National Archives releases first batch of 2017 JFK documents

[Peter Lemkin]

According to Hardway, Trump released 11% of the documents and none of the best/important ones. Trump also did not follow the law in withholding any...reasons for impeachment, but the Congress is complicit in the cover-up too...so forget that....

[Peter Lemkin]

By VIC BRADSHAW Daily News-Record
HARRISONBURG John M. Newman said Tuesday morning that he spent too much time talking to reporters in recent days to dive deeply into the recently released documents related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with international television crews at his home and calls from print journalists around the globe.

But he's had a chance to study between 400 and 500 of what he thinks are the key pages out of the thousands made available to the public Thursday night, and he's intrigued by what he's found and hasn't found. "Having been around this case since the early 1990s, I know pretty much how to hit the high-value stuff," said Newman, a James Madison University adjunct professor of political science and author of four books on JFK, his assassination, and Lee Harvey Oswald, whom history tells us was the assassin. "There were 50 that were never before released at all. I've been through those."

The thing that's captivated him most so far is the re-release of an April 1972 memo handwritten by a then-CIA agent.

In the document, which lists "Harvey Lee Oswald" as the subject, the agent writes that then-CIA Director Richard Helms indicated that "the agency was NOT, under any circumstances, to make inquiries or ask questions of any source or defector about Oswald." What's important about the memo is that the third page says Oswald was a source for the CIA, providing information about the Soviets. ::"That contradicts a 50-year lie that [CIA officials] never talked to him," Newman said of Oswald. "The people involved those the memo was to and from and the people who were shown the document were all involved in counterintelligence."

That's significant enough as it is. But Newman's curiosity is piqued because he has a copy of the three pages released in the early 1990s. The version released Thursday had only two pages, and it was given a different document number than the initial release.

"I was amazed," the retired U.S. Army intelligence officer said, "to see one piece disappear and not be released with the other two pieces it belongs with. Obviously, that was an attempt to disconnect it from [the previously released] document."

Newman's Theory

Newman, a Harrisonburg resident, will provide more of his impressions at 7 p.m. Thursday when he presents "KGB-CIA Spy Wars: Oswald's intelligence files and the CIA's Soviet Russia Division." The event is scheduled for the Highlands Room at JMU's Festival Conference and Student Center and is free and open to the public.

"Everybody was lying," he said of the Soviet and American intelligence agencies. "Oswald was at the center of the chessboard."

Newman already has published two of the five-book series he's writing on the Kennedy assassination: "Where Angels Tread Lightly" and "Countdown to Darkness." The presentation essentially will be the fifth chapter of Volume 3, which he's working on now.

A consultant to director Oliver Stone for his 1991 film "JFK," Newman said he isn't focused on who shot Kennedy or how many shooters there were.

He personally thinks there probably was more than one shooter, but isn't convinced of it, and he questions whether Oswald could have shot the president as he rode through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, and escaped the Texas School Book Depository so quickly as to encounter a Dallas police officer moments after the shooting.

His focus is on who is behind the slaying. Did the shooter or shooters act alone, or were they emissaries of some organization?

Based on his research, Newman has developed a hypothesis that President Lyndon Johnson used "a very complicated psychological warfare operation" to get Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy.

The commission determined that both Oswald and Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald two days after JFK's slaying, acted alone. Conspiracy theorists have long doubted the panel's findings.

Newman said he thinks Johnson "browbeat" Warren to head the commission and stay away from conspiracy theories by telling the chief justice that identifying the KGB or Cuban leaders as masterminds of the plot to kill Kennedy would prompt a nuclear holocaust that would leave 40 million Americans dead. Documents with false information, Newman claims, were put in Oswald's file to persuade Warren that Oswald did the communists' bidding, though neither the Soviets nor Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro had anything to do with it.

"Warren thinks it's the truth," Newman said. "He had to tamp down what he thought was the truth to save lives."
As evidence of the duplicity, the professor notes that tapes made in the Oval Office include Johnson boasting about what he'd done to Warren Commission member Sen. Richard Russell and Warren relaying a similar version of the exchange on public television in the 1970s.

More To Come

The documents didn't provide the trove of information historians and researchers expected as Thursday approached. Legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on Oct. 26, 1992, called for all assassination records to be released no more than 25 years from that date.
But last-minute appeals by the FBI and CIA prompted President Donald Trump to withhold some documents for six months. Newman said only about 6,000 pages were released, about 12 percent of the total expected.

