JFK Records Suit Tests CIA Secrecy on Assassination
April 30, 2019
On April 29, my attorney Dan Hardway filed a
petition for certiorari asking the Supreme Court to review my case, Morley
v. CIA. When I filed this Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit 16 years ago, I sought certain files
related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The JFK story still resonates, albeit more faintly
than it once did. Kennedy was a popular liberal president who, at the time of
his death, was challenging the country to embrace civil rights and “a strategy
for peace” to end the Cold War. Detested in the Pentagon and CIA as a weakling
and traitor, Kennedy was shot dead as his open-air motorcade passed through
downtown Dallas on a sunny day in November 1963.
I never expected the case would take so long or rise
so high. Yet I am not surprised. I always believed FOIA litigation could shed
new light on the causes of JFK’s assassination, a national trauma on par with
9/11 for the next generation. I anticipated new information would clarify
long-standing questions about America’s most enduring murder mystery. And I
expected the CIA would resist full disclosure. The federal courts have been
divided on the merits of my case, leaving the Supreme Court as the final
arbiter.
My lawsuit, filed in December 2003, sought records
to clarify the CIA’s response to JFK’s murder. After Kennedy was killed, the
Dallas police department immediately picked up an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey
Oswald and claimed he shot the president. Oswald denied the charge and was
killed in police custody the next day. A year later, a commission of Washington
insiders concluded Oswald acted “alone and unaided.” JFK’s death was not
politically motivated, it was proclaimed.
As the biographer of two top CIA operations officers who were deeply
knowledgeable about the events of 1963, I don’t find the official story of a
“lone gunman” to be credible. The CIA men I wrote about did not believe it, not
in the privacy of their thoughts and actions. They knew far more about Oswald,
the supposed assassin, before JFK was killed than they disclosed to
investigators. Declassified records and interviews demonstrate that the
agency settled on the story of a “lone gunman” in order to
conceal its deep pre-assassination interest in Oswald from law enforcement,
Congress, and the American people.
With the help of Jim Lesar, a veteran FOIA
litigator, I sought to learn more via a request for information about a Miami-based
CIA operative named George Joannides who handled sensitive matters for senior
officials in Langley. The request turned into a long-running lawsuit. Thanks to
a unanimous December 2007 appellate court decision, issued
over strenuous CIA objections, I obtained more than a thousand pages of
material.
‘Presumed Assassins’
The redacted Joannides files illuminated two
previously unknown aspects of the JFK story.
The first was Joannides’ role in an authorized and
deniable CIA psychological warfare operation that generated propaganda about
Oswald. A job evaluation from 1963 revealed Joannides ran a
CIA-funded anti-Castro student group, the Cuban Student Directorate, known by
the code name AMSPELL. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death,
Joannides’ agents published the first JFK conspiracy theory, claiming Oswald
and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, were “the
presumed assassins.”
The second story revealed by my lawsuit was
Joannides’ obstruction of a congressional investigation. In 1978, after the
Watergate-era revelations about CIA abuses, Congress re-opened the JFK probe by
creating the House Select Committee on Assassination. The agency called Joannides
out of retirement to serve as liaison with the Committee investigators. He shut
down their inquiries. Even under direct questioning, he did not disclose the
Oswald-AMSPELL activity. A 1979 job evaluation praised Joannides as “the perfect man” for dealing with the Committee. In
1981 he received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal for “exceptional
achievement.”
Intrigued, I sought to obtain another 330 records
about Joannides that the agency withheld on grounds of “national security.” In
June 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected my arguments and said the CIA had complied with the FOIA. The substantive part
of the case was over.
I then asked the court to order the government to
pay for cost of my litigation, namely Lesar’s fee for hundreds of hours of time
he spent crafting the arguments that freed the Joannides files. Under the FOIA,
the government is required to pay court costs if the plaintiff has
“substantially prevailed.”
The law is designed to incentivize the government to
follow the FOIA and to compensate citizens, reporters, and whistleblowers who
seek information in the public interest. One of the four factors in awarding legal
fees is whether the information sought has the potential to benefit the public.
I thought I cleared that bar easily. The New
York Times, Fox News, Associated
Press, Politico, and USA Today covered Morley v. CIA. The Washington Post
and two dozen other mainstream news sites published the AP story. The Times and other sites published a photo,
obtained via FOIA, which showed Joannides receiving his medal.
