News and Views

JFK Records Suit Tests CIA Secrecy on Assassination

(Photo by STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images)

by Jefferson Morley 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 reversed Leon’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 not contain 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

Perhaps the biggest single revelation generated by Morley v. CIA was the medal given to Joannides. Inside the agency, one might say that Joannides protected the agency’s “sources and methods” around the Oswald/AMSPELL/FPCC operation. Outside the agency, you could say he was honored, at least in part, for perpetuating the JFK cover-up.

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.

The high court now has the opportunity to decide. The answers are a long time coming.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Watergate conspirator James McCord, Jr. died two years ago. His death was never announced.

Watergate witness James McCord, left, seated with attorney Bernard “Bud” Fensterwald, right, testifies in a 1973 hearing of the Senate Select Committee on the Watergate case. (AP)

By Emily Langer ,

Harrison Smith and

Kate Morgan

April 18 at 5:50 PM

James W. McCord Jr., a retired CIA employee who was convicted as a conspirator in the Watergate burglary and later linked the 1972 break-in to the White House in revelations that helped end the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, died June 15, 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pa. He was 93.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to his death certificate obtained at the Berks County Register of Wills office in Reading, Pa.

Mr. McCord’s death was first reported in “Dirty Tricks,” a 2018 history of the Watergate investigation by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan. But the news did not appear in local or national media outlets and surfaced online only in March, when the website Kennedys and King published an obituary referencing his gravesite in Pennsylvania.

Mr. McCord served in the CIA for 19 years, including as chief of the agency’s physical security division, before his supporting, at times sensational role in the events that precipitated the first resignation in history of a U.S. president.

He had retired from the spy agency and was privately employed as head of security for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President — commonly called CREEP — when he became entangled in a scheme to burglarize and bug the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington.

Mr. McCord had once taught a college course on how to protect buildings from intrusions, and he helped lead the operation. Preparing for the break-in, the conspirators rigged door latches at the Watergate complex with adhesive tape to prevent the doors from locking.

Mr. McCord shows how to rig the transmitter of a bugging device in a telephone at a hearing in Washington on May 23, 1973. (Charles Del Vecchio/The Washington Post)

The tape caught the attention of a security guard, Frank Wills, who alerted the police to suspicious activity in the building. In the early-morning hours of June 17, 1972, plainclothes officers entered the Democratic headquarters and found five burglars clad in suits and surgical gloves.

[‘The Post’ and the forgotten security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in]

Those men — Mr. McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Frank A. Sturgis, Eugenio R. Martinez and Virgilio R. Gonzalez — were carrying bugging devices, cameras, film and a walkie-talkie. Mr. McCord initially used the alias Edward Martin but was quickly connected to the reelection committee.

His arraignment, covered by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for one of the newspaper’s first articles about the events now collectively known as the Watergate scandal, was memorably dramatized in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.”

Portrayed by actor Richard Herd, Mr. McCord is asked by a court official about his previous line of government work. “C-I-A,” he whispers, in an early hint that the break-in was more than a “third-rate burglary attempt,” as White House spokesman Ronald L. Ziegler dismissively described it.

John J. Sirica, the federal judge who presided over the Watergate cases, controversially threatened defendants with stiff sentences if they did not assist investigators. Facing a possible 45 years in prison, Mr. McCord submitted to Sirica a letter that The Post described years later as a “bombshell.”

“There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent,” Mr. McCord wrote in the March 1973 document, delivered to the court after his conviction and before his sentencing. “Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation, and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.”

He further wrote that “others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.”

Days later, Mr. McCord appeared before the Senate Watergate committee and testified that Liddy had told him John N. Mitchell, the reelection committee chairman and former U.S. attorney general, had approved the bugging scheme. Mr. McCord further said he had been informed that White House counsel John W. Dean III and Nixon aide Jeb Stuart Magruder knew in advance of the plan.

Mr. McCord continued to deliver allegations of misconduct at high levels. In a May 1973 memorandum to Senate and other investigators, he wrote that he and the other burglars were pressured to falsely testify that the Watergate scheme was executed at the behest of the CIA — an account that would have exculpated the reelection committee and one that he refused to give.

“Even if it meant my freedom, I would not turn on the organization that had employed me for 19 years,” he wrote. “I was completely convinced that the White House was behind the idea and ploy which had been presented, and that the White House was turning ruthless.”

Mr. McCord also testified that John J. Caulfield, a Nixon administration official, relayed an offer for clemency and a future job if Mr. McCord agreed not to testify against Nixon officials and to accept a prison sentence.

