“The devil is in the details — also the light of truth. For nearly three decades, Malcolm Blunt has been digging through the stacks of U.S. government documents and illuminating their meaning. It took an English citizen, working in his spare time and sidetracking his holidays, to burrow deeply into the hidden and hiding-in-plain-sight facts of the John F. Kennedy assassination — the most earth-shaking American crime of the 20th Century. Countless Kennedy scholars, authors and independent researchers have come to depend upon Blunt for eye-popping discoveries that previously eluded them. I count myself among this crowd.”
~ David Talbot, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.
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“Every so often, you’d find somebody had taken a pair of scissors, or a very sharp knife, and cut out a sentence. … That’s not a clerical error.” — Malcolm Blunt
For more than three decades, British researcher Malcolm Blunt has worked in the National Archives, reading the JFK records the way the CIA’s own clerks once wrote them: routing slips, cryptonyms, file numbers, the gaps where something should be and isn’t. In The Devil Is In The Details, Volume II, he and Alan Dale, executive director of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, go further than ever into what the records reveal about the assassination of President Kennedy, and what they still conceal.
In this volume, Malcolm Blunt once again opens uncommon lines of inquiry, reaching into the deepest workings of the national security state in the Kennedy years. President Kennedy’s thousand days of inspiration and influence ended abruptly in Dallas, but the decades of deception, denial and bureaucratic shell games that have kept parts of that story out of view continue to this day.
Inside this 515-page volume:
- Conversations with Malcolm Blunt: unscripted sessions with researcher Bart Kamp (recorded 2021–2026), and private recorded telephone calls between Malcolm and Alan, candid, detailed and often funny.
- Essays by Malcolm Blunt on the JFK records and the National Archives: project files and notional companies, the “emulsification” of CIA and State Department objectives, full integrated cover, and the Interagency Source Register and Antonio Veciana.
- “Why JFK?”: twenty-four of President Kennedy’s speeches and addresses, from the Senate to his last day in Dallas, with remarks from his news conferences. Presented in two parts, within this well-chosen collection, you will feel his inspiring voice in every line.
- Ten appendices of primary sources: President Kennedy’s candid message of 7 September 1963, sent via private channel to his friend, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan; Dan Hardway’s 2025 testimony to the congressional Task Force; HSCA testimony from witnesses and whistleblowers; the 24 November 1963 McCone memorandum; and Russell Holmes’s internal memo of 8 January 1992, written nineteen days after the premiere of Oliver Stone’s JFK: “How Should the Agency Respond?”
- Facsimiles from Malcolm’s own archive, including the FBI’s copy of Charles de Gaulle’s verdict on the assassination, with J. Edgar Hoover’s handwritten note in the margin.
- A full index of names, offices, cryptonyms and documents.
- Foreword by Dan Hardway, former staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
For researchers, students of the Cold War and the CIA, and every reader who has wondered why, sixty years on, the files are still not complete. This book shows you how the work is actually done, where to look, and what is missing.
Volume I (2020) is available separately. Each volume stands on its own.
PURCHASE THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS, VOLUME II
