Since Murder, Inc. approaches President Kennedy's assassination from a different direction than most writers, I naturally have a different view of the National Archives' December 15 release of 13,000 documents in its collection that were formerly redacted or withheld. The common approach is what might be called a "treasure hunt," looking for a smoking gun or needle in a haystack. None was found.
I saw all the documents the CIA withheld from disclosure in the Warren Report when I was on the Senate intelligence committee staff in 1975-76. The CIA never had a "smoking gun" because it didn't fully investigate Kennedy's assassination. And this was because at the very moment of the killing in Dallas, the CIA was meeting with an agent in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. As astonishing as it may be, no evidence has ever been produced that the CIA investigated a connection between its plot and the Kennedy assassination. That is the point of my book.
Moreover, while it is important to keep up the pressure on the government to release all the withheld and redacted documents in the JFK collection at the National Archives, it is also important to recognize that significant documents are not even in the collection.
Among the documents missing from the collection are these.
1. The Senate intelligence committee's transcripts of the CIA's JMWAVE chief, Ted Shackley, and the CIA's Tom Karamessines, who was Richard Helms's executive officer in 1963. In these transcripts, Shackley provided seemingly-informed speculation that the CIA investigated a connection between Kennedy's murder and its own plots against Castro. Karamessinves talked about why he tried to prevent Mexican authorities from arresting Silvia Duran, the Cuban consulate employee who befriended Oswald in his attempt to get a visa to Cuba.
2. A memo of August 13, 1963, from the CIA's Desmond FitzGerald to Joseph Califano of the Department of the Army entitled "U.S. Courses of Action in the Event of a Military Revolt in Cuba." The National Archives said this memo was turned over and seven copies made, but all copies have vanished. The significance of the memo is that in August of 1963, FitzGerald was seeking Califano's help in identifying conspirators in Cuba who would join a CIA-sponsored coup. Among the names on which Califano furnished details was Rolando Cubela.
3. An audio tape of the August 15, 1963, meeting at the White House attended by President Kennedy, and NSC advisor McGeorge Bundy and from the CIA, Director John McCone, Richard Helms, William Colby, and Bruce Cheever. The tape was never identified to the Assassination Records Review Board, "ARRB," and is not part of the JFK Collection at the Archives but rather is at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Eighteen minutes are withheld as secret.
4. The National Security Agency's internal report on its inspection of the Russian radio, a portable Turist model, that was found in Oswald's room after the assassination. Although other NSA documents indicate such a report was the basis for a letter NSA wrote the Warren Commission and imply that the Turist might be a spy radio, NSA responded to an FOIA request I made in researching Murder, Inc., by saying the document no longer exists. This "lost" report took on added significance when the National Archives denied my request to have an expert examine the radio, giving the strange explanation that it was evidence in a crime. Photographs of the inside of the radio show changes from either accidental damage or intentional changes. I hoped to determine if it could pick up shortwave transmissions that would have allowed Oswald to listen to radio stations in Cuba.
5. The full contents of CIA Director McCone's memorandum of his briefing of President Lyndon Johnson on the night of November 28, 1963, at Johnson's house, The Elms, in northwest Washington, D.C. The parts of the memorandum which are public indicate that the President asked McCone about Cuba. Again, this document was not identified to the ARRB and is not at the National Archives.
In addition, accompanying this year's December 15 release is a letter from the current director of the CIA, suggesting that it will never agree to the release of some documents in the foreseeable future. One reason is the familiar sources-and-methods claim. The CIA says:
Human assets and sources are the bedrock of the CIA's clandestine intelligence collection mission, and the continued confidentiality of human sources and assets-regardless of the age of the information or whether the individuals are deceased-is critical to the CIA's intelligence mission.... If current or prospective sources or assets learn that the CIA was required to reveal identifying information about its intelligence assets and sources despite the CIA's assurances of confidentiality, such individuals are likely to refuse to work with the CIA, seriously impairing the CIA's ability to conduct intelligence operations in the future.
But of course, the CIA has routinely released the names of its sources in many of the documents. This raises the question of the CIA's selectively protecting sources. Why is it protecting one dead human resource and not another? Besides, it is well known that source names do leak out all the time. The 1963 so-called AMLASH plot is an example. Although the CIA claimed that only a handful of CIA officers knew who its sources and agents were in that operation in 1963, most if not all of those names are public today.
More troubling is another reason the CIA advances for not releasing documents, and this is that it might damage "foreign liaison relationships."
Similarly, the disclosure of information about CIA's foreign intelligence liaison relationships is highly likely to damage such arrangements.... If the CIA cannot credibly promise foreign liaison services that their intelligence information and sensitive arrangements with the CIA will be protected from disclosure, the Agency cannot expect the same level of confidentiality and protection in return.... [F]oreign liaison partners may choose to limit or terminate cooperation with the CIA, significantly impairing CIA's ability to perform its foreign intelligence gathering mission.
The CIA's claim creates a loophole in the JFK Records Collection Act big enough to drive a truck through. As you will read elsewhere in this blog, I have pressed for access to records other countries, including Mexico, may have that are related to the assassination. They could be highly relevant to what history ultimately concludes about John Kennedy's assassination. But the CIA claims a prerogative to withhold information relevant to the assassination of the President despite the passage of sixty years if the information came from a liason relationship with a foreign government. To give the most dramatic example of what this might mean, the CIA is saying that even if a foreign government gave it evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, the CIA would withhold that from the public. To the CIA, protecting liaison relationships is apparently more important than letting the public, and history, know the truth.
In short, the media is missing the point on its coverage of these releases. The CIA and FBI have not been sitting on smoking guns. None of the withheld documents or redacted material will prove the Warren Commission was wrong. However, these releases undoubtedly will continue to build the case that the Warren Commission's work was crippled by its reliance on a CIA and FBI with agendas different from the public's.
What the newly released documents say about this will be discussed in Part 2.
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