Mr. McCord’s statements, some of them made in closed-door Senate sessions and reported by the media, were credited with helping to break open the Watergate investigation by connecting the burglary to high-ranking Nixon officials.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Mr. McCord served four months in prison.

“I have no regrets in telling the truth,” he said when he reported to the penitentiary in March 1975. “I think in the long run it’s been extremely beneficial to the country to have become aware of what occurred. I was probably the first to tell the truth on Watergate.”

[Herbert Kalmbach, ‘most mysterious figure’ in the Watergate scandal, dies at 95]

James Walter McCord Jr. was born in Waurika, Okla., on Jan. 26, 1924. He was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, serving as a bombardier during World War II, and graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas. He was an FBI special agent before joining the CIA in 1951, and in 1965, he received a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University.

After retiring from the agency, which bestowed on him an award for distinguished service, he ran a security consulting firm in Rockville, Md. In subsequent years, he worked in Colorado for a company that promoted alternative energy.

His wife, Sarah Berry McCord, died in 2014. He had three children, but a complete list of survivors was not available. Calls seeking comment from his family were not immediately returned.

In 1974, Mr. McCord self-published a book, “A Piece of Tape — The Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction,” that discussed at least one scenario of events that might have been.

Shortly before the Watergate break-in, Mr. McCord wrote, the burglars considered calling off the plan when they discovered that someone had noticed and removed the adhesive tape they placed on the door latches. Rather than aborting the operation, they rigged the locks again.

It was Wills, the $80-a-week security guard, who spotted the tape the first time. He did not overlook it the second.

Dr. John Newman Responds to CNN

What is going on in this new CNN article by Thomas Maier claiming that the “U.S. Releases Most but not All JFK Assassination Files”?

https://www.cnn.com/…/us-assassination-attempt-m…/index.html

It’s an interesting article, but there is nothing new here. And contrary to the video attached to the print article, no new document or documents have been recently released about plots to assassinate Castro. The CNN article mentions CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell’s false story that–right after the inauguration–he was pressured by the White House to establish an assassination capability in the CIA to dispose of Castro. As I demonstrated in Chapter Seven of my latest (2019) volume, Into the Storm, that was a lie and Bissell knew it was a lie. When Bissell appeared before the Church Committee on 17 and 22 July 1975, he retracted his claim that President Kennedy told him to create an Executive Action project. At length, the committee concluded this: “His testimony, given in light of information obtained since his earlier appearances, was that there was no White House urging for the creation of the Executive Action project.” At the end of several weeks of depositions to sort out the facts, the committee’s investigation established that an Executive Action capability had neither been requested by the president nor discussed with him. What Was the Motive for Bissell’s Deception?

Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, President Kennedy, John McCone

This question needs to be answered and I believe it can be answered with confidence. By the time Kennedy was in the White House, Bissell was desperate for a miracle. Bissell calculated that if Harvey was convinced that the new president was secretly serious about assassinating Castro, then the gun-toting king of luncheon martinis might be motivated to help make it happen. For Bissell, much more than his position as the DDP was riding on the success or failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In early 1961, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles wanted Bissell to accept the position of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Bissell got an appointment with Secretary of State Rusk to talk about it, and Rusk said he would be delighted if Bissell served in that position. Afterward, Bissell spoke with the president. Kennedy told Bissell it would be best if he remained in his job as the CIA Deputy Director of Plans. Kennedy had let it be known that Bissell would be replacing Dulles as DCI in July 1961. It was “no great secret,” Bissell wrote in his memoir, that JFK “viewed me as Dulles’ successor.”

Clearly, nothing less than Bissell’s future chance to become the Director of Central Intelligence was at stake. This single fact explains a lot about Bissell’s flawed judgement. In his mind at the time, Castro’s assassination before the exile landing was the only card left in the deck and the only person able to play that card appeared to be Harvey. Having accepted that the ends justified the means, Bissell lied to Harvey. Bissell fabricated his story about a presidential order at the first possible opportunity—immediately after Kennedy’s inauguration.

