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Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp

By Nora Gámez Torres

Updated October 29, 2021 9:59 AM

Ricardo Morales, known as “Monkey,” second left, and his “cleanup” crew posing with CIA-provided sniper rifles. The date and the location of the photo are not known. Cortesia de Ricardo Morales Jr.

Almost 40 years after his death following a bar brawl in Key Biscayne, Ricardo Morales, known as “Monkey” — contract CIA worker, anti-Castro militant, counter-intelligence chief for Venezuela, FBI informant and drug dealer — returned to the spotlight Thursday morning when one of his sons made a startling claim on Spanish-language radio:

Morales, a sniper instructor in the early 1960s in secret camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, realized in the hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees.

Morales also told his two sons that two days before the assassination, his CIA handler told him and his “clean-up” team to go to Dallas for a mission. But after the tragic events, they were ordered to go back to Miami without learning what the mission was about.

The claims made by Ricardo Morales Jr. during a show on Miami’s Actualidad Radio 1040 AM, add to one of the long-held theories about the JFK assassination — that Cuban exiles working for the CIA had been involved. But the claims also point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case.

Morales’ son, 58, said the last time his father took him and his brother to shooting practice in the Everglades, a year before dying in 1982, he told them he felt his end was near because he had revealed too much information of his work for the CIA to a Venezuelan journalist and he was writing a memoir. So he encouraged his sons to ask him questions about his life.

“My brother asked ‘Who killed John F. Kennedy?’ and his answer was, ‘I didn’t do it but I was in Dallas two days before waiting for orders. We were the cleaning crew just in case something bad had to be done.’ After the assassination, they did not have to do anything and returned to Miami,” his son said on the radio show.

Morales Jr. said his father told them he did not know of the plans to assassinate Kennedy.

“He knew Kennedy was coming to Dallas, so he imagines something is going to happen, but he doesn’t know the plan,” he said. “In these kinds of conspiracies and these big things, nobody knows what the other is doing.”

Morales also knew Oswald, his son claims.

“When my old man was training in a CIA camp — he did not tell me where — he was helping to train snipers: other Cubans, Latin Americans, and there were a few Americans,” he said. “When he saw the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald [after the assassination] he realized that this was the same character he had seen on the CIA training field. He saw him, he saw the name tag, but he did not know him because he was not famous yet, but later when my father sees him he realizes that he is the same person.”

Morales Jr. gave a similar account to the Miami Herald in an interview Thursday, adding that his father said he didn’t believe Oswald killed Kennedy “because he has witnessed him shooting at a training camp and he said there is no way that guy could shoot that well.”

He said he believes his father told the truth at a moment he was fearing for his life after losing government protection.

While Lee Harvey Oswald was accused in Kennedy’s assassination, a 1979 report from the House Select Committee on Assassinations contradicted the 1964 Warren Commission conclusion that JFK was killed by one lone gunman. The committee instead concluded that the president was likely slain as the result of a conspiracy and that there was a high probability that two gunmen fired at him.

The House Select Committee, which also interviewed Morales, said they couldn’t preclude the possibility that Cuban exiles were involved.

There have been previous reports that a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, including the leader of the organization Alpha 66, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, met at a house in Dallas days before the assassination, and that Oswald was seen visiting the house or being in the area. As that theory goes, Cuban exiles, who felt betrayed by Kennedy’s lack of support in the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation and his deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis not to invade Cuba, could have planned to kill JFK and blamed Castro so the U.S. would invade the island.

Other theories say the CIA was involved in the conspiracy, using Cuban exiles while helping create a fake narrative to paint Oswald as a pro-Castro communist so that the Cuban leader could be blamed for the assassination.

The CIA did not immediately reply to an email requesting comments about the new allegations.

Whatever happened, Biden’s decision to postpone the declassification of the remaining 15,000 documents linked to the case is once again giving life to the conspiracy theories. Morales’ son believes the documents might never be made public.

After advocating for the documents’ release, President Biden ordered the postponement last week citing the impact of the COVID pandemic on the declassifying efforts and the need to protect “against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

“If Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer, acting on his own, why not release the documents?” said Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, who has extensively researched Kennedy’s assassination.

