12-18-03

As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we urge the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense to observe the spirit and letter of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act by releasing all relevant records on the activities of a career CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides, who died in 1990.

Joannides's service to the US government is a matter of public record and is relevant to the Kennedy assassination story. In November 1963, Joannides served as the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch in the CIA's Miami station. In 1978, he served as the CIA's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

The records concerning George Joannides meet the legal definition of "assassination-related" JFK records that must be "immediately" released under the JFK Records Act. They are assassination-related because of contacts between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a CIA-sponsored Cuban student group that Joannides guided and monitored in August 1963.

Declassified portions of Joannides's personnel file confirm his responsibility in August 1963 for reporting on the "propaganda" and "intelligence collection" activities of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), a prominent organization known in the North American press as the Cuban Student Directorate.

George Joannides's activities were assassination-related in at least two ways.

(1) In August 1963, Oswald attempted to infiltrate the New Orleans delegation of the DRE. The delegation—dependent on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided by Joannides—publicly denounced Oswald as an unscrupulous sympathizer of Fidel Castro.

(2) After Kennedy was killed three months later, on November 22, 1963, DRE members spoke to reporters from The New York Times and other news outlets, detailing Oswald's pro-Castro activities. Within days of the assassination, the DRE published allegations that Oswald had acted on Castro's behalf.

The imperative of disclosure is heightened by the fact that the CIA has, in the past, failed to disclose George Joannides's activities. In 1978, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal to the Congress his role in the events of 1963, compromising the committee's investigation.

In 1998, the Agency again responded inaccurately to public inquiries about Joannides. The Agency's Historic Review Office informed the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that it was unable to identify the case officer for the DRE in 1963. The ARRB staff, on its own, located records confirming that Joannides had been the case officer.

This is not a record that inspires public confidence or quells conspiracy-mongering. To overcome misunderstanding, the CIA and the Defense Department should make a diligent good-faith effort to identify and release any documents about George Joannides.

The government should make these records public in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 2003, so as to help restore public confidence and to demonstrate the agencies' commitment to compliance with the JFK Assassination Records Act.

The law requires immediate disclosure, nothing less.

G. Robert Blakey
Former General Counsel
House Select Committee on Assassinations

Jefferson Morley

Also signed by:

John Newman

Anthony Summers
Jim Lesar

Robyn Swann Summers

Elias Demetracopoulos

Jim Hougan
Don DeLillo
Paul Hoch
Norman Mailer
Gerald Posner
Richard Whalen

By Gerald Posner

11-21-03, “Newsweek“ magazine

BUT THE CUBAN and Soviet governments had already turned him down. The KGB agents were his last hope. Growing increasingly hysterical, the man reached for his .38-caliber revolver, and swung it about in the air. “See?” he cried. “This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”

The man: Lee Harvey Oswald. The date: Sept. 28, 1963—less than two months before he would be arrested in Dallas for assassinating John F. Kennedy.

The accounts of Oswald’s desperate visit to those communist embassies in the weeks before his rifle shots would change the course of history have long been one of the case’s most troubling issues. Was Oswald alone or with someone when he went to the embassies? Did he threaten to kill the president? Did either Cubans or Soviets encourage him to undertake the assassination? While Cuban and Soviet officials—decades after the event—provided accounts of what transpired, there might be definitive answers closer to home, inside CIA files, in documents never released by the agency.

From 1992 to 1998, an independent federal body, the Assassination Records Review Board, released thousands of records previously deemed too sensitive for the public. But more is needed. While the massive document release of the past decade reinforces the growing consensus that Oswald alone killed the president, there is a continuing failure by key government agencies—particularly the CIA—to disclose everything of relevance. Over the past 40 years the agency has too often served its own interests in this case, at the expense of truth and history.

In the late 1970s the CIA informed the House Select Committee on Assassinations that it had routinely destroyed any audiotapes of Oswald in Mexico City prior to JFK’s murder, and that its surveillance cameras were not working on the days Oswald visited. However, in 200 pages of documents released by the CIA to the review board in September 1995, there are two memos, dated Dec. 10 and 12, 1963, that conclusively establish the agency had inadvertently discovered copies of Oswald’s intercepts after JFK was murdered. Where are those intercepts? In 1971, when Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, died of a heart attack, counterintelligence chief James Angleton raced to Mexico and emptied Scott’s safe and files. Scott was running the Mexico City office at the time of Oswald’s visit, and Angleton had headed the CIA’s minimal investigation into JFK’s death.

This is not the only instance of the CIA’s foot-dragging. I am one of the signatories on a letter to the CIA and the Defense Department demanding release of all relevant records on a career CIA operations officer, George Joannides.

Declassified portions of Joannides’s personnel file reveal that in August 1963 he was responsible for reporting on “propaganda” and “intelligence collection” for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a prominent anti-Castro organization known in English as the Cuban Student Directorate. That same month Oswald attempted to infiltrate the DRE’s New Orleans delegation. That branch—subsisting on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided by Joannides—publicly condemned Oswald as a Castro sympathizer.

In November 1963, Joannides ran the CIA’s Psychological Warfare branch in Miami. After the assassination, DRE members were among the first sources to expose Oswald’s pro-Castro activities in interviews with journalists. Within days of JFK’s assassination, the DRE published charges that Oswald had killed the president on behalf of Castro.

In 1978 Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the CIA’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal Joannides’s role to the congressional investigators, even claiming it was unable to identify the DRE case officer in 1963. Joannides never volunteered that he was the person for whom investigators were searching. Eventually, the review board’s staff independently located records revealing it was Joannides.

This is not a performance that inspires public confidence and is a significant reason there is little trust in the CIA’s willingness to be truthful and forthcoming on many important fronts. Needless conspiracy speculation is only fueled by the CIA’s stonewalling. The American public has a right to know everything that its government knows about the president’s murder and Lee Harvey Oswald.