None of Bissell’s lies resulted from a dislike, let alone a hatred, for John Kennedy. But his selfish interests had long term consequences that he could not have foreseen. His last lie was his worst lie. Bissell could never have imagined that his whopper about a presidential order to establish an Executive Action capability would ultimately fall into the hands of a CIA staff officer who held nothing but hatred for the Kennedy brothers. Bissell could never have imagined that his last lie would be used to deprecate his former friend John Kennedy in perpetuity. Bissell could never have imagined that the CIA would carry on his Mafia plot to assassinate Castro, lie to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that it had been terminated, and then continue the operation against the AG’s orders and behind his back. And, finally, Bissell could never have imagined that Sam Halpern would lie to the Agency and to the world that RFK had waged a secret Mafia campaign to assassinate Castro.

All of these unforeseen events would come to pass. Both Bissell and Halpern lied about what I have dubbed the “White House pressures ploy.” But their motives differed. Bissell lied about it at the time (early 1961) to protect his chance to become the DCI. Halpern lied about this alleged ploy much later to buttress his forty-year-long false campaign to blame Bobby Kennedy for his brother’s assassination.

Dr. Newman’s latest work, Into the Storm: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume III addresses these issues and may be ordered through Amazon by clicking here.

Courtesy of JFKFacts: The Man Who Asked Too Many JFK Questions

Jeff Morley|27 March, 2019

The late Charles Thomas belonged to an exclusive, unhappy and forgotten club: U.S. government officials whose efforts to honestly investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 cost them their jobs and reputations.

Last week the Washington Post ran an obituary of Cynthia Thomas, the widow of Charles Thomas. It was an unusual tribute. The Washington Post, now acknowledges that there are good and solid reasons for perfectly sane people to reject the U.S. government’s implausible and widely disbelieved official theory that a “lone gunman” killed JFK for no discernible reason.

This is a welcome and overdue development, as the facts of Thomas’s tragic story attest.

Thomas, a Foreign Service officer, was stationed in Mexico from 1964 to 1967. In the course of his consular duties, Thomas gathered first-hand information from credible sources about the visit of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to Mexico City six weeks before JFK’s assassination. Thomas assumed that the CIA and FBI would be interested in his new evidence. He assumed wrong.

In fact, Thomas was punished for asking questions about JFK’s assassination. Despite glowing job recommendations, he was inexplicably dismissed from the Foreign Service in 1969. “It was nonsensical,” Cynthia Thomas told a reporter, “Charles was the best sort of American diplomat.”

Two years later, Charles Thomas put a gun to his right temple in the second-floor bathroom of the couple’s home in northwest Washington, and pulled the trigger.

‘Sandbagged’

Other than its violent end, Thomas’ story resembles that of John Whitten, a senior CIA official, who died in 2000. Whitten too paid a price for asking JFK questions.

In 1963 Whitten served as chief of the Mexico desk in the clandestine service. He came up through the agency’s Berlin base where he pioneered the use of the polygraph in counterespionage investigations. He investigated the famous case of Otto John, the West German intelligence chief who defected to East Germany in the 1950s.

The day after JFK was killed, deputy CIA director Richard Helms put Whitten in charge of collating all reports on Oswald. Arrested for killing Kennedy, Oswald denied responsibility and told reporters he was “a patsy.” Oswald was then killed in police custody.

The more Whitten learned about Oswald’s Cuban contacts, the more he wanted to investigate. With a clerical staff of 30, he launched a counterespionage investigation of Oswald, a leftist who had lived in the Soviet Union.

Within a month, Whitten was, in his own words, “sandbagged” by CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

“Angleton started to criticize my report terribly without pointing out any inaccuracies,” Whitten told Senate investigators in closed-door testimony. “It was so full of wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and I just sat there and I did not say a word. This was a typical Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the report, and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to the meeting. ”

A legendary and controversial figure in the annals of the CIA, Angleton is best-known for the “mole hunt,” his ceaseless unsuccessful effort to find a Soviet spy inside the CIA in the late 1960s. As I recounted in my 2017 biography of Angleton, The Ghost, Angleton and his molehunters closely monitored Oswald’s travels, foreign contacts and political activities from November 1959 to November 1963.

At a bitter meeting on Christmas Eve 1963, Whitten was relieved of his duties. “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten. “I was not, and Angleton was.”

The questions Whitten wanted to pursue about Oswald and the Cubans were never asked, much less answered, by the Warren Commission, which concluded predictably that Oswald acted alone, and that no one in the government was to blame.

When Whitten, an outstanding undercover officer, received a poor job evaluation in 1965, he quit the CIA and moved to Europe to join the Vienna Men’s Choir.

Snatched

Thomas and Whitten’s story also resembles that of Win Scott, the veteran chief of the agency’s Mexico station in the 1960s.