In December 2011 District Court Judge Richard
Leon dismissed my request for legal fees, asserting the
litigation had uncovered little of substance. I appealed. In June 2013 the
Court of Appeals reversedLeon’s decision. In July 2014, Leon threw out my case on different grounds. In January
2016, the appellate court reversed him again.
Throughout this legal slog, the CIA and Justice
Department’s lawyers have insisted there is no public benefit to the disclosure
of Joannides’ JFK-related activities. Move along, says the CIA. There’s nothing
to be learned in the Oswald-AMSPELL story or in the ancient Joannides files
that contain sensitive valuable “national security” secrets.
Last July, on a fourth hearing, a divided
three-judge panel dismissed my case. Now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his last decision before he joined the high court,
assessed the value of my FOIA lawsuit as “small.”
Judge Karen Henderson, the senior judge on the D.C.
Court of Appeals, issued a stout dissent, saying I clearly deserved to have my court
costs paid. Kavanaugh’s decision, she declared, “ignored our precedent and
misapplied our mandate.”
Findings
What has Morley v. CIA revealed about
JFK’s assassination?
For 16 years, I resisted definitive conclusions
about Joannides’ role in the events that led to JFK’s death. I truly wasn’t
sure. I wanted to see all of the CIA’s records on the subject first.
I awaited the promise of the JFK
Records Act of 1992: full disclosure. The law, passed unanimously by
Congress, mandated the release of all of the government’s JFK files within 25
years, that is to say, by 2017. The promise, alas, was betrayed by
President Trump. He used the one loophole provided in the law, allowing for
continued postponement of release of assassination records. Trump, the
conspiracy theorist, certified that disclosure would cause “an identifiable
harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or
conduct of foreign relations” and that “the identifiable harm is of such
gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
In his October 2017 White House directive, Trump
stated he had “no choice” (curious phrase) but to allow federal agencies
to continue to withhold thousands of JFK assassination files from public view–
including the Joannides files. In April 2018, the National Archives reported
that 15,834 assassination records remain redacted, most of
them by CIA and FBI. These files will remain sealed until April 2021 at the
earliest,
‘No-Brainer’ on Secret JFK Files
The continuing secrecy around thousands of JFK files
surprises Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination
Records Review Board (ARRB). The ARRB was a civilian review board that
declassified hundreds of thousands of JFK files in the mid-1990s.
“My assumption was that all the remaining records
would simply be released in 2017,” Tunheim, now the senior federal judge in
Minnesota, told me in an interview. “At that point in time [1998], our thinking
was there is no legitimate reason to withhold information about how we
collected information fifty years ago, that there would be no legitimate reason
for protecting things that were that old.”
The agency’s stance on the Joannides files is
particularly obtuse, Tunheim said. In 1998, the JFK review board asked the
agency to provide relevant Joannides files. The agency handed over exactly 11
pages of material. The CIA “fooled’ the board about the extent of the Joannides
files, Tunheim said. “We would release them in full today without a moment’s
hesitation,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer.”
Of course, the fact that the CIA is sitting on
thousands of JFK files in 2019 does not necessarily mean the U.S. government is
hiding evidence of a conspiracy in 1963. As President Obama said in a 2009 memorandum, “the problem of overclassification”
is endemic in the federal government. I’m pretty sure that 95 percent of the
still-secret JFK files are historically irrelevant. It’s the remaining five
percent, however, that interests historians, researchers, journalists and
students.
The files I sought in my lawsuit are a case in
point. They do notcontain evidence that Joannides plotted against JFK’s
life. They contain plenty of evidence that he abetted those who did, after
Kennedy was dead. He wasn’t in Dallas when JFK was killed. He helped run the
coverup in Miami and Langley afterwards. He died in March 1990.
‘We Were Used’
I did not take my case to the Supreme Court to
vindicate any conspiratorial interpretation of JFK’s death. I pursued new
information to fill out the fact pattern around the assassination with
confidence that people can make up their own minds about what it shows.
My reading of the evidence conforms with that of
knowledgeable observers. Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded his brother
was ambushed by enemies in his own government. So did the widowed First Lady,
Jackie Kennedy.
