The public's right to know

         When I was a lawyer for the Church Committee in 1975, James Angleton, the head of counterintelligence for the CIA, and I left together after a committee hearing. We had to take an elevator down from the hearing room in the Capitol to the rotunda.  Several celebrity senators like Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were on the same elevator.  When the door opened at the rotunda, the tourists there recognized the senators and immediately came over to shake their hands and get autographs.  On the way back to the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Angleton remarked that he never realized what it was like to be a senator. That is, he was surprised at the ready access voters had to politicians.  He said something like, “How can they be sitting in a room listening to the nation’s highest secrets one minute and the next minute walk out into a crowd and start shaking hands?”

James Jesus Angleton

Angleton had spent his life in clandestine service, defending a democracy he had never seen in action.  He typified many in U.S. intelligence in having an academic understanding of democracy but no “hands on” experience.  

I always wondered why politicians wanted to be on something like the intelligence committee. It fed their egos of course. They were privy to information that their colleagues did not have.  But how did this help them politically?  It wasn’t like getting a post office built or landing a new military base in their state.  It wasn’t even like sending a constituent an American flag that had flown over the Capitol. They couldn’t tell constituents about the good work they had done.

Of course, the senators did talk to reporters. On occasion, they might ask the staff what they could say in public about some secret they had learned.  But they often just made that decision on their own. I remember distributing a paper marked Top Secret to the senators at a hearing.  When the hearing was over and the senators were leaving, Senator Hart called out to another senator, saying in a loud voice, “You put that paper in the pocket of your jacket.  It is Top Secret.  You’ll have to leave it here.”  Still, the senators were surprisingly good at “declassifying” what they heard and explaining it to reporters. 

They sometimes made mistakes, but this is is a good thing. Democracy is better served by having politicians break through the morass of security classification and give the public a sense of what is going on rather than have the government operate in secrecy.  

Kennedy's classified White House tapes

      In the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy called national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to ask who owned his brother's presidential papers. After checking with the State Department, Bundy told Kennedy that they were the personal property of the slain president. The attorney general then had the locks changed on the White House safes so that only he would have access.  He told the president's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln to secure all the audio tapes that had been made of the president's meetings and take them to her apartment.  She did this and later turned the tapes over to Robert Kennedy.

      I didn't bother to find out what happened to the documents in the safes, but I presume they went to the Kennedy Library in Boston. I did look into the tapes. Some, but perhaps not all, are at the Kennedy Library. According to the library's explanation, Robert Kennedy donated a collection to the library, but the library doesn't know if he gave it everything that he acquired from Evelyn Lincoln.  

       Although the tapes obviously contained highly sensitive information, since they included the president's meetings with CIA officials, they bore no security classifications.  Nonetheless, after the library acquired them, intelligence officials reviewed and classified them.  Of particular interest to me is the tape of August 15, 1963.  The president and Bundy met with CIA Director McCone, Deputy Director Helms, Southeast Asia desk chief William Colby, and Bruce Cheever of the CIA.  The library's listing for this tape says "Eighteen minutes are deleted as secret."  Apparently the CIA or someone else went to the library, listened to the tape, and classified it. (See page 91 in Murder, Inc.) The library's listing says the meeting dealt with British Guinea among other things, but this doesn't make sense. The United States' interests in British Guinea were not particularly sensitive in 1963, and most of the CIA men at the meeting had nothing to do with the country.

      The Presidential Records Act, which was passed later, would not have allowed Robert Kennedy to take possession of the tapes.   But this is an instance where the government classified a presidential record after the president died and was succeeded.

       The final oddity of the Kennedy tapes is that they were not identified for the Assassination Records Review Board and never reviewed by it.  So the mysterious August 15, 1963 tape has not been subject to the periodic reviews for declassification of the JFK Records Act, and we may never know what is on it.

President's Power to Declassify

      Although I don't ordinarily defend Donald Trump, his statements on the president's power to declassify documents aren't as misplaced as some in the media make them out to be.  He told Hannity last night:  "If you're the president of the United States you can declassify just by saying: ‘It’s declassified.' Even by thinking about it." "There doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn't have to be. You're the president, you make that decision…I declassified everything."

