J. Morley on RFK Jr.

[Michael Griffith]

On 5/11/2023 at 8:10 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

The Latest From JFK Facts

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Fact Checking RFK Jr: Is He Right About JFK?

A closer look at allegations of KGB disinformation and a 'shadowy' CIA agent.

JEFFERSON MORLEY MAY 11

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unprecedented claim that the CIA was responsible for his uncle’s murder has generated a furious response. Much of the Kennedy family is reportedly alienated and a leading chronicler of the CIA is contemptuous.

“I cannot emphasize enough that this is a lie first promulgated by the KGB in 1967, and that RFK Jr is acting as a useful idiot for the Kremlin,” tweeted former New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, author of “Legacy of Ashes,” a critical history of the CIA.

After claiming the evidence of CIA involvement is “overwhelming,” RFK Jr. added specificity to his charge. In a tweet Monday about still-classified records related to JFK’s assassination, the candidate wrote:

“As a Senator, Joe Biden voted for the Assassination Records Act of 1992, requiring that all documents related to the killing of JFK be released by 2017. But President Biden is still keeping thousands of pages heavily redacted, including 44 pages related to a shadowy CIA agent and a covert program that had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald just months before my uncle was killed.”

RFK Jr.’s claims received respectful coverage from right-leaning Real Clear Politicsand Greg Gutfeld of Fox News Radio, but has not yet been fact checked by Polifact (which has refuted his claims about the dangers of the Covid vaccine, as has FactCheck.org.)

So JFK Facts will examine the historical record.

What does the factual record of JFK’s assassination tell us about RFK Jr.’s claim? What is the evidence of CIA involvement? Is it overwhelming? Is it a KGB disinformation operation? And who is this “shadowy CIA agent”?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

‘Overwhelming’ Evidence?

The new records of JFK assassination released since the 1990s lend credence to—but do not prove—RFK Jr.’s allegations of CIA complicity.

These new files, unearthed by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), do not reveal a CIA plot but they reveal significant new facts not reported by major news organizations and not generally known to the public. 

The new records show that certain senior undercover CIA officers—including bitter Kennedy enemies —knew far, far more about the president’s accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, than they ever acknowledged to investigators or friendly news organizations.

A Pentagon file released in 1997 shows that in mid-1963 the Joint Chiefs conceived and approved false flag operations (code name Operation Northwoods) to deploy “trusted covert operatives” to stage a spectacular attack on a U.S. target and arrange for the blame to fall on Cuba. The goal wax to deceptively advance the policy favored by generals and opposed by JFK: a U.S. invasion.

Declassified files also show that Agency assets in a propaganda program (codename AMSPELL) were the first to link Oswald to Castro in the panicky hours after the president was gunned down in broad daylight. The New York Times reported that the AMSPELL case officer stonewalled congressional investigators about his knowledge of Oswald’s Cuban contacts.

CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia

In addition, the ARRB took sworn testimony from doctors and other personnel involved in JFK’s autopsy, which showed egregious breaches in the photographic record. Photo technician Saundra Spencer and other witnesses established that the photographic record of JFK’s autopsy evidence has been culled of photos showing the president’s fatal wound, and thus cannot be considered reliable. Of course, this does not constitute evidence of a murder conspiracy but it is evidence of a crime—tampering with evidence—begging the question why someone would manipulate the JFK autopsy evidence? One possibility: to conceal evidence of a crime.

In its totality, the preponderance of new JFK evidence does not yield “smoking gun” proof of a conspiracy, but it does further undermine the credibility of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the president was killed by one man alone for no reason. It raises investigative possibilities unknown to the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

All the same, RFK Jr. has overstated his case. The evidence that has come into public view since Oliver Stone’s 1992 “JFK” movie is consistent with a CIA-assisted false-flag operation designed to kill the president and lay the blame on Cuba. The evidence is not overwhelming or definitive. Rather, it is suggestive and incomplete.

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KGB Disinformation?

The claim of RFK Jr’s critics that the notion of a CIA plot against JFK originated with the Soviet intelligence service is erroneous. In fact, the notion originated with Americans who had CIA experience.

RFK Jr.s claim on Sean Hannity’s show that “it was my father’s first instinct that the CIA had killed his brother” is accurate. In his biography “RFK in His Times,” Arthur Schlesinger tells the story of RFK’s November 22 meeting with CIA director John McCone almost exactly as RFK Jr. recalls it. This was four years before the KGB disinformation operation alleged by Tim Weiner and others.

The possibility of a plot among CIA-supported Cubans against JFK was raised again by the Agency’s Miami station within days of the attack in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. The proof came with the release of a long-secret CIA memo in December 2022. 

The memo, written by Donald Heath, a deceased undercover officer, shows that, while the White House and FBI assured the public that Oswald had acted alone and there was no evidence to the contrary, CIA officers in south Florida actively pursued suspicions that anti-Castro exiles known to the CIA were involved. These officers were not under the influence of KGB disinformation.

Heath wrote that he and his fellow officers developed lists of “persons capable of orchestrating the murder of President Kennedy in order to precipitate and armed conflict between Cuba and USA.” In other words, the CIA men investigated the possibility that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a Northwoods-style operation to justify a war with Cuba. 

