SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the greatest American murder mystery, decades after the official report declared Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman responsible for JFK’s death.

But a new book from world-renowned JFK assassination researcher Josiah “Tink” Thompson comes to a shocking different conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire the fatal shot that killed President Kennedy.

“JFK UNSOLVED: The Real Conspiracies” is the new ABC7 Originals documentary based on Thompson’s book, “Last Second in Dallas.”

The film explores Thompson’s analysis of the evidence and shows how he believes the government tried to cover up what really happened.

Download the ABC7 Bay Area streaming app on Roku, AppleTV, Amazon FireTV or AndroidTV now to watch the full documentary.

JFK assassination expert Josiah Thompson is pictured in Bolinas, California during the filming of the 2021 documentary ‘JFK Unsolved’.

THE INVESTIGATOR

Josiah Thompson is part of an elite group of assassination researchers who descended on Dealey Plaza in Dallas after President Kennedy’s death on Nov. 22, 1963.

Thompson worked on a cover story for LIFE Magazine and wrote what is considered to be a seminal book on the assassination, “Six Seconds in Dallas,” in 1967.

Thompson went on to a long, distinguished career as a private detective, but kept coming back to the JFK assassination.

For the past 10 years, he revisited the forensic evidence, worked with a team of scientists, researchers, and assassination buffs, and wrote a new book, “Last Second in Dallas.”

Thompson trusted investigative reporter Dan Noyes to turn the book into a documentary film.

EXPLORE: Dive deep into ‘JFK Unsolved’ with the interactive experience

This image was taken during a secret service reenactment of the JFK assassination for the official investigation into the deadly shooting.

THE EVIDENCE

For “JFK UNSOLVED: The Real Conspiracies.” Noyes returned to the site of the assassination and interviewed people who were just feet away from President Kennedy when he suffered the fatal shot, and with Thompson’s help, Noyes explored evidence that points to a second gunman.

Debris fields of blood, bone and brain matter from the president traveled in two distinct directions, indicating two gunmen firing from different locations — the Texas School Book Depository and the Grassy Knoll.

A panel from the National Academy of Sciences initially dismissed a recording from a Dallas motorcycle police officer’s open microphone that may have picked up the sounds of gunfire.

Now, the leading acoustics scientist on the case defends the recording as authentic, and it provides a timing framework for the assassination.

Could Lee Harvey Oswald have fired all those shots from his Italian military-style, bolt-action rifle?

The answers in “JFK UNSOLVED: The Real Conspiracies.”

Dan Noyes & Josiah Thompson talk in his Bolinas, California home during the filming of the documentary ‘JFK Unsolved’ in 2021.

THE FILM

You can stream “JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies” starting Dec. 7, 2021 on your TV through the ABC7 Bay Area streaming apps. The app is available on Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV and Roku.

“JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies” will also be available to stream on Hulu starting Dec. 15, 2021.

READ MORE HERE

Malcolm Blunt, 2019 photographed by Bart Kamp

In cooperation with Dealey Plaza UK and The Mary Ferrell Foundation, AARC President Jim Lesar is proud to present direct access to Bart Kamp’s extraordinary Malcolm Blunt digital archives.

Malcolm Blunt is an independent investigator of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is important and what is not in the details of President Kennedy’s assassination. He is regarded within the assassination research community as an esteemed authority on the CIA and the JFK records held at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD. He is the 1998 recipient of JFK Lancer’s New Frontier Award In appreciation for his contribution of new evidence in furthering the study of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the AARC.  In November of 2020 he became of the subject of a new book featuring 10 transcribed conversations with AARC Executive Director, Alan Dale titled The Devil is in the Details.

This ongoing project was initiated by Bart Kamp of DPUK during the Spring of 2019. His Herculean efforts to identify, transport, scan, upload and catalog audio, video and paper documents, some of which have never been otherwise available online, represents a major contribution to Cold War historians and the JFK research community.

With appreciation to Malcolm Blunt, Jim Lesar of the AARC, Rex Bradford of Mary Ferrell Foundation, and Bart Kamp for indefatigable dedication necessary to produce this invaluable resource.

Visit The Malcolm Blunt Archives

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By Jefferson Morley Updated November 22, 2021 11:21 AM

President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jackie Kennedy arrive at Love Field on Nov. 22, 1963. Getty Images

As a professional journalist who has been reporting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy for almost 30 years, I have long been skeptical about the pursuit of a proverbial “smoking gun” that supposedly will blow open the case of the murdered president. When the congressional deadline for the release of the last of the JFK files approached last month, I instinctively advised friends that there would be no smoking gun in the released material.