Newman called the development "very disappointing" and said he's "angry" with both agencies for waiting 25 years to request redactions in the documents. April 26 is the new expected release date.

"There's no reason anybody in the government now would be withholding documents. That would be bad for democracy," he said. "A law was passed. It needs to be complied with. If not, this sore will fester.

"It's critical to get the documents out there and let people make up their own minds."

http://www.dnronline.com/news/harrisonbu...2031a.html

[URL="https://www.facebook.com/aarclibrary?ref_type=bookmark"]
[/URL]I'd just add that Neuman is a strange one in some ways....he is so keen on picking out key information from the documents [his forte for sure], but thinks that maybe there was more than one shooter and perhaps it was not Oswald doing the shooting......I find it almost incredible those two ideas reside in the same person's head.....

Also, if anyone knows which document number that is Neuman is referring to above, kindly place that information on this thread.

[Peter Lemkin]

A good article about only ONE set of missing files [not even listed in the files to be released on Oct. 26th]. There are many, many others. It is estimated that 300.000 files [not pages] related to the JFK Assassination exist [or existed] ::besides what is not extant to the Public. This below by Malcolm Blunt.

http://aarclibrary.org/analysis-and-opinion/

[George Klees]

Here is the original 3-page document that Newman refers to (NARA record number 104-10209-10001), but I have no idea about the new one he found indicating that Oswald was a CIA source.

[Scott Kaiser]

Here is the original 3-page document that Newman refers to (NARA record number 104-10209-10001), but I have no idea about the new one he found indicating that Oswald was a CIA source.

(If) Newman said Oswald was a CIA source AND said there is documentation showing 'proof' but no document can be published to support this information, he is not qualified to interrupt the documents I challenged him to fully analyzed.

[Scott Kaiser]

All he's saying is no questions or inquiries are to be asked by any Source or defectors about Oswald that doesn't mean Oswald is a source or Defector Oswald visited Russia he did not defect to Russia.

[Peter Lemkin]

Scott, you know little about so much of this case and how the CIA's CI unit under Angleton worked. The reversal of the first names was a 'marked card' trick as Angleton was mole hunting - and Oswald was one [of many] dangles in that operation. He was also many other things to both the CIA and FBI to which he was both connected. You challenging Neuman on this is a sad joke. Stick with what you know. But also, please lets keep this thread about the release/non-release. Other matters belong elsewhere.

[Peter Lemkin]

NOVEMBER 6, 2017 | DAN L. HARDWAY

THE CIA FLIPS OFF AMERICA

Open Letter from JFK Assassination Expert Dan Hardway

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from sarang / Wikimedia and CIA / Wikimedia.
The following is an article about an open letter Dan Hardway sent to his senator. Hardway worked as an investigator on the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, and is a noted expert on the JFK assassination. He calls on all people interested in transparency to reject an all-encompassing government secrecy that threatens our very liberty and democracy. WhoWhatWhy Staff

---

A 1964 CIA memo spells out clearly how James Jesus Angleton, the agency's famous counterintelligence chief, wanted to deal with inquiries from the Warren Commission:
Jim would prefer to wait out the Commission.1
History seems to be repeating itself. The events of the past two weeks have shown that the CIA is still running a disinformation campaign against anyone who questions the "lone-nut" theory that, according to historian David Robarge, constitutes the agency's "best truth."
I recently published an article about the delay in releasing records under the 1992 JFK Records Collections Act. In that article I explained the CIA's play to discredit those who question the agency's lone-nut theory,2 and suggested that Robarge, its historian, has told us what to look for in the documents that are still being withheld.3

There has been no explanation, let alone a presidential certification, that the massive redactions in these "released in full" documents meet any of the mandatory exemptions that allow withholding. No identifiable harm is specified. No rationale is given as to why the secrets protected outweigh the public interest in disclosure.

In that article I suggested we should look for information regarding covert operations against Cuba that would, according to Robarge, "circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy theories."4 While I doubt the existence of a "smoking gun," the circumstantial evidence we might look for in the delayed files could show a correlation between Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in New Orleans and Mexico City in the late summer and fall of 1963 and CIA covert operations against Cuba being run by George Joannides and David Atlee Phillips involving anti-Castro groups such as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE).5
I specifically suggested that we look to files on those operations. Some of these files are in the JFK records that are scheduled for release.
George Joannides (left) receiving a commendation from Bobby Inman.
Photo credit: CIA / JFKFacts.

