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JFK Assassination Records – 2018 Additional Documents Release

New Group of JFK Assassination Documents Available to the Public
Press Release · Thursday, April 26, 2018

WASHINGTON —

In accordance with President Trump’s direction on October 26, 2017, the National Archives today posted 19,045 documents subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).   Released documents are available for download.  The versions released today were processed by agencies in accordance with the President’s direction that agency heads be extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, established by the National Archives in November 1992, consists of approximately five million pages.  The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.  As permitted by the JFK Act, agencies appealed to the President to continue postponement of certain information beyond October 26, 2017.  The President provided agencies with a temporary certification until April 26, 2018 to allow for a re-review of all documents withheld in full or in part under section 5 of the JFK Act and directed agencies to “identify as much as possible that may be publicly disclosed” and to be “extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement.”

Based on reviews conducted by agencies in accordance with the President’s direction, the National Archives released 3,539 documents on Dec. 15, 10,744 documents on Nov. 17, 13,213 documents on Nov. 9, and 676 documents on Nov. 3 of last year.  The 19,045 documents released today represent the final release of documents in accordance with the President’s direction on October 26, 2017.

All documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act have been released in full or in part.  No documents subject to section 5 of the JFK Act remain withheld in full.  The President has determined that all information that remains withheld under section 5 must be reviewed again before October 26, 2021 to determine whether continued withholding from disclosure is necessary.

TODAY’S RELEASE CLICK HERE

You can also download the spreadsheet as an Excel file

RELATED:

Trump backtracks, delays release of JFK assassination records until at least 2021

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: JFK ASSASSINATION, JFK records

With More to Come, New JFK Documents Offer Fresh Leads 54 Years Later

The National Archives has finished processing the records about the JFK assassination that government agencies allowed to be released to the public without objection. However, there are thousands of records that remain withheld in whole or in part, which contain the most sensitive government information about the JFK assassination that agencies were not willing to release in the initial processing. President Trump promised that all of these withholdings will be subject to another review within six months to make sure that only very limited information is withheld- information related to live sources. The Trump review remains to be done. For that reason, the most sensitive information about the assassination has yet to be released. The news article that follows is based on what agencies allowed to be released this fall without objection. — AARC Editorial Staff

With More to Come, New JFK Documents Offer Fresh Leads 54 Years Later

By Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy DC | 28 December 17

alf-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don’t believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 “to put any and all conspiracies to rest.”

Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago.

“To this point, as expected, we haven’t had a document that lists the conspirators in the murder of President Kennedy,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century. “What we have gotten is a lot of rich material, not just about the Kennedy assassination but the times.”

It was a 1991 movie, Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” that led Congress to require the secret documents to be released more than two decades later after they were reviewed for national security purposes and to protect past informants. The film, which challenged the official version of the assassination, brought conspiracy theorists into the mainstream and led other Americans to question the official version of events.

McClatchy’s Washington bureau, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have pored over thousands of newly released JFK documents. Here are some of the new or bolstered leads revealed thus far by the new material.

Dallas mayor was CIA asset

One particular document from the August release has created much buzz. It that shows that Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas at the time of the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting, became a CIA asset in late 1956.

The CIA had withheld the information on grounds that it was not considered relevant. No related documents have been released, but even alone it is important. Cabell’s brother Charles was deputy director of the CIA until he was fired by Kennedy in January 1962.

“That shows why Dallas was the place,” said Zack Shelton, a retired veteran FBI agent who fervently disbelieves that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. “I think the investigation or focus is going to be turned more into Oswald not being the lone wolf.”

Shelton, now 67 and retired in Beaumont, Texas, was an FBI agent in Chicago combating organized crime in the 1980s. In the process of helping bust a contraband ring involving an alleged mafia hitman named James Files, Shelton was told that Files had curious things to say about the Kennedy killing roughly 20 years earlier.

