Researchers question why large portion of JFK files are still sealed
Thousands of documents still haven’t been made public, which only adds to the conspiracy theories, writes DAVID PORTER.
Five decades after U.S. president John F. Kennedy was fatally shot and long after official inquiries ended, thousands of pages of investigative documents remain withheld from public view. The contents of these files are partially known — and intriguing — and conspiracy buffs are not the only ones seeking to open them for a closer look.
Some serious researchers contend the off-limits files could shed valuable new light on nagging mysteries of the assassination — including what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963.
It turns out that several hundred of the still-classified pages concern a deceased CIA agent, George Joannides, whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years.
“This is not about conspiracy, this is about transparency,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and author embroiled in a decade-long lawsuit against the CIA, seeking release of the closed documents. “I think the CIA should obey the law. I don’t think most people think that’s a crazy idea.”
Morley’s effort has been joined by others, including G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel for a House investigation into the JFK assassination in the 1970s. But so far, the Joannides files and thousands more pages primarily from the CIA remain off-limits at a National Archives centre in College Park, Md.
To understand the attention to the Joannides files, it’s necessary to go back to 1963 and to review what’s known about Oswald that put him on the CIA’s radar.
Oswald was a loner and an enigma even to those closest to him. Still, plenty was learned about Oswald after the shooting in Dallas. And, it’s now clear, he was not unknown to the U.S. government before that.
Assassination investigators learned that Oswald had formed a group in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 that ostensibly supported Cuban leader Fidel Castro and had been involved in a street altercation with anti-Castro demonstrators that was captured by a local television station.
Pamphlets Oswald had in his possession bore an address of a local anti-Castro operation connected to a former FBI agent with ties to organized crime, investigators discovered. That and other information has led researchers to believe that Oswald may have been part of a counter-intelligence operation to discredit the group he had joined, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, and that the street scene was a setup.
If so, who would have overseen such an operation?
Declassified documents show Joannides was the CIA case officer for the group involved in the street fracas with Oswald.