CIA Lawyers to Face JFK Questions
By Jefferson Morley
February 26, 2008The Central Intelligence Agency will quietly defend its refusal to release a batch of top-secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a Washington courtroom tomorrow.
Amid all the headlines about the discovery of a cache of previously unknown JFK material in Dallas, agency lawyers will make their first response to a court order to explain the secrecy surrounding a career CIA undercover officer allegedly involved in the events that led that to the murder of the president on November 22, 1963.
For four years, the agency has been battling in federal court to block my Freedom of Information Act request seeking disclosure of the secret operations of a deceased CIA officer named George Joannides. He is a shadowy figure in the complex story of JFK's assassination. At the time of the Dallas tragedy, Joannides was serving as chief of the CIA's Miami-based "psychological warfare" operations against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In December, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out the many of the agency's decades-old claims of secrecy around Joannides.
Circuit Judge Judith Rogers and two colleagues ordered the CIA to search its operational files for more material on Joannides. They also ordered the agency to explain why 17 reports on Joannides' secret operations in 1962, 1963, and 1964, are missing from CIA archives. In legal briefs, agency officials have claimed that more than 30 documents about Joannides's actions in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be made public in any form--for reasons of "national security."
Joannides' curious connection to the JFK assassination story was unknown until 2001. Declassified CIA records revealed that Joannides had [controlled] a Cuban exile group that publicly denounced the pro-Castro activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1963. Three months later, Oswald shot Kennedy dead from an office building. Joannides' agents in Cuban Miami shaped the first day press coverage of JFK's assassination by generating [bogus] evidence of Oswald's support for Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Editor's note: Excuse me! Lee Harvey Oswald did not assassinate President John F. Kennedy. He was the patsy. See my edition numbers 1, 2, 3, 14, 22, 28, and others for details on this assassination which prove that it was a team that carried out this assassination.
The Joannides files could shed light on the question of whether CIA officers manipulated Oswald as he made his way to Dallas.
The complete Joannides file has never been public. What remains unknown is the extent of Joannides' control over his agents in the Cuban exile community who sought to link Oswald to Fidel Castro. The day after JFK was killed the Cuban communist leader scorned the reports that Oswald was a supporter of his revolution and suggested the CIA was behind the charge. The available records show that Castro was right: CIA funds helped publicize the allegation.
Joannides has been never questioned by JFK assassination investigators we... to learn WHY Lee Harvey Oswald was already under constant surveillance by the CIA in 1963 --BEFORE JFK was murdered-- and what role "Seven Days in May" and Operation Northwoods played in the reasoning behind the Democratic president's false-flag assassination -- "REGIME CHANGE."
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The Journal of History - Summer 2008 Copyright © 2008 by News Source, Inc.