Other experts think that no single document will reveal the truth, but might shed light on how intelligence agencies impeded the investigations to cover other operations, tactics and shadow figures.

Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., called on the Biden administration to release the remaining JFK assassination records and end “the speculation, conjecture and conspiracy theories that have flourished because of the secrecy surrounding these documents.”

“If we have learned anything from the Kennedy assassination,” he noted, “it is that conspiracy theories like this one spread like mold in the darkness of secrecy. Almost 60 years later, it is time for historical transparency so that the Kennedy assassination can be laid to rest.”

Amandi, who called Morales Jr.’s account “a bomb” said there is no doubt that what Morales told his sons has merit, since he was a confessed CIA hitman, he told the Herald. Amandi believes many documents in the classified records make reference to Morales.

But Morales’ complex history and character, and his legal maneuvers to stay out of prison by becoming an informant in several federal and state investigations of anti-Castro terrorist activities, along with his drug trafficking, gave him a reputation as a clever man who was also unreliable.

The “Monkey,” a former intelligence agent for the Castro government in the early days of the revolution, later worked for or collaborated with the CIA, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Israel’s Mossad and Venezuela’s DISIP intelligence agency during the 1960s and ‘70s. According to CIA documents declassified in 2017, Morales was terminated as a CIA contract worker in 1964 after a mission in the Congo because he was “’too wise’ and not too clever for own good.”

His son said his father was in Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis and was working as a double agent, feeding false information to Cuban intelligence services after he was already a CIA asset.

Morales claimed to have been involved in almost every major plot to overthrow Fidel Castro, and he confessed to having a hand in more than 15 bombings. After his death, he was even linked to a plot to kill Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976, the Herald reported in 1991.

In a pretrial deposition related to a drug investigation case in which he was an informant, Morales confessed to being one of the people behind the mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines jetliner in Barbados in 1976, killing all 73 aboard. He also implicated the late Luis Posada Carriles, believed to be the mastermind of the bombing. In a 2005 interview with the Herald, Posada Carriles dismissed Morales’ account, attacking his character.

“I never would have participated in any conspiracy with Monkey Morales,” Posada said. “I’d have to be crazy, my God! Everything Monkey said had a double intent. He was not credible.”

But the fact that Morales avoided prosecution time after time, and that his name seems to pop up in so many government records, make his son and Amandi believe he knew what he was talking about regarding Kennedy’s assassination, they said during the show.

Morales’ son also made another claim on the show that might solve another 1980s murder mystery.

“On his deathbed, my uncle confessed he killed Rogelio Novo in retaliation for my father’s murder,” he said. Novo was the owner of Rogers on the Green, the Key Biscayne restaurant and bar where Morales was gunned down in December 1982. No one was ever arrested in Novo’s death.

A series of killings, including the death of Morales’ lawyer months before Morales himself was killed “destroyed my family,” his son told the Herald. The family split and scattered all around the country, fearing retaliation.

Morales Jr. currently lives in Michigan. He didn’t say anything before about the Kennedy connection because in the beginning, the family was “scared to death,” he said. Later he thought people would not believe him.

He mentioned the family is now considering a TV deal in connection to his father’s life, but gave no further details.

“It’s an amazing story,” he said. “It seems larger than life.”

Read more at Miami Herald

 

 

Filed Under: News and Views, Uncategorized

A. Linwood Holton Jr., Virginia governor who took bold stance on integration, dies at 98

California Gov. Ronald Reagan looks at button worn by Virginia Gov. A. Linwood Holton Jr. during the National Governors’ Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1971. (AP)

By Jeff Baron
October 28, 2021 at 6:37 p.m. EDT

A. Linwood Holton Jr., the reformist Virginia governor best remembered for racially integrating the state’s public schools with the dramatic gesture of accompanying his daughter to a predominantly Black high school in Richmond, died Oct. 28 at his home in Kilmarnock, Va. He was 98.

