C.I.A. Still Cagey About Agent Who
Knew Oswald
By Scott Shane | New York Times | Oct. 17, 2009
WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark
secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.
For six years, the agency has fought to keep secret hundreds of
documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed
publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A.
says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the
agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even
researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and
hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of
George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans
in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House
Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his
earlier role.
That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’ real
assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about
C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by
Jefferson Morley, a journalist and author who has doggedly pursued the
files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer
specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
“The C.I.A.’s conduct is maddening,” said Mr. Morley, 51, a former
Washington Post reporter and author of a 2008 biography of a former
C.I.A. station chief in Mexico. After years of meticulous reporting on
Mr. Joannides, who died at age 68 in 1990, he is convinced there is more
to learn.
“I know there’s a story here,” Mr. Morley said. “The confirmation is
that the C.I.A. treats these documents as extremely sensitive.”
Mr. Morley’s quest has gained prominent supporters, including John R.
Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota who served in 1994 and 1995 as
chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, created by Congress
to unearth documents related to the case.
“I think we were probably misled by the agency,” Judge Tunheim said,
referring to the Joannides records. “This material should be released.”
Gerald Posner, author of an anti-conspiracy account of the J.F.K.
assassination, “Case Closed,” said the C.I.A.’s withholding such aged
documents is “a perfect example of why nobody trusts the agency.”
“It feeds the conspiracy theorists who say, ‘You’re hiding something,”’
Mr. Posner said.
After losing an appeals court decision in Mr. Morley’s lawsuit, the
C.I.A. last year released material confirming Mr. Joannides’ deep
involvement with the anti-Castro Cubans who confronted Oswald. But the
agency is withholding 295 specific documents from the 1960s and ‘70s,
while refusing to confirm or deny the existence of many others, saying
their release would cause “extremely grave damage” to national security.
“The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and
1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies,” a
C.I.A. official wrote in a court filing.
An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the C.I.A. had opened all
files relevant to the assassination to Judge Tunheim’s review board and
denied that it is trying to avoid embarrassment. “The record doesn’t
support that, any more than it supports conspiracy theories, offensive
on their face, that the C.I.A. had a hand in President Kennedy’s death,”
Mr. Gimigliano said.
C.I.A. secrecy has been hotly debated this year, with agency officials
protesting the Obama administration’s decision to release legal opinions
describing brutal interrogation methods. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came
under attack from Republicans after she accused the C.I.A. of misleading
Congress about waterboarding, adding, “They mislead us all the time.”
On the Kennedy assassination, the deceptions began in 1964 with the
Warren Commission. The C.I.A. concealed its unsuccessful schemes to kill
Fidel Castro and its ties to the anti-Castro D.R.E., the Directorio
Revolucionario Estudantil, or Cuban Student Directorate, which got
$50,000 a month in C.I.A. support during 1963.
In August 1963, Oswald visited a New Orleans shop owned by a D.R.E.
official, feigning sympathy with the group’s goal of overthrowing
Castro. A few days later, D.R.E. members found Oswald handing out
pro-Castro pamphlets and got into a brawl with him. Later that month,
Oswald debated the anti-Castro Cubans on a local radio station.
Mr. Morley’s lawsuit has uncovered the central role in overseeing D.R.E.
activities of Mr. Joannides, deputy director of psychological warfare at
the C.I.A.’s Miami station, code-named JM/WAVE. He worked closely with
D.R.E. leaders, documents show, corresponding with them under
pseudonyms, paying their travel expenses and achieving an “important
degree of control” over the group, as a July 1963 agency fitness report
put it.
Fifteen years later, Mr. Joannides turned up again as the agency’s
representative to the House assassinations committee. Dan Hardway, then
a law student working for the committee, recalled Mr. Joannides as “a
cold fish,” thin and bespectacled, who firmly limited access to
documents. Once, Mr. Hardway remembered, “he handed me a thin file and
just stood there. I blew up, and he said, ‘This is all you’re going to
get.”’
But neither Mr. Hardway nor the committee’s staff director, G. Robert
Blakey, had any idea that Mr. Joannides had played a role in the very
anti-Castro activities from 1963 that the committee was scrutinizing.
When Mr. Morley first informed him about it a decade ago, Mr. Blakey was
flabbergasted. “If I’d known his role in 1963, I would have put
Joannides under oath — he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,”
said Mr. Blakey, a law professor at Notre Dame. “How do we know what he
didn’t give us?”
After Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “J.F.K.” fed wild speculation about the
Kennedy case, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board to
release documents. But because the board, too, was not told of Mr.
Joannides’ 1963 work, they did not peruse his records, said Judge
Tunheim, the chairman.
“If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for
all his records,” said Judge Tunheim. He said he may ask the current
C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, to release the records, even if the
names of people who are still alive must be redacted for privacy.
What motive could C.I.A. officials have to bury the details of Mr.
Joannides’ work for so long? Did C.I.A. officers or their Cuban contacts
know more about Oswald than has been revealed? Or was the agency simply
embarrassed by brushes with the future assassin — like the Dallas F.B.I.
officials who, after the assassination, destroyed a handwritten note
Oswald had previously left for an F.B.I. agent?
Or has Mr. Morley spent a decade on a wild goose chase?
Max Holland, who is writing a history of the Warren Commission, said the
agency may be trying to preserve the principle of secrecy.
“If you start going through the files of every C.I.A. officer who had
anything to do with anything that touched the assassination, that would
have no end,” Mr. Holland said...