as part of that he also established the NDC – the national
declassification center. Which was intended to declassify 400 million pages,
records by 2013.
At
a series of hearings in front of the NDC. I and others raised questions about
what was going to happen to the JFK act records when they would be part of the
400 million pages to be disclosed and if so given the fact that requesters for
JFK assassination related records far outnumber those in any other subject
matter. Why should they not be placed at the head of review and processed
first?
Initially
the response from the acting director at that time was, acting director of the
NDC, I'm sorry he was the acting director of the national archives. He
responded that they would be. He indicated that they would be and that there
was something on the order of 5 million pages and some 50,000 pages that he
thought had been withheld. Unfortunately at a later conference, in which there
was a new chairman, headed by a lady who had been an operations officer for the
CIA, and she backtracked on that. At one of these meetings I was approached by
a staff member of the NDC who told me in response to my question that the order
not to process the JFK Act Records as part of the NDC project came directly
from the White House.
That
is part of the problem as the CIA began to assert control over the records and
resisted in all kinds of ways, their disclosure. It took Morley's lawsuit, was
the first to be able to try and pinpoint the number of documents that the CIA
claimed were being withheld, entirely withheld until 2017. Initially that
figure was about 700 million that was admitted by the CIA in Morley's lawsuit.
That soon changed and the number then escalated to 774 million. More recently
the number has gone to 3,346 records or there abouts according to national
archives press releases. Those specify are entirely withheld records, withheld
in their entirety until 2017.
There
are, in fact, other persons who have more personal knowledge than I do about
this, who have said that number maybe more like 5 thousand. We're talking about
entirely withheld records and we're not talking about the number of pages. In
addition, there are a huge amount of documents that have been withheld until,
partially withheld, there are estimates here that I've seen in my personal
estimated, that might be in the range of 30 to 50 thousand but we don't know.
Because again we're faced with the problem of not having sufficient reliable
information.
The
judge and others have raised the question about what do we do with the fact
that the experience of the past teaches us the things that we thought were not
relevant and may turn out to be very significant and very worthy of consideration.
The answer is that at present time, ironically, we've been put in a condition
and in a situation, where filing a lawsuit is preferable to trying to proceed
under the JFK Act because there is Obama's executive order put into effect a
provision for automatic declassification of historically significant records
and limited the number of documents, number of exemptions which could be
claimed after 50 years to 2. One of which was information related to national
defense or foreign policy and secondly intelligent sources in methods.
Jeff
Morley eloquently described the process of dealing with the CIA and he
suggested that one of the things that we need to do is to establish a new
board, somewhat like the review board. That is one way to go but I think that
there is a better way.
The JFK act has a provision in it for oversight by congress and I think
we need to get the issues that have been raised here today before congress.
That's it and my times about up but I do close by saying we need to get issues
before congress that relate to the oversight hearings, the oversight hearings
were last held under the JFK Act in 1993. There have been none since then, and it
has been obvious that given what has happened over the course of time is there
have been enormous important disclosure after disclosure after disclosure due
to the review board’s work. There has been no assessment by congress of what
were the pluses and minuses of the review board’s performance. I think that is
one thing that needs to be done.
Secondly,
we know the result of Jeff Morley's work in the case that the CIA has turned
out to be admitted during the course of the litigation that an undercover agent
who was supposed to investigate the CIAs activities regarding the DRE was a
Cuban organization that had been in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. He didn't
do that, we need oversight by congress and why the CIA subverted the
accountability function of the house select committee on assassinations. There
is no democratic accountability unless you have review by congress of executive
agency actions. We don't have it, we need it.
This
in a way relates, we had the same thing come up with regard to the church
committee and with the senate select committee on intelligence acts on
terrorism on the CIA's torture practices.
Lastly
I want to call your attention to the kind of information that comes out that
puts a new focus on things. There is a story that I have copies of here that
ran on January 25th, reporting a new lawsuit that my organization filed. It is
seeking records relating to the September 25, 1963 memorandum at a meeting
chaired by General Curtis LeMay - if it ever, an opponent of president Kennedy
and that meeting had detailed report by Desmond Fitzgerald who was involved in
the AMLASH business. He referred to the CIA study of the Hitler plot, as a
means to use against the Fidel Castro and his regime.
The fact is that this memo would have
been released by the review board but apparently there was no investigation of
this alligation that the CIA was studying plots to, studying the Hitler plot as
a means of conducting operations against Castro. So we have asked for that
information and the CIA initially denied having any, then it said, oh wait a
minute we do have some and then it later reversed. I filed that lawsuit to see
what happens with the CIA.
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