On October 26, 1992, Congress passed S. 3006, with only one amendment and very little, if any, opposition. The Senate bill, introduced by Sen. John Glenn (D-OH), was signed the same day by President George H.W. Bush and became Public Law 102-526, ("JFK Records Act"). Among other things the JFK Records Act provided for the collection, preservation and eventual release of all records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with minimal exceptions.
It mandates, in clear and unambiguous language, "[e]ach assassination record shall be publicly

shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act." The Act allows an exemption to this mandatory requirement only if the president "certifies" that the release of each withheld document "is made necessary by an identifiable harm to" either 1) military defense; 2) intelligence operations; 3) law enforcement; or 4) the conduct of foreign relations and "the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure."6

They stood by, grinning, as they watched my reaction upon opening the file to find it largely expurgated. They were grinning so hard because they knew they had waited out the HSCA and there was nothing I could do about it. The Angleton strategy still worked. It is still working today.

On November 3, NARA released some of the files that I have been waiting on. The Excel spreadsheet listing the released files include four files referenced to David Atlee Phillips and one file referenced to the DRE.7 Of the files referencing Phillips, three are of an unspecified nature and one is listed as his Office of Personnel (OP) file. The DRE file is listed as "CIA file on DRE AMSPELL operations."
AMSPELL is a CIA cryptonym for DRE, the anti-Castro Cuban group that was run by George Joannides in 1963, that had the encounter with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963, and published the first conspiracy theory blaming Castro in their CIA-financed newspaper in Miami on November 23, 1963. For such an active group, the file that was released is a very thin 87 pages of which 61 are expurgated in full.
November 23, 1963, leaders of anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) newspaper link Lee Harvey Oswald in conspiracy with Fidel Castro to assassinate JFK.
Photo credit: Unknown / JFKFacts.

Of the remaining 26 pages, many are largely expurgated. The Phillips files are even worse. The three files of unspecified type may be some of his operational files. These files are even more highly expurgated than the AMSPELL file. Taking the 73-pages long file RIF 104-10177-10135 as an example, a full 48 pages are completely redacted and NOTHING that was released in the file has any substantive info. For all intents and purposes, it remains withheld in full.
The file that is listed as David Atlee Phillips's OP file is not as heavily redacted as the other three Phillips files, although many of the documents mainly personnel forms it contains have been cleansed of any significant data. That, however, is not the end of the story on this file.

This release not only demonstrates that the Angleton strategy is still being applied. It also illustrates the point I have been making about what they are covering up. There may well be nothing we can do about it. It appears our lawmakers are spineless in the face of the intelligence community.

The file starts with a few items of post-retirement correspondence between Phillips and the CIA in 1975 and then proceeds chronologically backwards from his retirement in 1975. I have not yet been able to go through the 358-page file to carefully study all the documents, but I have gone through it well enough to note that all his fitness reports between 1956 and 1965 are missing not redacted, just simply not there.
Indeed, so far as I have been able to find, there is no record whatsoever of a document in the file dated between 1961 and 1965 not redacted, just simply not there.
There has been no explanation, let alone a presidential certification, that the massive redactions in these "released in full" documents meet any of the mandatory exemptions that allow withholding. No identifiable harm is specified. No rationale is given as to why the secrets protected outweigh the public interest in disclosure.

"You represent Congress. What the f*** is that to the CIA? You'll be gone in two years and the CIA will still be there."

These files are not in compliance with the law no matter what the mainstream media says.
They are an in-your-face flipped bird to the American public. They basically tell us that the CIA is saying that it doesn't have to comply with the law of the land and that it will not tell us its secrets and that there is nothing we can do about it.
I've been here before. It was in a small room in CIA Headquarters in late 1978. I had been fighting to see a file generated by the CIA debriefing of its hired mafioso Johnny Roselli. Scott Breckinridge and George Joannides, CIA liaisons with the HSCA, had just handed me a highly redacted file that violated the HSCA/CIA Memorandum of Understanding mandating unexpurgated access by HSCA to CIA files.

They stood by, grinning, as they watched my reaction upon opening the file to find it largely expurgated. They were grinning so hard because they knew they had waited out the HSCA and there was nothing I could do about it. The Angleton strategy still worked. It is still working today.
James Jesus Angleton
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from National Counterintelligence Center / Wikimedia.