After all, no serious investigative reporter seeks a single piece of evidence to decisively prove some kind of wrongdoing. To the contrary, good investigative journalism assembles myriad pieces of evidence into a mosaic that depicts a granular story of wrongdoing not previously visible to the public and law enforcement. Most prize-winning journalistic investigations do not depend on, or even feature, a “smoking gun” piece of evidence. So why should the JFK assassination story?

As the editor of the JFK Facts blog, I report on new pieces of evidence that filled in blank spaces in the historical record of JFK’s assassination. Think mosaic, not smoking gun.

But when the Biden White House announced late in the evening of Oct. 22 that the last of the JFK documents would not be released until December 2022 at the earliest, I began to rethink my caution. Friday nights are traditionally when the White House press office takes out the president’s smelliest garbage in hopes that the stench will pass by Monday morning. The announcement that the CIA and other federal agencies had delayed compliance with the 1992 JFK Records Act for the second time in four years was a story the White House understandably wanted to go away.

Smoking gun?

The delay struck me — and University of Texas Professor James Galbraith, among others — as a smoking gun in itself. The CIA’s slow-walking tactics are not quite definitive proof of a JFK conspiracy. They do, however, demonstrate that the CIA does not intend to obey a law concerning the assassination of a sitting American president.

The most plausible explanation of the CIA’s six-decade long history of deception, deceit and delay about assassination-related records is the desire to hide embarrassment or malfeasance. If nothing else, Biden’s order on the JFK files indicates that the CIA has a JFK problem: the clandestine service today cannot afford full disclosure about what happened in Dallas a long time ago.

To be sure, there are other possible explanations. Mark Zaid, a leading national security attorney in Washington, suggests that the CIA is hiding legitimate non-JFK secrets. This is possible, if not probable. But the CIA, facing a deadline set by President Trump in October 2017, released no JFK documents of any kind, basically saying, “the COVID dog ate my homework.” You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if non-JFK secrets is all they are withholding.

In fact, JFK researchers know something about what the CIA is hiding. Most of the still-secret JFK files have been partially declassified. In some documents only a paragraph, sentence or single word remains secret. From context we can deduce much about what is still hidden.

A redacted 123-page CIA file on Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, released in April 2018, for example, may shed light on what President Richard Nixon called “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” Nixon used this phrase as a coded reference to JFK’s assassination, according to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. The Hunt file lends credence to Haldeman’s claim.

Cuba policy

In 1970, Hunt, a leading figure in the failed invasion of Cuba, circulated the manuscript of his memoir, “Give Us This Day,” which denounced JFK’s Cuba policy as weak, if not traitorous. Hunt did not go through the agency’s pre-publication clearance process, a serious breach of protocol. Five documents, comprising eight pages of material, have been removed from the Hunt file with the notation that they can be found in CIA’s JFK files. I doubt these documents include a smoking gun, but they are certainly relevant to the assassination story.

The CIA file of Hunt’s fellow burglar Frank Sturgis has more smoking-gun potential. Sturgis, a long-time resident of Miami, was a soldier of fortune involved in anti-Cuba operations in the 1960s. Accused of involvement in Kennedy’s assassination, Sturgis denied he was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But behind closed doors, Sturgis boasted to investigators that the FBI considered him a plausible suspect in JFK’s murder. The redacted material in the Sturgis file may shed light on questions about Mafia involvement in JFK’s murder.

These passages concern the agency’s long-running interest in a man named Robert Maheu. He was a corrupt former FBI agent who facilitated the first CIA conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1960. In 1971, Maheu shared what he knew of the Castro plots with syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Maheu’s source, Mafia hitman Johnny Rosselli had hinted that the CIA’s efforts to kill Castro had led to the assassination of JFK. Rosselli, under federal investigation, with the possibility of deportation to Italy, threatened to tell the whole story to a Las Vegas grand jury. The blackmail ploy worked. The agency protected Rosselli from deportation, and Maheu never told the story to prosecutors. Years later, Rosselli, facing a congressional subpoena seeking his JFK testimony, was found stuffed in an oil drum floating in Biscayne Bay before his appearance on Capitol Hill.

Another still-secret file concerns a Miami man named Eladio del Valle. Some of his associates — not conspiracy theorists and not enemies— believed he was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Del Valle was murdered in 1966, a crime that never was solved. David Kaiser, a diplomatic historian and author of “The Road to Dallas,” a scholarly book about Kennedy’s assassination, sought to get access to Del Valle’s CIA records. He learned the Del Valle file was — and is — classified in its entirety.

Aware of Oswald

Then there’s a 338-page file that traces the very interesting career of James Walton Moore, the chief of the Dallas office of the agency’s Domestic Contacts Division in 1963. Moore knew all about Lee Harvey Oswald a year before he supposedly killed Kennedy. In the summer of 1962, Moore learned that Oswald, a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union out of sympathy for communism, had returned to Texas with a Russian wife. If the official JFK story is true — if Oswald alone killed the president — Moore was one of a half dozen senior CIA officials who failed to discern the threat he posed.