That tip to Shelton launched a chain of events that led to Files confessing from prison in Illinois that he was one of several gunmen in Dallas on the fateful day, and that he fired from the famous grassy knoll.

Many historians dismiss Files’ claims, but Shelton maintains that Files was indeed an assassin and was part of the Cosa Nostra mob organization headed in Chicago by Salvatore “Sam the Cigar” Giancana. Files was released from prison in 2016 after a long stint for attempted murder.

The CIA and FBI documents released so far say nothing about Files or another assassin he allegedly worked with named Charles Nicoletti, but that’s no surprise to Wim Dankbaar. He’s a Dutch national with a website and videos devoted to debunking what he considers a myth — that Oswald killed Kennedy or that he acted alone — and promoting the view that Files assassinated Kennedy.

“Do you really think they haven’t deep-sixed the incriminating files?” Dankbaar asked in a testy telephone interview.

The November tranche of new documents does include some about Giancana’s courier, a former Chicago cop who went by the alias Richard Cain and met in Mexico City with CIA staff; he was also an informant for the FBI. A 1992 biography written by Giancana’s family said the mob boss had told his younger brother that Cain and Nicoloetti, not Oswald, were in the Texas Book Depository from where shots at Kennedy were fired.

In addition, several new documents discuss the CIA and its work with mobsters to prevent Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba and later oust him.

CONTINUE READING AT READER SUPPORTED NEWS

RELATED: HSCA Sworn Testimony of Orestes Pena 6 23 78

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, JFK, JFK records, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy assassination, NARA, Trump

Rolling Releases After October 26: The Current Status by Rex Bradford

13 November 2017|For the numbers people among us, I’ve updated the 2017 Documents Project page above to break down the 4 document releases so far, by formerly withheld vs. redacted, and by agency within each group.  Some interesting findings while compiling it.  See the table at the top of the linked page.
I found numerous errors in the online download page – record number column not matching the pdf filename for more than a dozen of them.  I also discovered that 13 documents in the Oct 26 have since that date been recategorized from “formerly withheld in full” to “formerly redacted” (now 39 withheld and 2852 redacted; on Oct 26 there were 52 and 2,839).
I ran some other tests on the data and found a few more surprises.  Prime among them was that it appear that 375 of the documents released do not appear in the NARA online database at all.  Many of these are from the “withheld in full” set, and don’t appear on the supposedly-definitive 2016 FOIA spreadsheet of 3,571 records.  I can find no NSA records in the online database, for example, but 244 of them have been released now.  Similarly for Army INSCOM files (none in NARA db), though I know some have already been out in Archives in paper form since Joan Mellen’s DeMohrenschidt book references a few of them.
Thus it is becoming less and less clear what the universe of documents being processed really is, nor how we can ascertain it.
Read more at Mary Ferrell Foundation HERE.

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, JFK records, JFK Records Act, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy assassination, NARA

Latest Group of JFK Assassination Records Available to the Public Press Release · Thursday, November 9, 2017

Washington, DC

In the fourth public release this year, the National Archives today posted 13,213  records subject to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act).

The majority of the documents released today were released previously in redacted form.  The versions released today were prepared by agencies prior to October 26, 2017, and were posted to make the latest versions of the documents available as expeditiously as possible.  Released records are available for download.

On October 26, 2017, President Donald J. Trump directed agencies to re-review each and every one of their redactions over the next 180 days.  As part of that review process, agency heads were directed to be extremely circumspect in recommending any further postponement of information in the records.  Agency heads must report to the Archivist of the United States by March 12, 2018, any specific information within particular records that meets the standard for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act.  The Archivist must then recommend to the President by March 26, 2018, whether this information warrants continued withholding after April 26, 2018.  The records included in this public release have not yet been re-reviewed by the agencies as part of that process and have not been reviewed by the National Archives.

The National Archives released 676 documents on Nov. 3, 2,891 documents on Oct. 26, and 3,810 records on July 24.

The National Archives established the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in November 1992, and it consists of approximately five million pages of records. The vast majority of the collection has been publicly available without any restrictions since the late 1990s.

JFK Assassination Records – 2017

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: 1992 JFK Act, CIA, JFK records, Kennedy assassination, NARA, President John F. Kennedy, Trump

Morley responds to CIA historian David Robarge

In a great compliment to me, personally and professionally, that CIA historian David Robarge has attacked my new biography of James Angleton, THE GHOST.

Click to OrderRobarge’s review is a compliment because it shows how my account of Angleton’s career is disturbing the CIA’s preferred narrative of Angleton, and especially the agency’s enduring cover story that Angleton was not paying close attention to Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963. In fact, he was paying attention to Oswald, as I show in THE GHOST.

Robarge is discomfited by the JFK facts as I have presented them. He should be.

Unrequited Animus

Robarge’s review does not up live up to the usual editorial standards of the CIA, which is why I suspect it was not published by Robarge’s employer but by Max Holland on his personal site Washington Decoded.

Let it be said that while Holland and Robarge harbor an animus against me, I do not return the favor. Robarge’s published views on Angleton are fair and judicious. Holland did pioneering work on the story of Deep Throat/Mark Felt. When it comes to THE GHOST, however, their professionalism falters.

This does not surprise me. When I started researching THE GHOST, I sought out Robarge’s expertise. In the summer of 2015, I requested an interview with him. On August 21, 2015, CIA Public Affairs Office informed me that the agency could not support the request.

Robarge now criticizes me for not sharing his views of Angleton, after passing up the opportunity to share his views with me. Gee, thanks.

Robarge says THE GHOST is “erratically organized.”

Readers will observe that the 50-plus chapters in THE GHOST are organized chronologically.

John Hadden, CIA

John Hadden, retired Tel Aviv station chief and colleague of James Angleton.

Robarge says that I have “insufficient discernment among sources.”

In THE GHOST I relied heavily on-the-record interviews with retired CIA officers, and others who knew and worked with Angleton including Bill Hood, Jane Roman, Peter Jessup, Ann Goodpasture, Bill Gowen, Peter Sichel, as well as State Department officials, Tom Hughes and Tom Pickering, and former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy.

I drew from on the private papers and records of retired CIA officers including Richard Helms, Roscoe HIllenkoetter, James McCarger, and John Hadden.

I also relied on CIA’s biographies of Richard Helms, John McCone and William Colby. David Robarge is quoted favorably on pp. 86 and 123.

Robarge taxes me for quoting an anonymous blogger.

I quoted one blogger who described Angleton’s reign at the CIA as a “Panopticon rendered in paper.” I thought that was a nice turn of phrase. Robarge says the blogger did not have any citations. I had the same problem with this blogger which is why I do not cite him as the source for a single fact in the book, only his quote.

Robarge says “Morley overstates Angleton’s part in the Italian election operation—he hardly was its “miracle worker.”

My account of Angleton’s role in the 1948 election is based on Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, by Robin Winks, p. 351-388. “It was in Italy that the ‘legendary Jim Angleton’ was born,” Winks wrote. He may not have been a “miracle worker” but he had that reputation, at least with his friend Winks.

George Hunter White

In a 1953 diary entry, Angleton’s friend George Hunter White notes “CIA reimbursement,” and calls with MKULTRA scientist Sidney Gottlieb

Robarge says “no persuasive evidence shows that Angleton had a “supporting role” in the MK/ULTRAproject,”

My account is based primarily on the diary of Angleton’s friend, George Hunter White, which is held in the Stanford University Library. The diary records six meetings between Angleton and White in the summer and fall of 1952, including phone calls, meals, and office meetings.

The diary shows the two men met in 1952 with Sidney Gottlieb, the Technical Services Division scientist who later ran MKULTRA. White would go on to run two CIA safehouses where unwitting persons were dosed with LSD.

White’s diary is persuasive evidence of Angleton’s supporting role in the early days of MKULTRA.