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His family announced the death in a statement but did not give a cause. His daughter Anne is married to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Virginia governor who also served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee and was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential running mate.

Mr. Holton helped break the domination of Virginia politics by the Byrd political organization, which ardently supported racial segregation, and his election as governor in 1969 made him the first Republican to hold statewide office in Virginia in the 20th century.

He persuaded the legislature to raise the income tax and the gasoline tax, and he used the money for environmental protection, higher education and transportation projects. But he called his work on race relations “the greatest source of satisfaction and pride for me.”

In his inaugural address from the steps of the Capitol of the old Confederacy, Mr. Holton quoted Abraham Lincoln in calling for an open society that operates “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

“Let our goal in Virginia be an aristocracy of ability, regardless of race, color or creed,” he said.

Mr. Holton opposed busing as a tool to achieve integration, but when a federal appeals court affirmed the order to require busing in Richmond’s schools in the summer of 1970, the Holtons decided as a family to participate, even though the governor’s mansion was not technically in the area covered by the order.

He drew international attention on the first day of school in September 1970, eight months after his inauguration, when he escorted his daughter Tayloe to Kennedy High School. His wife was enrolling two of the couple’s younger children at a mostly Black middle school.

“What I did, and what I tried to emphasize, was: Look, the system requires an answer, and the answer comes from the courts, and if the courts give this answer, then you’ve got to comply with it,” Mr. Holton said in an interview for this obituary. “That’s fundamental to the republic. . . . And that’s what made me feel so good as I walked up to that school.”

Mr. Holton’s election victory — his only one at any level — also made him the first of the progressive New South governors, to be followed a year later by Democrats Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida and John West of South Carolina.

But even before Mr. Holton’s term was up, the Virginia GOP had moved to his right and the governor openly split with Richard M. Nixon over the president’s Southern strategy of building a Republican majority by winning over conservative Southern Democrats.

“If he could ever have gotten another Republican nomination, he would have been back in office,” University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said of Mr. Holton. “The party wouldn’t nominate him. They had gone well to the right of Linwood Holton and kept moving.”

Mr. Holton speaks at a campaign rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine, his son-in-law, in Christiansburg, Va., on Nov. 5, 2005. (Steve Helber/AP)

Abner Linwood Holton Jr. was born Sept. 21, 1923, in Big Stone Gap, Va., in the southwestern part of the state where his father was president of a coal mine railroad.

He graduated in 1944 from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. He returned to Virginia after obtaining a degree from Harvard Law School in 1949.

A few years later, he met Virginia “Jinks” Rogers, a CIA intelligence analyst from a prominent Democratic Virginia family, on a blind date. They wed in 1953. In addition to his wife, of Kilmarnock, survivors include four children, Tayloe Loftus of Cazenovia, N.Y., Anne Holton of Richmond, A. Linwood “Woody” Holton III of Columbia, S.C., and Dwight Holton of Portland, Ore.; a sister; and 10 grandchildren.

As Mr. Holton began gravitating toward GOP politics in the 1950s, Virginia was in the middle of the 40-year reign of Harry F. Byrd Sr., who as governor and then as senator commanded the dominant Democratic Party with strict adherence to fiscal and social conservatism. Virginia’s taxes were minimal, as was its support for education, roads, mental health care and other services.

In the 1950s, dissatisfaction with the Byrd organization, notably in the cities and suburbs that stretched from Northern Virginia to Norfolk. New residents were eager for more services, and the popularity of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower brought many voters to the party.

Mr. Holton became a leader among the state party’s moderates and narrowly lost a 1955 race for a House of Delegates seat from Roanoke by campaigning for compliance with the previous year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordering an end to segregation of public schools.

Virginia’s governor at the time, Thomas B. Stanley, took the same position at first, but Byrd decided instead on a policy of “massive resistance” to integration.

Mr. Holton worked on building the Republican organization as a party official and during his low-budget race for governor in 1965, when he lost to Democrat Mills E. Godwin Jr. He had the campaign support of Eisenhower and former vice president Nixon. Mr. Holton, in turn, was an early leader of Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign for president.