The CIA has largely managed to keep Moore out of the JFK investigations. He was never questioned about his pre-assassination knowledge of the accused assassin. His personnel file was partially released in 2018. A dozen pages remain redacted in their entirety.

Even more sensitive are the files of George Joannides, chief of CIA covert action operations in Miami. In 1963, Joannides ran a network of Cuban agents, recruited under a program code-named AMSPELL, who generated propaganda about the pro-Castro Oswald before and after JFK was killed. A dozen documents from Joannides’ personnel file in 1963 are still kept secret on the grounds that their release would harm the national security of the United States in 2021.

This claim sounds extreme but I’m inclined to believe it. The release of these records could do real damage to the reputation of the CIA. One heavily redacted memo that I obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit concerns a security clearance Joannides received to participate in a still-undisclosed top-secret operation in the summer of 1963. If that operation involved AMSPELL agents and Oswald’s Cuba activities, the memo will be strong evidence that certain CIA officers were complicit in Kennedy’s murder.

The CIA partially declassified an 87-page AMSPELL file in 2018. A dozen pages are still hidden from public view. If, and when, they are declassified, these pages may shed light on the CIA cover-up that followed JFK’s murder.

Of course, my educated guesses could be wrong. After all, I cannot see the redacted material. Only top CIA officials know what the agency will — and will not — release in compliance with Biden’s order. The sheer variety of the still-secret JFK files, however, indicates the scope of the agency’s JFK problem today. Six decades after the Dallas ambush, there is a lot of potentially embarrassing JFK material — hundreds of pages worth– that the CIA is loath to share with the Congress and the American people.

Do one or more of these pieces of the JFK mosaic add up to a veritable smoking gun?

In my opinion, yes, which is why I doubt any significant JFK files will be released in the coming weeks or in December 2022. The CIA, of course, could prove me wrong and dispel all doubts by releasing these files in their entirety at any time. That is not going to happen for one increasingly obvious reason. When it comes to the JFK assassination story, the CIA’s files are smoking suspiciously.

Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog, is the author of the forthcoming “Scorpions Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate,” to be published in June 2022.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/article256018857.html#storylink=cpy

“I do not need this court, these prosecutors or a piece of paper to tell me I am innocent,” said Muhammad Aziz, who spent two decades in prison.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, making a statement in court in August.Credit…Pool photo by Curtis Means

A motion filed by the Manhattan district attorney asking a judge to toss out the convictions of Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam in the murder of Malcolm X concludes that crucial evidence was withheld during the men’s trial.

The 43-page motion, which was granted at a hearing on Thursday, described in detail the investigation conducted by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and the men’s lawyers.

It concludes that if evidence withheld by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department had been given to the defense, the trial would likely have gone differently.

Read the Motion to Vacate Convictions in the Murder of Malcolm X

A review by the Manhattan district attorney and lawyers for the two men originally convicted decades ago found they did not receive a fair trial. The son of one of the men called the move “bittersweet.”

Read Document

“These defendants did not receive a fair trial,” the motion says. “And we respectfully submit that their convictions should be vacated and the indictment against them be dismissed.”

A New Witness

The motion includes a host of new findings. It mentions an interview with a new witness, J.M., conducted only days after the re-investigation began. J.M. said he was answering the telephone at the Nation of Islam’s Harlem mosque the day of the assassination and that his account backed up the alibi of Mr. Aziz.

“J.M. recalled receiving a phone call from Aziz at around 3:00 p.m. on February 21st, informing him that Aziz had just heard Malcolm X had been shot,” the motion says.

J.M. then hung up and went to get the mosque’s “captain” and together, the two men called Mr. Aziz back at his home.

“J.M. reached Aziz at home and told him the captain wanted to speak to him,” the motion says, a simple sentence that lends credence to Mr. Aziz’s story that he was at home at 3 p.m. when Malcolm X was shot.

A Trove of Documents From Law Enforcement

The motion details more than a dozen reports compiled by the F.B.I. and the N.Y.P.D. that were not disclosed to the defense, several of which point toward the men’s innocence.

The F.B.I. reports contain the accounts of several witnesses who describe gunmen who do not resemble the two men, as well as details about agency informants, who were present in the Washington Heights ballroom where Malcolm X was killed.

One F.B.I. report from Sept. 28, 1965, even contains a description of the man whom some experts on the assassination have concluded was probably the assassin who wielded a shotgun — William Bradley.

That report gives a description of Mr. Bradley, who was 27 years old at the time, that matches the one given by a defense witness of the shooter who had a shotgun.