As told in my 2008 biography, Our Man in Mexico, Scott and his deputy Ann Goodpasture, launched their own private investigation of Oswald at the same time as Thomas. Like Thomas, Scott came to reject the official theory of a “lone gunman.” He wrote as much in an unpublished memoir in 1970.

Angleton suppressed Win Scott’s JFK dissent too. When Scott died suddenly in April 1971, Angleton flew to Mexico City and seized Scott’s unpublished manuscript. It would be 20 years before portions of Scott’s memoir surfaced with its damaging account of how the CIA had fed a lie to the Warren Commission about Oswald.

CIA officials then disparaged Scott, who had received the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 1969. One CIA official said Scott had “gone to seed.”

Unwelcome Questions

For Thomas’s obituary, the Post turned to an outside writer, former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon. The author of two well-reported books about the Warren Commission and 9/11 Commission, Shenon reported Thomas’s story for The Guardianlast spring.

In the Post, Shenon wrote:

Declassified government files released in the 1990s suggested to her and her family — and to some historians and researchers who have studied the case — that her husband’s career was ended to stop him from continuing to raise unwelcome questions inside the government about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy: specifically, about whether the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had accomplices in Mexico,

Thomas’s “unwelcome questions,” Shenon contends, concerned a possible Cuban communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

The long-classified State Department and CIA documents show that her husband alarmed his superiors in the late 1960s by pressing for a new investigation that might have pointed to a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. It was a plot, he suspected, that had been hatched on Mexican soil and somehow involved officials of the communist government of Cuba.

The implication of the Post’s obituary is that the U.S. government protected Fidel Castro from credible evidence of Cuban involvement in JFK’s assassination–and continues to protect the Cuban government to this day.

As I explain in this piece for Salon, the “Castro did it” theory lacks plausibility.

Why would the CIA protect the impudent revolutionary leader who loved baiting the U.S. government as “Yanqui imperialists” and “war criminals?” The U.S. government had–and has–a policy of unremitting hostility toward the government of Cuba. The agency mounted scores, if not hundreds, of conspiracies to assassinate Castro. Declared U.S. policy long called for the overthrow of Castro’s government.

If Thomas’ evidence credibly pointed to Cuban involvement, why wouldn’t U.S. officials have publicized it in order to discredit Castro, facilitate the overthrow of his government, and do justice for the slain president?

To protect themselves is the obvious answer. But what did the CIA have to hide?

CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE AT JFKFACTS

More Clues, and Questions, in 1961 Crash That Killed Dag Hammarskjold

By Rick Gladstone and Alan Cowell Feb. 17, 2019

A few provocative tidbits have emerged about the mysterious 1961 death of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, just months before the world body may forever close the book on the unsolved case.

The new information, which appears to corroborate the theory that South African or Belgian mercenaries may have forced the plane carrying Mr. Hammarskjold and 15 others to crash in a conflict region of Africa, is far from conclusive.

But it has provided more fuel for questions about what powerful nations may still be withholding in their intelligence archives about the crash, a defining event nearly six decades ago in emerging post-colonial Africa.

Mr. Hammarskjold, a pipe-smoking Swedish diplomat whose name now adorns buildings in and around the United Nations headquarters in New York, was on a mission to settle a conflict over Katanga, a rebellious part of Congo, when his aircraft, a chartered DC-6, crashed just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961.

The aircraft, named the Albertina, was just a few minutes from its destination: an airfield in Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.

Whether the crash was accidental has been at the crux of inquiries that have persisted to this day, generating many conspiracy theories that colonial-era mining interests, perhaps backed by Western intelligence agencies, had plotted to assassinate him.

The inquiries have turned Mr. Hammarskjold’s death into the biggest mystery in the history of the United Nations.

Now, as a prominent jurist retained by Mr. Hammarskjold’s most recent successor, António Guterres, is preparing what may be the final report on the crash, a documentary film has caused a stir by presenting what it has described as revelations.

The two-hour film, “Cold Case Hammarskjold,” by Mads Brugger, a Danish journalist, received mixed reviews when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last month. It suggested that a South African group of white mercenaries had not only played a role in the crash, but had also later plotted to infect South Africa’s black majority with AIDS through a fake vaccination campaign.

While the AIDS theory has been met with deep skepticism by a range of experts, its assertions about a South African mercenary connection to Mr. Hammarskjold’s death have not been dismissed so easily.