The next year, with Democrats badly divided, Mr. Holton received help from the state’s major union and Black organizations as well as Nixon to beat William C. Battle in the race for governor. The Republican Party had arrived in Richmond.

“When this man was elected governor in 1969, I felt — like most loyal Democrats — that the world had come to an end,” Gerald L. Baliles, a later governor, said at a 1999 conference on Mr. Holton’s term.

With just a handful of fellow Republicans in the General Assembly, Mr. Holton established friendships with moderate Democratic lawmakers and persuaded them on some key initiatives.

“He had a productive career, and the General Assembly was 85 percent Democratic, but that actually helped him,” Sabato said. “They didn’t see him as a threat. They viewed him as a fluke. . . . He was much more than a transitional figure. He helped Virginia move into the modern era on race and lots of other things.”

In an effort to stop pollution of Virginia waterways, Mr. Holton won an increase in the income tax to upgrade sewage treatment plants. He also instituted a Cabinet form of government and appointed minorities, Democrats and even out-of-state experts to important jobs in his administration.

One such appointment was of Ernie Fears Sr., the Norfolk State University basketball coach and athletic director, as director of Virginia’s Selective Service program. “Two-thirds of the kids that we were drafting for the Vietnam War were Black,” Mr. Holton said. “So I wanted somebody to integrate that system and found out that Ernie was the guy I wanted.”

Mr. Holton, then an assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, listens as Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), left, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger chat in 1974. (John Duricka/AP)

After leaving office in 1974, Mr. Holton briefly served as assistant secretary of state for congressional relations in the Nixon administration. He became a partner in the law firm Hogan & Hartson in Washington and Richmond and said he was not “one of the book lawyers,” acting instead as a dealmaker and a lobbyist.

One deal he made, at the request of then-Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole, put Washington National and Dulles International airports under local control. The two airports had been the only ones in the nation run by the federal government, and Mr. Holton lobbied members of Congress for two years to create the airports authority.

“If we had not assured them that they would have parking right close to the gate, Congress wouldn’t have passed it,” he said.

As chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Mr. Holton helped push for modernizing the airports and expanding Dulles while responding to the concerns of Washington-area residents. But he had limited sympathy for people who moved near the airports and then complained about the noise. As a ­resident of McLean, Va., he used the roar of the jets from National to cover up his deliberate violation of Fairfax County firearms ordi­nances.

Mr. Holton said that, like his father, he liked to garden, and he was frustrated because he realized that the squirrels were getting all the fruit from the peach tree he had planted in his front yard. So he got out his bird gun.

“I would sit outside my garage and wait for the noise of the planes overhead,” he said. “Altogether that fall, I killed 13 squirrels and got three bushels of peaches.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Filed Under: News and Views

Mort Sahl, whose political comedy set the bar for future humorists, dies at 94

“I am deeply saddened by the news that Mort Sahl, a truly brilliant comedian, monologist, social critic and activist has passed away. During his career he demonstrated both personal and professional courage as a seeker of truth about the JFK assassination and other history-making events. It is uncomfortably fitting that he should die on the anniversary of the date congress had set as the release date for all withheld JFK assassination-related records. This coincidental circumstance should enhance the public’s outrage over President Biden’s decision to intervene and once again delay the release of these essential materials.”  — James H. (Jim) Lesar, president, AARC.

Mort Sahl in 1977. (Jim Palmer/AP)
By John Otis
October 26, 2021 at 5:36 p.m. EDT

Mort Sahl, the comic whose caustic and fearlessly observant routines about Cold War politics in the button-down 1950s transformed American comedy and paved the way for generations of acid-witted humorists, not least Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, died Oct. 26 at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 94.

His friend Lucy Mercer confirmed the death but did not cite an immediate cause.

Before Mr. Sahl, wisecracks about government and Washington were little more than glib asides with no attempt at the jugular. For the most part, comedians avoided topics that might alienate escapist-minded radio, TV and nightclub audiences and stuck to safer material about mothers-in-law or nagging spouses.