“He had been a lieutenant in the Newark mosque and was known as a ‘strongman’ there,” the F.B.I. report on Mr. Bradley said. “He was a machine gunner in the Marine Corps.”

At least one of the witnesses at the trial was an informant for the F.B.I., according to the documents cited in the motion. One document, dated Feb. 25, 1965, said the bureau had ordered its local offices not to disclose to the New York police the fact that any witnesses were federal informants.

In addition, several F.B.I. reports indicated that, on the orders of the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, informants were told not to disclose their relationship with the F.B.I. when talking to the New York police and prosecutors about the murder, according to a footnote in the motion.

The Police Department documents include descriptions of undercover detectives having been present in the ballroom, at least one of whom was there at the time of the murder. The report may have been referring to Detective Gene Roberts, an undercover officer who it later came out was working as a member of Malcolm X’s security detail.

Prosecutorial Misconduct

The report also describes prosecutorial files that included police reports that would have been helpful to Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam’s defense. One noted that a witness in the ballroom who knew the accused men well had not seen them there but had seen other men who were associated with a Nation of Islam mosque in New Jersey.

The report makes it clear that prosecutors hid the fact that undercover officers were present during the shooting from the defense, a breach of the rules of evidence.

“The prosecutors were aware that undercover detectives were present at the time of the assassination,” the motion says, adding, “The People did not call any undercover officers at trial. There is no record of this information having been disclosed to the defendants.”

Because potentially exculpatory evidence never reached the defense, the re-investigation concluded that Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam did not receive a fair trial.

The Question of Innocence

Though the trial was found to be unfair, prosecutors stopped short of declaring that Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam were innocent of the charges. “Given the information currently available, the People make no determination on the question of the defendants’ actual innocence,” the motion said.

Mr. Vance was asked on Wednesday if he personally believed that the two men were innocent.

“Innocence is actually a term you won’t find in the penal law,” he said. “I will say this: The vacation of these convictions and the dismissal of the indictment means that they stand like any other person who has not been charged with a crime. They stand as presumed innocent.”

— Jonah E. Bromwich

Ilyasah Shabazz, center, with her sisters Qubilah Shabazz, left, and Gamilah Shabazz, right, said Thursday that full justice required identifying who really killed their father, Malcolm X.Credit…David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

One of Malcolm X’s daughters said on Thursday that she hoped the exonerations of two men wrongly convicted of her father’s assassination would bring “a measure of peace” to their relatives, but that her own family was still seeking justice.

Ilyasah Shabazz was almost 3 years old when she watched her father get gunned down in an Upper Manhattan ballroom. On Thursday, she recalled her mother’s efforts to keep “the legacy and inspiration Malcolm brought to the world alive” after witnessing his “horrific” death — and demanded that those responsible be held accountable.

“Full justice will not be served until all parties involved in the orchestrated killing of our father are identified and brought to justice,” Ms. Shabazz, who is now 59, said in a statement. “It is our hope that finally the full truth can be learned.”

In the more than five decades since Malcolm X’s killing, the children of the civil rights leader — Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, Gamilah, Malikah and Malaak — have pushed for answers along with other relatives, questioning the official narrative of the assassination and the role of government agencies in it.

Three of Malcolm X’s daughters were present in the Audubon Ballroom as gunmen poured bullets into their father and they say they continue to carry the trauma with them. As the shooting broke out, their mother, Betty Shabazz — who was pregnant with twins — threw herself over them, they have recalled.

Image

Several members of Malcolm X’s family watched as he was shot in Upper Manhattan decades ago. Credit…Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

Ilyasah Shabazz, who is the third oldest, said in 2005 that she has little recollection of the shooting. Still, she added at the time, “you still have to be traumatized by all the noise and commotion and my mother covering us up.”

For Attallah Shabazz, the oldest daughter, who was around 6, the image was clearer: “I’m a child with the forever memory of the most significant man in my life standing at a podium and falling backwards,” she said in a television interview in 2000. “That’s forever.”

The family has long been in conflict with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, whom they accused of playing a role in the assassination plot, an allegation Mr. Farrakhan has denied. They also have sought to reframe the public understanding of Malcolm X’s legacy.

Ilyasah Shabazz’s 2002 memoir, “Growing Up X,” described her childhood and the memories she held of her father — and how her life was shaped by his own life story.

And Betty Shabazz, a civil rights advocate herself who died in 1997, said she taught their six daughters about their father by emulating his personality.

“I taught them about him by myself being disciplined and strict,” she said in 1993. “My children think my persona is me, when actually, it is their father’s.”

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2 Men Convicted of Killing Malcolm X Will Be Exonerated After Decades

READ MORE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES