The Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley discuss the October 2017 release of the remaining documents held by government agencies relating to the assassination of John Kennedy as mandated in law by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, or the JFK Records Act passed by Congress in October 1992. The Act requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full and be made available in the collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of the Act (which will be October 26, 2017), unless President Trump certifies that: (1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (2) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. The Act established, as an independent agency, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to consider and render decisions when a U.S. government office sought to postpone the disclosure of assassination records. Of particular interest in the discussion are documents relating to George Joannides.   

In 2013, the ARRB’s former chairman John R. Tunheim and former deputy director Thomas Samoluk wrote in the Boston Globe that after the ARRB had declassified 5 million documents, “There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.” Tunheim and Samoluk pointed out that the CIA had not told the Warren Commission that George Joannides was the CIA lead for the Agency’s links with the anti-Castro group Oswald had a public fight with in mid-1963; nor had they told the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), of which Joannides was the CIA’s liaison. Tunheim said in a separate interview that “It really was an example of treachery… If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things.”

Jefferson Morley is moderator of of JFK Facts (JFKFacts.org). He worked as an editor and reporter at The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, and Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, and Slate. His first book was Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (2008). His book Snow-Storm in August (2013) details what happened when the anti-slavery movement first came to Washington, D.C., during Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Morley is also the author of FFF’s ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. His newest book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, a biography of James Jesus Angleton, CIA chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, will be published by St. Martin’s Press this year.

The Best of Charles Burris