By contrast, Mr. Sahl dove headfirst into the divisive politics and tumult of his time — from the nuclear arms race to segregation — with erudite outrage, a finely tuned sense of the absurd and a high tolerance for risk. Referring to his more genial comic forebear, Time magazine described him in a 1960 cover story as “Will Rogers with fangs.”

Mr. Sahl developed a trademark look — a V-neck sweater and loafers, befitting a graduate student — and he carried onstage the rolled-up newspapers whose headlines he had plundered for inspiration. Having honed his style in seedy San Francisco bars and coffeehouses, he riffed in knowing argot about presidential politics, Cold War paranoia, institutionalized religion and neurotic relationships between the sexes.

During the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts, which ensnared numerous entertainment figures, among other targets, Mr. Sahl took the position that “McCarthy doesn’t question what you say as much as your right to say it.”

He painted President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a blandly avuncular, distracted, golf-obsessed leader. Amid the 1957 racial integration showdown in Little Rock, Mr. Sahl joked that Eisenhower considered walking a Black girl to school but could not decide “whether or not to use an overlapping grip.”

He mocked talk of the “missile gap” during the 1960 presidential campaign, wryly jesting, “Maybe the Russians will steal all our secrets, then they’ll be three years behind.” And he spoke facetiously in favor of capital punishment, observing, “You’ve got to execute people. How else are they gonna learn?”

With more sophistication than a string of staccato one-liners, his jokes formed a free-flowing narrative punctuated by references to political and diplomatic leaders including Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, Cold War hot spots such as Malta and Pakistan, and legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act.

In one discursive story about Eisenhower’s travels abroad, Mr. Sahl said that White House press secretary James C. Hagerty grew testy when reporters asked when the president might visit Russia.

“Hagerty was quoted as saying, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m not God,’ ” Mr. Sahl said. “Somewhat out of proportion to the question.”

In “Seriously Funny,” a book about rebel comics of the 1950s and 1960s, Gerald Nachman explored the novelty of Mr. Sahl’s intellectual, explanatory style and his Ivy League wardrobe.

“Pre-Sahl was a time in which comedians, clad like bandleaders in spats and tuxes, announced themselves by their brash, anything-for-a-laugh, charred-earth policy and by-the-jokebook gags,” Nachman wrote. “Sahl challenged and changed all that simply by the comic device of being himself and speaking his mind onstage.”

Mr. Sahl in 1957 (AP)

At the end of his shows, Mr. Sahl would ask, “Is there anyone here I haven’t offended?”

Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner became an admirer of Mr. Sahl’s humor and promoted him as an exemplar of cool sophistication. The comedian performed on Broadway and in Playboy Clubs, acted in films, recorded popular comedy albums and appeared on a bevy of late-night and other comedy shows.

He was regarded as a pathfinder for the more topical, personal or offbeat styles honed by Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Mark Russell.

In 1954, a 19-year-old Woody Allen saw Mr. Sahl perform at a New York nightclub and for years mimicked his delivery style. “He was the best thing I ever saw,” Allen once said. “He was like Charlie Parker in jazz. . . . He totally restructured comedy.”

Behind Mr. Sahl’s humor lay a deep concern for American democracy, and his onstage probing was the antithesis of the cheap laugh. He sometimes warmed up crowds for his friend Dave Brubeck, but the jazz pianist complained that “he demands so much of an audience that it hasn’t the strength for anyone else.”

His high-minded material itself invited satire. In the early 1970s, Carlin portrayed a manic Mr. Sahl uncorking a ludicrous rant about the Arab League, student riots in Japan, Eisenhower watching a movie in Manila and the role of Asian religions in ecclesiastical history.

By then, Mr. Sahl’s career had fallen into decline, a development owed almost wholly to his nonstop ribbing of President John F. Kennedy and his obsession with his assassination in 1963.

Mr. Sahl had admired Kennedy and even contributed one-liners to his 1960 campaign speeches. But, fiercely independent and vowing to make any White House occupant the butt of his humor, he let loose when Kennedy won. He joked about Kennedy’s wealthy father influencing the election outcome (“You’re not allowed one more cent than you need to buy a landslide”), the Kennedy preoccupation with communist Cuba, and the new president’s rumored mafia connections.

