The Secret JFK Records

Preliminary Note: Watch Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and James DiEugenio Testify Live Today on JFK before Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. 2 p.m. Eastern. Today, April 1. Click here.

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For more than 60 years, U.S. officials have claimed that to release their secret JFK-assassination-related records would threaten “national security.” That was their position during the Warren Commission hearings in 1964 and during the House Select Committee hearings in the 1970s. That’s what they told the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. That’s what they told President Trump during his first term in office. That’s how they got President Biden to order the continued secrecy of the records essentially into perpetuity.

It was all a lie. There was never any threat to “national security” whatsoever.

How do we know this? Because many, but certainly not all, of those long secret records have now been revealed to the public. And guess what! The United States has not fallen into the ocean and the U.S. government has not been taken over by the Reds, terrorists, Muslims, Taliban, Russia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela. The federal government and the nation are still standing!

Of course, it’s true that any of those scary things could still happen if and when the rest of the long-secret records are released. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

So, why would the U.S. national-security establishment lie about so-called threats to “national-security” that would supposedly arise if those records were to be released?

Immediately after the recent initial release of records, the mainstream press declared that there were no “smoking guns,” as in the nature of an official confession to the assassination. But that’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Assassination researchers were always certain that the secrecy was not intended to hide a confession. Don’t forget, after all, that these are all records that the national-security establishment knowingly delivered to the National Archives in the 1990s, where they were then kept secret. What are the chances they would have delivered a confession to the National Archives? No chance at all. Nobody would be that dumb. And there is no doubt that the high officials who worked in the CIA were not dumb people. On the contrary, they were extremely smart people.

Moreover, it was standard practice within the national-security establishment to never put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that policy would have been especially followed in the state-sponsored assassination of a U.S. president.

So, then why fight so fiercely to keep the records secret for so long?

The JFK assassination is like a gigantic jig-saw puzzle with lots of tiny pieces. Let’s estimate that about 80 percent of the pieces have been put together. Most of the other pieces — such as the identities of the shooters — are gone forever. But it is still possible to see the overall picture of what the jigsaw puzzle depicts — a regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment arising out of a war between Kennedy and the national-security establishment over the future direction of America.

Thus, as I have long maintained, the probability is that these long-secret records contain small pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that further fill out the mosaic of a regime-change operation, which is why they would want them to be kept secret. The national-security establishment knows that the assassination researchers are a very sharp group of people who can recognize those tiny puzzle pieces and see how they fit into the overall regime-change mosaic. That’s what assassination researchers are doing right now as they study the documents.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

For example, consider a memorandum by close Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that was among the long-secret records. It recommended a major reform of the CIA that would have drastically reduced its power.

Why would the CIA want to keep such a memorandum secret? The mainstream press would see such a memorandum and would certainly exclaim, “No smoking gun here.” But when one considers the CIA’s motive in assassinating Kennedy, it becomes clear why the CIA would want to keep that small puzzle piece secret. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy was so angry over the CIA’s lies that he vowed to tear the agency into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. That was the beginning of the war between JFK and the CIA that would culminate in Dallas two years later. The Schlesinger memo demonstrates that even if Kennedy wasn’t going to go all the way and abolish the CIA, he was going to radically reduce its power. The CIA, on the other hand, was not going to permit that to happen, on grounds of “national security.” It’s not difficult to see why the CIA would want to keep that small puzzle piece secret from the American people.

Or consider what Jefferson Morley, the head of JFK Facts, has discovered within the long-secret records. For decades, the CIA has claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was just a “lone nut.” As Morley has recently detailed, the long-secret records demonstrate that the CIA was lying the entire time. In fact, as the records detail, the CIA was keeping close track of Oswald prior to the assassination.

So, why would they want to keep that secret? The mainstream press would undoubtedly say it was because they were embarrassed at their “incompetence” in having failed to avert the assassination. But there is another explanation: That Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent who had been recruited while serving in the U.S. Marines (Semper Fi!) and was later unwittingly groomed to take the fall in the Kennedy assassination. Such being the case, it would have been necessary to watch him closely as he was being maneuvered into position — such as having him publicly pose as a communist provocateur in New Orleans or have him make a big hullabaloo at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City. The close surveillance of him would have been needed to ensure that he hadn’t caught onto what they were doing to make him a “patsy” in the assassination.

One of the most revealing aspects of the records controversy are the files relating to CIA operative George Joannides. The CIA was funding an organization called the DRE in New Orleans prior to the assassination. The DRE was the first entity to issue a press release telling the nation that Oswald was a communist. It turns out that the DRE was a secret front organization for the CIA, one that the CIA was secretly funding. The CIA kept secret from the House Select Committee and the ARRB that Joannides was the liaison between the CIA and the DRE.

Thus, there is no question but that Joannides’s CIA files are JFK-assassination-related records. Yet, they weren’t included in this first batch of long-secret records. In fact, it’s possible, if not probable, that they won’t be part of the rest of the records still slated to be released. In other words, it’s possible that the CIA’s Joannides files were never turned over to the National Archives at all in the 1990s, notwithstanding the fact that they obviously relate to the assassination. Why not? Why the steadfast insistence on keeping them separate and secret? For the complete Joannides story, see FFF’s book Morley v. CIA by Jefferson Morley. Also, see FFF’s other book by Morley: CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files.