This release not only demonstrates that the Angleton strategy is still being applied; it also illustrates the point I have been making about what they are covering up. There may well be nothing we can do about it. It appears our lawmakers are spineless in the face of the intelligence community. Joseph Burkholder Smith, a retired CIA officer, told me and fellow investigator Gaeton Fonzi in 1978, "You represent Congress. What the f*** is that to the CIA? You'll be gone in two years and the CIA will still be there."

I also encourage you to not take this insult to your intelligence and ability to govern yourselves without reaction. Refuse to accept the cancer of secrecy that destroys our liberty and ability to govern ourselves. Get involved. Get informed. Stay informed.

To paraphrase that to fit the situation in which we now find ourselves: "You are the people that Congress supposedly represents. What's that to the CIA? You'll forget about it in a few weeks or so."
But I won't. I wrote a letter to my senator, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, on November 3 before I saw the travesty that was the day's release of JFK documents by NARA. Probably a futile gesture, but one I had to take anyway. Here's part of what I told him:
On October 26, 2017, as I am sure you are aware, President Donald Trump, at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence community members, disregarded the clear provisions of the law and postponed release of ninety percent of the remaining withheld documents in the JFK Records Collection for an additional six months. In doing this, the President made no findings, issued no orders and certified nothing, merely issuing a statement through the press office saying that all documents will be released "with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances" by April 26, 2018.
The President's action was not only without authority in law, it was also taken in patent violation of the clear, unambiguous and mandatory terms of a law that your institution passed. …
The real problem that this presents is that it is showing to the nation that the intelligence agencies of our nation are not subject to the laws of the nation. They are effectively above the law. At their request, or pressure, the President of the United States will violate the clear mandates of enacted legislation. And, to date, the reaction of our elected representatives in Congress seems to reinforce the fact that no one is willing to stand up to such blatant disregard of the clear provisions of the duly enacted laws of the nation. I understand that it is the executive branch that is charged with the enforcement of the laws your branch enacts and, in this case, it is the executive branch that is violating the law so there can be little realistic expectation of enforcement from them. But this is the heart of the problem and why it is incumbent upon the Congress to act. At a minimum there should be oversight hearings. At a minimum the Congress should not be seen to willingly acquiesce in executive contempt for the Legislative branch of government and the law of the land.
This action on the part of the intelligence community, the National Archives, and the Executive is only the latest in a long string of actions that disregard the provisions of the JFK Records Act that also subvert and cover up the information related to the assassination of our 35th president. Those other actions are beyond the present scope of this letter, but are things about which I would be glad to speak with you if you have any interest, so I will not go into them here.
To my knowledge there has been no coverage or explanation of why the intelligence community has requested this delay of the President. It was made in secret. What reason have they given for the delay? What kind of pressure have they brought to bear? How can they force a president to so blatantly disregard the law? If they can do this in regard to disclosure of fifty-year-old records, in what else can they exercise a like secret influence that corrupts the laws of the nation? What affect does the existence and use of such secret power have on our democracy? If these things not just the documents but the method of influence remain always secret, then how can a citizenry be sufficiently informed so as to exercise their franchise to any real purpose? How can we have faith in our democracy, let alone our government, if this kind of practice is allowed to continue unchallenged? These are the questions that I would like to have answered. But, to make it easier for you, I note you are in a unique position in regard to these issues due to your membership on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Are you at least going to call and press for public hearings on any of these issues? Or are you going to join the vast majority of our representatives and once again cower before the intelligence agencies? Will you stand up for your constituents' right to participate in their government on an informed basis? Will you stand for holding our government to a standard of open honesty before its citizens and against allowing the real affairs of state to be conducted in secret and in disregard of the laws enacted by the people's representatives?8
majority of our representatives and once again cower before the intelligence agencies? Will you stand up for your constituents' right to participate in their government on an informed basis? Will you stand for holding our government to a standard of open honesty before its citizens and against allowing the real affairs of state to be conducted in secret and in disregard of the laws enacted by the people's representatives?8
The questions I asked Manchin in that letter are even more pressing today. I don't know if he'll even answer, let alone do anything. Maybe, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), he'll send out an apparently frustrated tweet. Or maybe, like the mainstream press, he'll tout the release of the documents, hoping no one will look to see what a travesty the "release" is because of the massive redactions. At this point all I can do is try to tell the truth about this whole state of affairs.
I also encourage you to not take this insult to your intelligence and ability to govern yourselves without reaction. Do something. If nothing else, circulate this article to everyone you know. Refuse to accept the cancer of secrecy that destroys our liberty and ability to govern ourselves. Get involved. Get informed. Stay informed. Read and follow http://2017jfk.org/home/ and http://jfkfacts.org/. Read WhoWhatWhy.
Join the AARC at http://aarclibrary.org/aarc-membership/. Join CAPA at http://capa-us.org/membership/. If those who exercise the power in this country have such blatant contempt for the law, then the time for serious peaceful civil disobedience may be upon us. Get the word out. Don't be silent any longer. This is not an issue of the left or the right. Do something. Say something. And don't stop until you are heard.
Endnotes

.