He incurred the wrath of Kennedy intimates and said his livelihood was threatened. Many nightclubs, fearing tax audits, stopped booking him. Some liberals in his fan base, having grown accustomed to gibes about Eisenhower and Nixon, abandoned him.

Mr. Sahl plowed ahead and made an even more radical shift after the assassination.

Deeply shaken by the killing, he became convinced that the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, was a farce and that the CIA had participated in a plot to kill Kennedy. Onstage, Mr. Sahl read excerpts from the commission report that he considered full of comically tortured logic, and he rambled on about various conspiracies.

He journeyed to Louisiana, where the controversial New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison deputized him to help investigate an alleged government coverup. Putting comedy aside, Mr. Sahl spent several years traveling the country interviewing witnesses and evaluating evidence.

Invitations to appear on TV shows and in clubs dried up. In his 1976 memoir, “Heartland,” Mr. Sahl wrote that his earnings fell from $1 million a year to “about nothing.” But he made a comeback after Watergate, when his searing skepticism and dark view of American leadership better matched the national mood.

“The harvest of what we found came out repeatedly afterward in Watergate, the Iran-contra affair, the whole idea of shadow government and of people who think they know better what’s good for Americans,” Mr. Sahl told the makers of a public television documentary about him in 1989.

He returned to nightclubs and had a one-man Broadway show in 1987. Mr. Sahl still impressed with his steady supply of zingers.

One of them involved his friend, former secretary of state Alexander Haig, and the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Mr. Sahl explained: “I was with him when he lit up a Havana cigar, and I asked him, ‘Isn’t that trading with the enemy?’ He told me, ‘I prefer to think of it as burning their crops to the ground.’ ”

Mr. Sahl in 1967. (Robert W. Klein/AP)

Morton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal to American parents on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, a failed left-wing playwright from New York, ran a tobacco shop to support his family. The Sahls later settled in Los Angeles, and the elder Sahl became an FBI clerk.

According to Nachman, Harry Sahl cast a pall over his son’s view of the world. “It’s all fixed,” he would tell Mort, referring to show business. “They don’t want anything good.”

In high school, Mr. Sahl joined the ROTC, and by his own account became an expert marksman and “something of a martinet.” At 15, he enlisted in the Army by lying about his age. His mother found him two weeks later and ushered him home.

Undaunted, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces after high school graduation and was sent to an outpost in Anchorage, where his contrarian spirit made an untimely emergence. He grew a beard and tried to turn a base newspaper, which he edited, into a muckraking journal. His efforts earned him ample KP duty before his discharge in 1947.

He graduated in 1950 from the University of Southern California. While doing odd jobs, he wrote a novel and a play that found no takers.

He followed a girlfriend to San Francisco, where in 1953 he began trying out comic material at a basement bar called the hungry i, a rendezvous for beatniks that charged a 25-cent entrance fee.

Mr. Sahl, who had been living in the back of a station wagon, said it took three months to get his first laugh. The winner was a Cold War joke about McCarthy’s anti-communist crusades: “Every time the Russians throw an American in jail, we put an American in jail to show them they can’t get away with it.”

His success at the hungry i led to more prominent engagements in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas and Miami Beach. A heavy coffee drinker largely averse to alcohol and cigarettes, he led a busy life that took a toll on his private affairs.

All three of Mr. Sahl’s marriages — to Sue Babior, former Playboy centerfold China Lee and Kenslea Ann Motter — ended in divorce. His son with Lee, Mort Sahl Jr., died of a drug overdose in 1996. He had no immediate survivors.

