AP: Five Decades Later Federal Government Continues To Conceal Records Showing CIA Ties To Kennedy Assassination

I've read almost everything I can get my hands on concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The more facts I learn about the assassination and the conduct of the investigation following it, the more convinced I am that his assassination was carried out by rogue elements within the CIA, who joined forces with top military leaders and the military industrial complex that thrived off the Cold War against communism. The government went to great lengths to cover up the true biographical narrative of the lone assassin accused of committing the crime, Lee Harvey Oswald. The narrative that Oswald was a pro-Castro,  pro communist wacko was a false narrative the CIA manufactured for a man who was actually in their employ. Bit by bit, as more of the mystery is unraveled, we are learning that what was once dismissed as pure bunk concocted by unstable conspiracy theorists, is much closer to the truth than the white-washed story fed to the public by the Warren Commission.

The Evansville Courier Press runs a lengthy AP story by David Porter laments the fact that thousands of documents regarding the Kennedy assassination remain off limits despite the passage of fifty years, which the unconvinced believe will shed light on what really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The story focuses on a lawsuit filed by a former Washington Post reporter, Jefferson Morley, to force the release of more documents, particularly those pertaining to George Joannides, a deceased CIA agent "whose activities just before the assassination and, fascinatingly, during a government investigation years later, have tantalized researchers for years." Morley's efforts are backed by Notre Dame law professor Robert Blakey, who served as counsel to the House investigation into the assassination of Kennedy in the 1970s, which concluded Kennedy's assassination involved a conspiracy, not the lone acts of Oswald, and that there was likely at least one other shooter in Dallas.

Blakey, who initially thought the CIA had been cooperative during the House investigation, has subsequently concluded the opposite because of information that later came to light about its role in funding an anti-Castro group with which Oswald had direct dealings. Blakey had also not been told about Joannides direct relationship with this organization on behalf of the CIA. Joannides was designated to handle the exchange of information between the CIA and the House committee and may have had a strong incentive to cover up not only his agency's role in the Kennedy assassination, but his own role.  "He was put in a position to edit everything we were given before it was given to us," Blakey said. Blakey has said if he had known then what he knows now that Joannides would have been called as a witness, not working as a staff member on the investigation.  Blakey added, "Do I think I was snookered, precisely like the Warren Commission was? Yes."

Kennedy assassination buffs will recall that smoking gun evidence surfaced tying Oswald to communism and pro-Castro sympathies during the original investigation. Months before the assassination, Oswald was captured by a local TV news crew in New Orleans clashing with anti-Castro demonstrators as he handed out pamphlets for a pro-Castro organization known as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. "Declassified documents show that Joannides, while based in Miami, was the CIA case officer for the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), the group involved in the street fracas with Oswald," Porter writes. The DRE clash was used as a cover story to make it appear that Castro was behind the assassination. As we now know, it was the CIA that for many years had unsuccessfully attempted to carry out assassination plots against Castro.

The one big piece of information missing from the AP story is what Joannides' broader role was when he worked for the CIA. Joannides was an immigrant from Greece who earned a law degree at St. John's University. He began working for the CIA in 1951 and later became the chief of its Psychological Warfare branch at the CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami. He was supposedly assigned to that role because of his disinformation skills. That's where he worked closely with the DRE, the anti-Castro group that supposedly clashed with Oswald in New Orleans in August, 1963. His other assignments included work in Greece and Vietnam. What few records Morley has been able to gather on Joannides proves that he made trips to New Orleans in 1963, and that he had been cleared for two highly sensitive operations in 1962 and 1963 prior to the Kennedy assassination. Other research has also linked Joannides to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.