Jim DiEugenio: Not to be Trusted

[Peter Lemkin]

[size=12]T[/size]HE CIA'S ONGOING COVERUP
WITNESSES TELL JFK ASSASSINATION TASK FORCE
Dick Russell
May 23

 
Two key government witnesses came forward at the recent congressional hearing in Washington of a declassification task force, around still-withheld records related to the murder of President Kennedy more than sixty years ago. If anyone thought it was impossible to be shocked by revelations at this late date, they would’ve been wrong.
The first to testify was Dan Hardway, who’d been in his mid-twenties when he served as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA, 1977-79): “I believe we were very close to some major discoveries,” he said, “and then the CIA ran an illegal domestic covert operation involving an undercover officer to subvert and obstruct the HSCA.”
That undercover officer was a man named George Joannides. His file is probably the most sought-after in the current release effort - and so far the CIA says it cannot locate it. At the time of the assassination in 1963, Joannides was the head of the Agency’s psychological warfare branch at its station in Miami. There he directed a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles known as the Student Revolutionary Directorate. Members of that group had consorted with Lee Harvey Oswald that summer in New Orleans and, after the assassination, taken the lead in spreading the first (false) “conspiracy theory” - that the accused assassin had committed the act on behalf of Castro’s Cuban regime.
The HSCA was unaware of Joannides’ history. “We were told he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy case,” Hardway recalled. In May 1978 the CIA appointed Joannides as their liaison to aid the committee’s search for important records. As Hardway put it, “the very man who knew exactly how to keep us from finding what we were looking for.” Hardway detailed how Joannides “began slowly tightening down the process,” including placing portions of files in sealed envelopes to which the investigators did not have access for their Final Report.
Hardway and a partner, Ed Lopez, were the HSCA’s sleuths looking into one of the biggest mysteries around the assassination. What was Oswald, and/or someone resembling him, really doing when showing up at the Cuban Consulate and Russian Embassy in Mexico City less than two months before the assassination seeking a travel visa to Cuba?
It turns out that Joannides was working closely with David Atlee Phillips, at the time the overseer of the CIA’s covert operations in Mexico City - and who the HSCA learned had been seen in Oswald’s company in Dallas in early September. Hardway testified that “we can draw reasonable inferences from the evidence that is of record - facts not theories - that clearly point to Oswald being used in an operation in Mexico City….designed to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee” [for which Oswald started a one-man chapter]. Hardway pointed out that this doesn’t necessarily mean the CIA was behind Kennedy’s assassination, but “they obviously had something they were very desperate about hiding,”
He recounted a story about a certain file he really wanted to see, which Joannides presented to him personally at CIA headquarters. It had not only been redacted but retyped, indicating someone may have made more omissions. Hardway says he “exploded and….stormed out of the room.” Subsequently, Hardway saw a memorandum “which says the file was shown to me and, quote, ‘no objections were recorded.’” The CIA “didn’t say that i didn’t make any” which is what was inferred - they just weren’t written down.
The second witness testifying before the Task Force was Judge John Tunheim, who had chaired the Assassination Records Review Board (1994-98). The AARB was created by President Clinton following renewed interest inspired by Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The Board’s task was reviewing still-secret records and declassifying as many as possible. Ultimately, almost five million pages ended up at the National Archives.
But Judge Tunheim didn’t mince words about continued stonewalling by the government, and not only the CIA. “The Secret Service was very difficult, the only agency we were aware of that tried to reclassify assassination records after we were in office. The JFK Records Act specifically required the Department of State to help us find foreign records,” but they proved “less than helpful. When we negotiated with Russian officials over the Oswald files in Moscow [where he had allegedly defected in 1959], they did not lift a finger to help us, not even allowing us access to the United States Embassy [files on the defection]. When we planned meetings with Mexican and Cuban officials, they [State Department] stopped us from direct contact.”
The CIA, not surprisingly, had kept up their masterfully deceitful ways. When the ARRB asked specifically for records of former counterintelligence chief James Angleton, “we were told these were no longer maintained as a collection….[and that] all other documents were destroyed. “ Now, since President Trump’s executive order for release of all remaining files, “we are seeing a flood of documents that clearly meet the definition of assassination records involving Angleton and others that were not submitted to us for review.” Indeed, it’s become clear that Angleton had been monitoring Oswald’s activities continuously for four years before the assassination.
As for George Joannides, he died in 1990 at the age of 67. Tunheim noted: “We had in our hands a small file on Joannides that disclosed nothing….just his personnel file, when he got paid and when he separated. So it was returned. We didn’t know details of his work at the time. Clearly we were misled. I wrote to President Biden [about] asking the CIA to release its Joannides file, and I never received a response.”
U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs the Task Force, said she’d spoken to the CIA Director a week ago, and the Agency then served notice that four out of five requested files considered most important by assassination researchers will be made public within a couple of weeks. These include Oswald’s travel records and CIA “201” file, and a whistleblower report implicating the CIA for its role. However, as mentioned, the Joannides file is still missing-in-action.
“No matter how ugly or inconvenient it is, the American people deserve and can handle the truth,” said U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace. “Approximately two-thirds of Americans don’t buy the official narrative. There is so much distrust that nearly forty percent believe the U.S. Government was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Task Force is looking to use sunshine as a disinfectant, and get people the unvarnished truth.”
Dan Hardway summarized it like this: “My question for the Task Force is whether anyone in the new generation of leaders has the backbone, the courage and the gumption to try to do something even at this late date. It’s easy to admit and air the sins of our ancestors. It’s much harder to admit that we built their tombs and endorsed their action by our inaction. I am here to testify again, which is all that I can do. What will you do?”