Two astute contemporaries, Fidel Castro and Charles DeGaulle, also believed that Kennedy fell victim to
a conspiracy emanating from within U.S. security forces. Castro was a
battle-hardened Marxist revolutionary. DeGaulle was a continental conservative
snob. They knew, as well as anyone, the workings of American power and the
machinations of the CIA. More recently, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a retired CIA
station chief and Just Security editor, told a conclave of retired spies that
he believes if the CIA were responsible for JFK’s murder, it was
likely certain rogue CIA officers in Miami.
Morley v. CIA produced documentary evidence
consistent with the Castro-DeGaulle-Mowatt-Larssen interpretation of November
22, 1963. The Joannides’ files laid bare agency operations around Oswald.
Joannides’ propaganda
agents among anti-Castro
Cuban students created a plausible
public record—in intelligence parlance, a “legend”—that Oswald was a leader
of a pro-Castro group called Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New
Orleans. The FPCC was a popular socialist organization with 30 chapters on
college campuses that defended Castro’s revolution, which had abolished racial
segregation and redistributed land to poor people.
The CIA operation that monitored and manipulated
Oswald emerged from a joint CIA-FBI program known as COINTELPRO. Short for
Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO sought to undermine and destroy civil
rights and antiwar organizations from 1958 to 1974. According to this
declassified memo, the CIA was conducting a
secret operation against the FPCC as of mid-September 1963.
Joannides was involved. Within hours of Oswald’s
arrest, his AMSPELL agents in the Cuban Student Directorate fed reporters the
story that the president had been killed by a leader of the FPCC.
One of those AMSPELL agents was Jose Antonio Lanuza.
A retired school teacher in Miami, Lanuza served as spokesman for the
CIA-funded Cuban Student Directorate in 1963. According to a JFK Library memo, the Cuban students received $51,000 a month from the CIA.
On the night of November 22, 1963 Lanuza recalls the
group communicated with the group’s CIA handler, Joannides, whom he knew as
“Howard.” Lanuza also recalls speaking with a dozen local and national
reporters about the connection of Kennedy’s accused killer to the pro-Castro
FPCC. The next day, the AMSPELL information fueled headlines that the American
president had been killed by a “pro-Castro assassin.”
“We were used by the people who wanted to make
Oswald take all the blame for killing Kennedy,” Lanuza said in an interview.
“We were ideal cover for using the theme of Oswald being a Castro supporter.
Somebody wanted to build up that story. That’s where we came in.”
The first-day AMPSELL publicity blitz did much to
convince the public that a liberal president had been killed by a communist.
But was it true? Under interrogation, Oswald denied
shooting Kennedy. He told reporters that he was a “patsy.” The next day he was
shot dead in police custody by a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime
connections. These shocking and baffling events gave birth to a thousand
conspiracy theories.
I took my case to the Supreme Court to bypass the
theories and get the facts: to complete the historical record of a critical
moment in which American democratic institutions were attacked, a record that
the American people do not yet fully possess.
CIA Medal
House Select Committee on Assassination general
counsel G. Robert Blakey, now emeritus professor at Notre Dame law
school, told PBS Frontline that Joannides had obstructed
Congress’ investigation, a felony. Was he concealing the existence of a CIA
operation to falsely blame Oswald for killing JFK? Or just CIA incompetence?
Absent full disclosure, definitive conclusions are elusive.
Morley v. CIA fell short of getting the whole
story. The agency identified but never released 330 Joannides files I sought.
These include 44 documents from 1963 and 1978, which concern Joannides’ cover
and “intelligence methods.” They are key to the JFK story. I suspect they
identify the senior agency officers who authorized psychological warfare
operations that linked Oswald to Castro’s Cuba before and after JFK was killed.
According to the agency, not a single word contained
in these antique records – even with any potentially appropriate redactions for
sources and methods – can be made public in 2019 without threatening “national
security.” Given that most of the records in question are more than 50
years old, the claim seems far-fetched, if not suspicious. Nonetheless, the
federal courts agree it is accurate.
‘Entirely Unreasonable’
The question now before the Supreme Court is not
conspiracy. The issue is accountability and how the FOIA seeks to insure it. In
the July 2018 majority opinion, Kavanaugh ruled the CIA
acted “reasonably” in spurning my JFK queries. Judge Henderson countered that
the government’s actions were “entirely
unreasonable” and I should be awarded court costs.
unreasonable” and I should be awarded court costs.
The high court now has the opportunity to decide.
The answers are a long time coming.
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