(The Heath memo belies the oft-stated claim that the recent JFK assassination files do not contain significant information. They do. You can read the Heath Memo here: “1964-65 Miami Station Action to AId USG Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy.)

The possibility of CIA involvement was also raised, albeit obliquely, by President Harry Truman within a month of JFK’s assassination. In a column published in the Washington Post on December 22, 1963, Truman called for the abolition of the Agency he had signed into existence in 1947. 

The CIA had become “an operational and at time policymaking arm of the Government,” the former president wrote. As “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue” and the “subject of cold war enemy propaganda, the Agency had outlived its usefulness, he argued.

Former president Harry Truman in Key West, Florida (Credit: National Archives)

While Truman never linked JFK’s assassination to the CIA, his notes in the Truman Library indicate he started writing his piece on December 9, 1963, the day the FBI issued its initial report concluding Oswald acted alone. Truman’s call for CIA abolition was almost certainly motivated by the ambush in Dallas.

He was not alone. In April 1967 President Lyndon Johnson told an aide he thought the CIA was involved in JFK”s assassination. In a memo to colleagues, a senior FBI official wrote:

Excerpt from an FBI report, April 4, 1967

So the notion that the CIA personnel were complicit in Kennedy’ murder—while encouraged by communist sources—did not originate with the KGB. It first voiced by well-informed Americans who had experience working for or with the CIA.

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‘Shadowy’ CIA Agent?

RFK Jr.s claim that Biden is still keeping thousands of pages of JFK files “heavily redacted” is accurate.

The National Archives database indicates that some 4,400 assassination-related records still contain redactions, some of them quite extensive. For example the CIA is still censoring more than a page of Arthur Schlesinger’s 1961 memo for JFK on “CIA Reorganization.”

RFK’s Jr. statement that the CIA is withholding “44 pages related to a shadowy CIA agent and a covert program that had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald just months before my uncle was killed” is inaccurate but understated.

As I reported here last November, the CIA has “denied in full” 44 documents—not 44 pages—from the administrative file of George Joannides, undercover officer who ran the AMSPELL program in 1963 when his agents had repeated encounters with Oswald in the summer of 1963. 

Whether Joannides, who died in 1990, can fairly be described as “shadowy” is a judgment call. He certainly obstructed the House Select Committee on Assassinations, according to G. Robert Blakey, head of the HSCA investigation.

CIA officer George Joannides, left, received a CIA medal in 1981 after stonewalling JFK investigators (Credit: CIA)

An ARRB staffer who reviewed the Joannides file in 1998 stated that it contained no information about Oswald or the assassination. What the review board didn’t know was the that the file contains extensive still-classified information about the AMSPELL program which publicized Oswald’s pro-Castro activities before and after JFK was killed. 

Judge John Tunheim, a federal judge who chaired the ARRB from 1994 to 1998, told President Biden in a letter last December that the CIA had “deliberately misled” the board about the Joannides file. “The Joannides file absolutely needs to be released in full,” Tunheim wrote.

In response to the JFK Facts story, the CIA issued a statement to favored Washington news organizations claiming

The assertion that CIA has been holding, and has not disclosed, a set of documents about Lee Harvey Oswald that were part of now-deceased, former CIA officer George Joannides’ files in the JFK Collection is false.

The CIA’s denial is technically accurate and wholly misleading. The 44 Joannides documents that the CIA is withholding were not—and are not—part of the JFK Collection at National Archives. Despite Judge Tunheim’s recommendation, the CIA refuses to turn over the 44 documents to the National Archives. 

In other words, the CIA is holding, and has not disclosed, a set of assassination-related documents related to a CIA covert program that came to involved with Kennedy’s accused killer.

I filed a Mandatory Declassification Review request with the CIA for these documents to the CIA in June 2020. Three years later, the Agency has yet to respond.

Will the Joannides files confirm or refute RFK Jr’s allegations of CIA involvement in JFK’s assassination? Only full disclosure can answer the question.

This is a great article by Jeff Morley. It contains lots of important information. Although I disagree with Morley's opinion that the ARRB materials contain no smoking-gun evidence of conspiracy, this is still a superb article overall. I guess it depends on how one defines "smoking gun." Anyway, great article. Thank you for posting it, Benjamin.

Edited May 19, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Benjamin Cole]

10 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

This is a great article by Jeff Morley. It contains lots of important information. Although I disagree with Morley's opinion that the ARRB materials contain no smoking-gun evidence of conspiracy, this is still a superb article overall. I guess it depends on how one defines "smoking gun." Anyway, great article. Thank you for posting it, Benjamin.

Thanks for your comments--

Please lay out the smoking gun evidence you see.

I am a CT'er, but mostly due to what I see in the Z film, and on LHO's biography. 

I am 100% CT'er that there was a cover-up, and the WC was an "investigation," which is to say, a kangaroo court. 

I am preparing a story on the Walker Bullet, and that bit of evidence appears fraudulent---which does not exonerate LHO, even of the Walker shooting, but illustrates what was happening to "evidence."