1. Raymond Rocca to Richard Helms, Memo Re Response to Rankin, 5 Mar 1964, NARA Record No. 1993.06.24.14:59:13:840170, available at https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html...1&tab=page

2. David Robarge, "DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," Studies in Intelligence, (Vol. 57, No. 3, 09/2013), Approved for Release and declassified, 09/29/2014, at page 20. Available at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49...bb_026.PDF. Robarge wrote: "The DCI was complicit in keeping incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission's agenda and focusing it on what the Agency believed at the time was the best truth': that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy." For my commentary on the CIA's "best truth", see Thank You, Phil Shenon available at https://realhillbillyviews.blogspot.com/2015/10/. Note that the "best truth" was conditioned by "at the time" leaving open the real possibility that alternative cover stories may have to be brought to play in the event that time undermined what the Agency considered to be the best truth for them.

3. Dan Hardway, What Were They Hiding and What Should We Look For, 30 Oct 2017, available at https://realhillbillyviews.blogspot.com/...ld_30.html

4. Robarge, n. 2 above, at p. 9.

5. This is addressed in more detail at JFKFacts, Exclusive: JFK investigator on how CIA stonewalled Congress, http://jfkfacts.org/hardway-declaration-cia-stonewalled-jfkinvestigation/; Declaration of Dan L. Hardway, Morley v. CIA, CA # 03-02545-RJL, D.C.D.C. 11 May 2016, Docket No. 156.

6. 44 U.S.C. § 2107 note § 5(g)(2)(D). Emphasis added.

7. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release, RIF Nos. 104-10176-10121, 104-10177-10135, 104-10177-10134, 104-10194-10026, and 104-10170-10121.

8. See here for the full letter.

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[Scott Kaiser]

Scott, you know little about so much of this case and how the CIA's CI unit under Angleton worked. The reversal of the first names was a 'marked card' trick as Angleton was mole hunting - and Oswald was one [of many] dangles in that operation. He was also many other things to both the CIA and FBI to which he was both connected. You challenging Neuman on this is a sad joke. Stick with what you know. But also, please lets keep this thread about the release/non-release. Other matters belong elsewhere.

Sadly, or in your case happy to know you are correct, I know little, and little to nothing about any of this or how any of them worked. I do apologize for weighing in on something I have no knowledge thereof. I will only read from now, and no longer shall I comment on topics I do not know what I'm saying, please forgive me. In closing I'd also like to say I love whoever drew that logo of the CIA that pretty much says 'FU!'

A friend called me tonight, someone I never met and yet I call him friend, Amato, called me tonight and said, have you heard anything from Joe, it was most peculiar only because I was also thinking about Joe, someone else I've never met, yet, I have this friendship, this connection with, as we talked about Joe, Amato said something very unexpectedly that only made us both laugh, keep in mind we have never met. He said, it's funny how everything you've said thus far has come true even when you said years ago they would not release the rest of the FOIA documents, and nobody listened.

It's as if he was saying, you're the first person I know of that no one has listened to, no one has created a story from or contended with, nor has anyone ever discredited you, imagine that? I'm just a voice crying in the wilderness saying, make way for the truth. He who has shared his secrets about his father will be rewarded openly, not by men.

How interesting!?

[Peter Lemkin]

Here is the original 3-page document that Newman refers to (NARA record number 104-10209-10001), but I have no idea about the new one he found indicating that Oswald was a CIA source.

Both indicate Oswald was a CIA source. The 'new' release is only two pages, not the original three. Here is the new version.

There would be NO logical reason for the CIA Director via CI staff to make the injunction that under NO circumstances was anyone in the Agency to make inquiries or ask questions of any source or defector about Oswald unless Oswald had been one of theirs and once on a very very sensitive CI mission and/or manipulated into a compromising position.