Mr. Sahl performed well into his 80s, even after a mild stroke. He often made light of death, but with a sharp political eye. Referring to the Windy City’s reputation for electoral fraud, he once quipped: “I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago. When I die, I want to still remain politically active.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Filed Under: News and Views

Biden postpones release of JFK assassination files, citing pandemic-related delays

President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Riding with Kennedy were first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, right, Nellie Connally, second from left, and her husband, Texas Gov. John Connally, far left. (Jim Altgens/AP)

By Amy B Wang
October 23, 2021 at 11:45 a.m. EDT

President Biden has further postponed the release of secret government files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, citing delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The files had originally been scheduled to be released by next week. They will now be released in two batches — one later this year and another in late 2022, Biden said in a White House memo Friday.

According to the memo, the postponement came at the recommendation of the national archivist, who said the pandemic “has had a significant impact on the agencies” responsible for reviewing each redaction in the documents.

“The Archivist has also noted that ‘making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste,’” Biden wrote, adding that he agreed the agencies needed more time.

“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure,” the president said.

Biden said some documents will be released on Dec. 15 of this year, but not earlier “out of respect for the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination,” which took place Nov. 22, 1963. The remaining documents will undergo an “intensive 1-year review” and be released by Dec. 15, 2022.

Under the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, all assassination records should have been publicly disclosed within 25 years — or by October 2017 — but postponements were allowed in instances that national security concerns outweighed the public interest in disclosure. The National Archives notes about 88 percent of the records have been released since the late 1990s.

President Donald Trump in 2017 announced he planned to publicly disclose the remaining JFK files, only to delay the release of some of the files for national security reasons, setting a new deadline of Oct. 26, 2021. In 2018, Trump did end up authorizing the disclosure of 19,045 documents, about three-quarters of which still contained some redactions.

Jefferson Morley, the editor of JFKFacts.org who in 2003 sued the CIA for records related to the Kennedy assassination, said he was outraged by Biden’s decision to further postpone the release, calling it the “covid dog ate my homework” excuse.

Morley had maintained a countdown clock to Oct. 26 on his website, detailing how much time remained until “Biden will decide … about the last of the secret JFK files.”

“Let’s not make hasty decisions? After 29 years of stonewalling, they don’t want to make a hasty decision,” Morley said dryly in an interview. “They are saying very clearly they do not intend to obey the law … it’s a ruse.”

Morley, who is also a former Washington Post staff writer, said Congress needs to step in.

Earlier this month, some members of Congress wrote to Biden urging him to fully release all of the JFK files, including 520 documents that remain withheld from the public and 15,834 documents that were previously released but are partially or mostly redacted. The letter was signed by Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo (Calif.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Jamie Raskin (Md.), Sara Jacobs (Calif.), Joe Neguse (Colo.) and Raul Grijalva (Ariz.).

“Democracy requires that decisions made by the government be open to public scrutiny,” the lawmakers wrote. “Yet excessive secrecy surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination continues to inspire doubt in the minds of the American public and has a profound impact on the people’s trust in their government.”

Biden on Friday said the need to protect records “has only grown weaker with the passage of time” and that he agreed it was critical the U.S. government “maximizes transparency.”

“Almost 30 years since the Act, the profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day,” Biden wrote. “It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency, disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Filed Under: News and Views

What Biden is keeping secret in the JFK files

The censored files may offer insights into Cold War covert ops, but don’t expect a smoking gun about the assassination.

Part of a file from the CIA, dated Oct. 10, 1963, details "a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico" report of Lee Harvey Oswald's contact with the Soviet Union embassy in Mexico City.

Part of a file from the CIA released by the National Archives in 2017, dated Oct. 10, 1963, details “a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico” report of Lee Harvey Oswald’s contact with the Soviet Union embassy in Mexico City. | Jon Elswick/AP Photo

By BRYAN BENDER

10/24/2021 02:43 PM EDT

President Joe Biden has once again delayed the public release of thousands of government secrets that might shed light on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure,” Biden wrote in a presidential memorandum late Friday.

He also said that the National Archives and Records Administration, the custodian of the records, needs more time to conduct a declassification review due to delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision, which follows a delay ordered by President Donald Trump in 2017, means scholars and the public will have to wait even longer to see what remains buried in government archives about one of the greatest political mysteries of the 20th century. And the review process for the remaining documents means Biden can hold the release further if the CIA or other agencies can convince him they reveal sensitive sources or methods.