An Israeli diplomat is alleged to have been “Angleton’s man in Havana.” But they met only a few times, 

Baruch Nir was Angleton’s man in Havana. Late in life, he spoke in detail to Israeli journalists about how he helped Angleton with intelligence missions in Cuba. He described himself as Angleton’s man in Havana.

Robarge disagrees that the United States had “two divergent Cuba policies” in mid-1963 represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “engineered provocation” plan called NORTHWOODS and the White House’s “autonomous operations” using Cuban exiles, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro.

Reasonable people can differ. But Robarge adds “NORTHWOODS was never carried out, and the CIA’s integrated covert action program codenamed AM/WORLD became the focus for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency. “

How do we know NORTHWOODS “was never carried out.”

I cited the proceedings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on May 1, 1963. The JCS unanimously approved of NORTHWOODS approach for provoking war with Cuba. And that is where the declassified paper trail ends. There is nothing in the public record that states whether NORTHWOODS was executed or discontinued. If Robarge has evidence that NORTHWOODS was cancelled after May 1963, I hope he will share it.

Oswald ID cardRobarge says that Morley “asserts that Angleton stressed Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban ties so the White House would activate NORTHWOODS,“

I don’t know what passage in THE GHOST Robarge is referring to. All I can say is that I did not write, and I do not believe this claim as stated.

Angleton did not stress Oswald’s Cuban ties after JFK’s assassination. The CIA’s psychological warfare agents in Miami and New Orleans publicly stressed Oswald’s Cuba ties. Angleton himself did not.

I did not write, and I do not believe, that the White House “activated” NORTHWOODS. Robarge is drawing conspiratorial conclusions from the evidence. I do not draw this conclusion in THE GHOST.

Robarge accuses me of a “fundamental misunderstanding” of Angleton’s “Cuban Control and Action Capabilities”—an assessment of the Castro regime’s counterintelligence apparatus, issued in May 1963. THE GHOST I report that the memo was not sent to White House, the National Security Council, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the administration’s point man on Cuban affairs.

Click to Order

“The recipients on the paper’s distribution list were the USIB’s [United States 

Intelligence Board] members and other US departments with equities in Cuban affairs,” he writes, all of which is true. Then he writes. “The White House, the NSC, and the attorney general would not have received it as a standard practice.”

But, of course, JFK’s Cuba policy in 1963 did not follow “standard practice.” Attorney Robert Kennedy, as the administration’s point man. on Cuba, did have equities in Cuba policy. So did the NSC. But they didn’t get the memo.

“Angleton did not leave them off as some devious tactic to influence policy behind the scenes or in a show of antagonism toward them,” Robarge writes.

No, Angleton left them off because he, like Dick Helms, disdained the amateurish AMWORLD approach favored by RFK and the White House. Angleton’s May 1963 memo shows that he trying to do something more serious: forge an inter-agency consensus around a more robust policy aimed at what we now call “regime change.”

Robarge accuses me of a “gross misrepresentation” when I say of the assassination of JFK, “an epic counterintelligence failure culminated on Angleton’s watch.” 

We can agree that counterintelligence chief Angleton was responsible for detecting threats from U.S. enemies seeking penetrate the government’s intelligence agency and American institutions.

Robarge does not dispute that Angleton, and his aides Jane Roman and Betty Egerter, received multiple reports about the movements, politics and foreign contacts of Lee Harvey Oswald from November 1959 to Nove

Betty Egerter

Betty Egerter, aide to James Angleton, who controlled access to the CIA’s Oswald file from 1959 to 1963.

mber 1963.

Robarge does not dispute that in late 1963, Angleton’s staff was informed about Oswald’s contacts with KGB and DGI officers, one of whom had been identified as a possible KGB assassination specialist.

Robarge does not dispute that Angleton and his staff also knew about Oswald’s pro-Castro politics and his recent arrest in October 1963.