Dag Hammarskjold in 1959.CreditAssociated Press

A few weeks before the premiere of “Cold Case Hammarskjold,” Alexander Jones, a former member of the mercenary group and an important figure in the film, was interviewed for 90 minutes in Sweden by a representative of the jurist who is preparing the United Nations report, according to Andreas Rocksen, a producer of the film.

Mr. Jones described a 1989 recruitment session for the group, the South African Institute for Maritime Research, in which photographs of the Hammarskjold crash site had been displayed and the group’s leader “referred to it as one of the most successful operations — taking down a dignitary,” Mr. Rocksen said.

Asked for comment, the jurist, Mohamed Chande Othman, the former chief justice of Tanzania, said he had received “information from a multiplicity of sources,” including “the makers of a recent film on this subject matter,” according to an emailed statement from his spokesman.

The judge also said he was still evaluating the information “in terms of whether it may be new information of relevance” and that he intended to submit his report to Mr. Guterres by June.

Neither the judge nor Mr. Guterres said they had seen the film. But a spokesman for Mr. Guterres, Farhan Haq, said that Mr. Hammarskjold’s death “remains one of the saddest, most tragic events in the history of our organization,” and that “a full accounting of what happened is way overdue.”

The film’s researchers also claim to have corroborated a theory that a now-deceased Belgian mercenary pilot, Jan van Risseghem, flying a French-built Fouga Magister belonging to the forces of Moïse Tshombe, the Katangese rebel leader, attacked and destroyed Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane.

The researchers interviewed a friend of Mr. Risseghem’s, Pierre Coppens, who said Mr. Risseghem had recounted the attack to him years later in Belgium.

That account, however, has been called into question by a German historian, Torben Gülstorff, who has traced documents showing that several Dornier twin-engine planes were sold to the Katangese rebel authorities.

Unlike the Fouga, the Dornier Do 28A had short takeoff and landing capabilities and could have used a short airstrip in the Congolese town of Kipushi to reach Ndola, while a Fouga, based much further away in the Congolese town of Kolwezi, would have been at the limits of its range.

In an article last year, Mr. Gülstorff wrote that “a Dornier Do 28A might be the plane that was used in a nighttime air-to-air attack” on Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane. But he said, “further research is necessary.”

Doubt also has been expressed about Mr. van Risseghem’s whereabouts on the night of the crash. In 1994, Bengt Rösiö, a Swedish diplomat and author who had interviewed Mr. van Risseghem, said in a paper titled “Ndola Once Again” that Mr. van Risseghem was “not in Katanga at the time of the Ndola crash since he was on leave in Belgium.”

But that assertion, too, seems undermined by documents published in a Belgian newspaper, De Morgen, last month, showing that Mr. van Risseghem apparently drew an advance on his salary as a mercenary for the Katangese authorities on Sept. 16, 1961.

New questions also have been raised about the precise cause of the Albertina’s destruction. An article last month in Counterpunch, a magazine based in Petrolia, Calif., suggested that the pilot had been trying for a controlled crash landing after an attacking plane hit it.

If the Albertina had not struck an enormous anthill, the article said, the “skinny trees would probably have arrested its forward movement in a fairly short distance and the passengers if they were strapped in would have a pretty good chance of walking away.”

Some of those colonial officials present in Ndola at the time, representing Britain, insist that there was no evidence of an aerial attack.

“I mapped out where every body was found in relation to the crash site and attended every post mortem,” said John Gange, a former detective senior inspector in the colonial police who examined the site hours after it had been located.

“Every single scrap of the aircraft was removed from the scene and examined by qualified engineers,” Mr. Gange said in an email. “Nothing untoward was found.”

“No bullets or bullet holes were found on any of the bodies or on any part of the wreckage,” he added.

In the absence of any definitive explanation, conflicting theories have proliferated, along with accusations that Western powers and the United Nations itself have obstructed successive inquiries.

Last November, Judge Othman directly accused Britain and South Africa of having failed to cooperate in his repeated requests for information.

This month, Hynrich W. Wieschhoff, whose father, Heinrich A. Wieschhoff, an adviser to Mr. Hammarskjold, died in the crash, said the United Nations had “done little to publicize the activities” of Judge Othman, had been “slow to fully declassify its own archives and still refuses to release some documents.”

In an article posted on PassBlue, a news website that focuses on the United Nations, Mr. Wieschhoff said the judge’s final report may offer more detail. Still, he said, “unless that report or a new sense of purpose by the U.N. can pry the facts out of Britain, the U.S. and other key states, what happened and why will once again fade unanswered into the past.”