       Well, his going on to say that the president only has to think in his head that a document is declassified and voila it is declassified is an exaggeration.  But there is no question but that the president can order documents declassified and that there is no formal process for this. 

       For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba took photographs of the sites the Russians had in Cuba for nuclear-capable missiles. These photographs were highly classified.

One reason for classification was "sources and methods."  The United States didn't want the Soviets to know how good U2 photographs were.  But Kennedy felt that he needed to release the photographs if he was to convince the American people and the world of the threat.  The story isn't new.  It has been written about a lot.  And while Kennedy may have been told about the sources and methods issue, there was no formal process. Kennedy was president, and he said the photographs needed to be released. I believe John Bolton in his book says Trump did the same thing with satellite photographs.

        That's why I made the point in a prior post that the classification on a document is relevant only as an evidentiary matter with respect to whether someone who releases national defense information did so with criminal intent.  If the document is marked Secret, the person is on notice that it may contain national defense information, and he may be violating the espionage acts if he releases it.  

         Of course in Trump's case, some overt act of declassification is relevant since he's not president any more.  But that gets into issues that are beyond the point of this post.  

But Did He Read Murder, Inc.?

       "Unlike some of his predecessors, Mr. Trump did not care about intelligence reports about U.F.O.s, but he would ask questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."  Trump's Taste in Intelligence, The New York Times, September 2, 2022.  

       I want to put a little humor in this blog.  The FBI inventory of the material seized at Mar-a-Lago included several unidentified books, so maybe Murder, Inc. is among them.  Now, I doubt this since Trump is not known to be much a reader. But in that case, why did he stash the books away with classified documents?  Anyway, an author can only hope.:)

       On a more serious note, the New York Times might have expanded on why Donald Trump is interested in the Kennedy assassination -- but not UFOs. And if he truly is interested in the assassination, why didn't he declassify the so-called "secret files" when he had the opportunity as president?

Search and seizure

      Some charge that the FBI photograph of the classified documents on a carpeted floor at Mar-a-Lago during its search and seizure there were staged to suggest improper handling.  

       But in fact, the usual procedure in search and seizures is to photograph the items seized individually and collectively.  The photographs below were taken of everything seized in Lee Harvey Oswald's room in Dallas after the assassination. When the Dallas police got to the rooming house where Oswald had been living and confirmed it was his room, they had to wait for a justice of the peace to drive to the house to issue a search warrant.  They then collected everything in the room that Oswald owned and took it to the police station where they had special camera arrangements to photograph items individually.  They also laid everything seized out on the floor and photographed it.  

      Although books on the assassination rarely talk about these photographs, I found them useful.  For one thing, it appears that about the only things Oswald had at the rooming house were the items he had taken with him to Mexico City. That stands to reason since he only lived with Marina at Mrs. Paine's for a few days after returning from Mexico City.  He moved out once he rented a room in Dallas and then moved again.  For another thing, the photograph shows various possessions of his that are talked about in the Warren Report, and this photograph lets you visualize how it got them. You will also notice that although the seizure was on November 22, this photograph wasn't taken until the next day.

      The two items that still pique my curiousity were the radio, which I discuss in Murder, Inc., and Oswald's shoes.  Note that the shoes seem to have been worn in the rain and have mud on them.  I checked the weather in Dallas the week of November 17.  There was a heavy rain on Wednesday, November 20. That would explain why the shoes look like they've gotten wet.  Oswald probably had walked through the rain on his way home that night, and they were too wet to wear the next day, November 21, when he went to work. Then he had spent that night with Marina at Mrs. Paine's.  The next morning he went straight from there to the book depository.  

        But how to explain the mud?  Walking through the rain on sidewalks doesn't get shoes muddy. It has always made me wonder if he had an outdoor antenna for his Turist radio to listen to Cuban radio and if he got his shoes muddy by going out in the yard on the night of November 20 to take the incriminating antenna down. Of course, no antenna wire was found in his room.