We agree that Angleton’s people did not take any action to heighten scrutiny of Oswald.

That’s why I describe their actions as a “failure” and I think the consequences were “epic.”

“By Morley’s logic, Angleton and the Counterintelligence Staff supposedly were, or should have been, preoccupied with one person—Oswald—to the exclusion of everyone else caught up in the sweep.”

I never say that Angleton should have been preoccupied with Oswald.

What I document in THE GHOST is that Angleton was interested in Lee Harvey Oswald from 1959 to 1963 and that he used Oswald for intelligence purposes–in his hunt for the mole and in watching the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City.

Our Man in Mexico

Click on image to order OUR MAN IN MEXICO

Robarge says “Morley unskeptically draws on CIA station chief Winston Scott’s memoir for details about what the Agency knew of Oswald’s doings in Mexico City without noting the errors in it that were pointed out in a publicly available CIA critique.”

I saw the CIA critique of Scott’s memoir, when I wrote Scott’s biograpy, Our Man In Mexico. The author who did not know Scott well, wrote six or seven years after Scott’s death. He claimed that Scott had “gone to seed” by the time he wrote the memoir in 1969-1970.

In fact, in those years, Scott received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and ran an international consulting business with former London station chief Al Ulmer. He had not “gone to seed,” according to his colleagues, friends and family. I did not cite the memo because it is not factual.

Robarge says my reporting reaches “a low point” when I quote Tom Hughes the head of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research division in the 1960s.

As a senior State Department official, Tom Hughes is a credible source. As I noted in the text, Hughes “speculated” about Angleton’s role in the events of June 1967.

Robarge says Morley “does not appear to have actually read Agency counterintelligence officer Tennent H. Bagley’s report arguing for Nosenko’s male fides although portions of it have long been declassified.”

Robarge does appear to have read my book. On p. 168 of THE GHOST I cite this document, summarize its contents, and note Bagley’s authorship.  

I weighed Bagley’ memo for Nosenko’s mala fides against the case made by CIA officers John Hart, George Kisevalter, Cleveland Cram, and Benjamin Fischer. I concluded the latter had the much stronger case. 

Robarge says MI-5 scientist Peter Wright is “routinely derided by critics as semi-paranoid.”

Robarge cites no names of these critics and disputes none of Wright’s facts, so it is hard to now what he is talking about.  

I find Wright’s Spycatcher to a credible source because Wright collaborated professionally with Angleton for a decade. He shared his anti-communist politics, subscribed to his penetration theories, and admired him personally, at least up 1970. I relied on Wright precisely because he did not have an ideological animus against Angleton.

“According to Angleton’s former colleague John Hadden, Angleton was guilty of “either treason or incompetence” in his handling of a suspected Israeli theft of nuclear material from a US facility. No alternatives exist? “

Sure, there are alternative explanations of Angleton’s behavior. My point is that his colleague and deputy John Hadden did not think so.

I’m accused of “bad sourcing” because I “overuse” books by Joseph Trento, Michael Holzman and Tim Wiener. 

In THE GHOST’s 824 footnotes, these three authors are cited a total of nine times. The articles and books of David Robarge are cited eleven times.

“Angleton ‘cooperated’ in quelling the outcry against Israel after it attacked the [Liberty] ship, but Morley does not say how or offer any proof that he did.” 

I write on p. 183 that Angleton cooperated by endorsing the Israeli claim, later withdrawn, that the attackers mistook the Liberty for an Egyptian steamer. Angleton made this claim in the first CIA cable about the attack. My proof is the memo is reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War 1967, Document 284.

Robarge says Morley’s “information about Angleton and the MK/ULTRA program comes mostly from H. P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake.

Actually, my account mostly comes from George White’s diary and the declassified MKULTRA papers at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which corroborate Albarelli on key points.

CONTINUE READING AT JFK FACTS

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, James Angleton. James Jesus Angleton, Jefferson Morley, JFK records, Kennedy assassination

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