- Marc Caputo
A CIA whistleblower, revealing his identity for the first time, tells Axios he saw a secret document in which an agency official bragged about misleading congressional investigators about Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico before President Kennedy was assassinated.
- “It’s a blueprint of a cover-up, how to lie to Congress and the American people,” former CIA-State Department historian Thomas L. Pearcy tells Axios.
Why it matters: Pearcy’s description of the nearly 50-page document — a CIA inspector general’s report — sheds new light on how intelligence agents routinely have covered up facts and records about Kennedy’s slaying that still haven’t been made public.
Driving the news: The 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination is Saturday, and President Trump has pledged to disclose all records related to the tragedy in accordance with the JFK Records Act of 1992.
- A CIA spokesperson said the agency “is committed to full transparency” and has made extra efforts to produce JFK records during the Trump administration, which was just made aware of the documents Pearcy referenced.
Zoom in: Pearcy, now a Latin America expert and history professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, told Axios he happened across the document — a CIA inspector general’s report — in a secure CIA safe room in 2009. He was researching Latin America policy for the Foreign Relations of the United States series while serving as the joint historian for the CIA and State Department.
- The report, contained in a manila folder that was accidentally included in the file box he ordered, was essentially a damage assessment by the agency to determine how much its reputation had been harmed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HCSA), which investigated the assassination.
- The report included memo from a CIA official who boasted on Aug. 23, 1978, about how he and two others from the agency had misled Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the HSCA.
- Blakey wanted to see the agency’s three-volume series of investigative files from the CIA’s Mexico City Station, which Oswald visited before he allegedly killed JFK, officials say.
Between the lines: The memo, Pearcy said, documented how CIA officers gave Blakey duplicates of the original books that removed documents the agency didn’t want Congress to see.
- Because the books were so “sanitized,” Pearcy said, Blakey had no questions after thumbing through each of them for 20 to 30 minutes.
- In a memo, CIA officer Martin Hawkins seemed to denigrate Blakey as “incurious” for not asking questions, Pearcy recalled.
While in the CIA building in 2009, Pearcy said, he briefly walked into a small room set aside largely for JFK records and saw a gray film canister labeled either “Oswald in Mexico” or “Oswald in Mexico City.”
- The CIA inspector general’s report, he said, also contained a reference to four Hasselblad cameras and 2,300 photographs taken in Mexico City.
- The CIA has denied having any photographs or film of Oswald in the city when he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies before the assassination.
The backstory: The HSCA was the second investigative committee to probe JFK’s assassination, after the Warren Commission.
- Both panel’s reports were seen as whitewashes by historians such as Jefferson Morley, who pens the influential “JFK Facts” website and has advised Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) as she pushes for more disclosure about JFK’s death.
- The JFK Records Act of 1992 helped change historians’ understanding about the depth of CIA cover-ups over the assassination. It required full disclosure of more records by 2017, a goal that hasn’t been met.