Public opinion polls have long indicated most Americans do not believe the official conclusion by the Warren Commission that the assassination was the work of a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who once defected to the Soviet Union and who was shot to death by a nightclub owner Jack Ruby while in police custody.

A special House committee in 1978 concluded “on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

But longtime researchers almost uniformly agree that what is still being shielded from public view won’t blow open the case.

“Do I believe the CIA has a file that shows former CIA Director Allen Dulles presided over the assassination? No. But I’m afraid there are people who will believe things like that no matter what is in the files,” said David Kaiser, a former history professor at the Naval War College and author of “The Road to Dallas.”

His book argued that Kennedy’s murder cannot be fully understood without also studying two major U.S. intelligence and law enforcement campaigns of the era: Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s war on organized crime and the CIA’s failed efforts to kill communist dictator Fidel Castro in Cuba (with the Mafia’s help).

Still, Kaiser and other experts believe national security agencies are still hiding information that shows how officials actively stonewalled a full accounting by Congress and the courts and might illuminate shadowy spy world figures who could have been involved in a plot to kill the president.

What’s still hidden?

Portions of more than 15,000 records that have been released remain blacked out, in some cases a single word but in others nearly the entire document, according to the National Archives.

The records were collected by the Assassination Records Review Board, which was established by Congress in the 1992 JFK Records Act.

The independent body, which folded in 1998, was headed by a federal judge and empowered to collect classified information from across the government that might have bearing on Kennedy’s murder and make public as much as possible after consulting with the agencies where the intelligence originated. It also had legal authority to overrule recalcitrant agencies.

A large portion of the JFK collection came from the probe by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which investigated the murders of President Kennedy and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The panel also delved into a series of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement activities in the early decades of the Cold War as part of its probe.

The creation of the review board ultimately led to the release of thousands of files. But the board also postponed the release of other documents until 2017, when Trump used his authority to further delay full public disclosure.

Much of what has yet to be released involves intelligence activities during the height of the Cold War that likely had no direct bearing on the plot to kill Kennedy but could shed light on covert operations.

One heavily censored file involves a CIA plot to kill Castro. Another is a 1963 Pentagon plan for an “engineered provocation” that could be blamed on Castro as a pretext for toppling him. Then there’s a history of the CIA’s Miami office, which organized a propaganda campaign against Castro’s Cuba.

Other redacted files are believed to contain new CIA information about the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel by former CIA operatives that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

But some could reveal more about the events leading up to the assassination itself.

Researchers are keenly interested in the personnel file of the late George Joannides, a career CIA intelligence operative who staffers on the House investigation in the late 1970s believe lied to Congress about what he knew about a CIA-backed exile group that had ties to Oswald.

A federal appeals court in 2018 upheld the CIA’s rejection of a lawsuit by researcher Jefferson Morley to obtain the file.

Lee Harvey Oswald denies shooting President Kennedy.
Paraded before newsmen after his arrest, Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 23, 1963, tells reporters that he did not shoot President John F. Kennedy. | AP Photo

Another partially released file contains information about how the CIA may have monitored Oswald on a trip he purportedly took to Mexico City ahead of the assassination.

The files could reveal more of “what the CIA was doing in New Orleans, some more info about Mexico City and likely even some revelations about the CIA role in Watergate,” said Larry Schnapf, a lawyer and assassination researcher.

Morley, who has filed multiple lawsuits to force disclosure, believes the CIA is covering up for individuals who may have had a role in Kennedy’s death or knew who was responsible and wanted it hidden from the public to protect the agency.

He says the CIA’s refusal to comply “can only be interpreted as evidence of bad faith, malicious intent, and obstruction of Congress.”

A spokesperson for the CIA, which accounts for the majority of the withheld records, declined to address the charge, saying only that the agency will comply with the law and the president’s directive.

When will the secret files be revealed?

Biden did set in motion the release of some of the remaining records.

Continue reading at POLITICO

Filed Under: News and Views

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