The deadline for the release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK-assassination records is rapidly approaching. The deadline is December 15. As I have previously predicted though, the CIA will demand that President Biden continue its cover-up of its November 22, 1963, regime-change operation, and President Biden will comply with that demand. There is no reasonable possibility that those 60-year-old records will be revealed to the public — ever. The notion that “national security” would be grievously threatened is, of course, patently ludicrous. The United States will not fall into the ocean or even be taken over by the communists if the records are released.
To be sure, a few records will be released once the newest deadline approaches. That’s what happens each time the new extended deadline is reached. That’s to comfort people by indicating that all is okay and that the records that they are still hiding contain no incriminating information. The bulk of the records — thousands of them — will continue to be kept secret, with nary a peep of protest from either the mainstream press or Congress, which enacted the JFK Records Act back in 1992. That’s the law that forced the CIA and other federal entities to disgorge their secret assassination-related records.
We can speculate all day long about what they are still hiding. No, not a confession. There is no possibility that any CIA official would put anything about a state-sponsored assassination of a high government official in writing. But it’s a virtual certainty that the records contain small pieces of the puzzle that will further fill in the mosaic of this particular regime-change operation.
There is something else to consider though: What those still-secret records don’t contain. That’s another reason why they have to continue keeping that last batch of records secret. Once they are released, we will be able to see what they don’t contain. What they don’t contain can be as incriminating as what they do contain.
Let’s take two big examples: George Joannides and the Zapruder film.
Jefferson Morley has an excellent article on Joannides in his Substack article yesterday entitled “Tunheim: Release Undercover Officer’s JFK File.” I recommend stopping at this point and reading Morley’s article first. Pay particular attention to what U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, says about the CIA, especially with reference to George Joannides.
Morley, a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post, sued the CIA for release of its files on Joannides, a high CIA official. The CIA fought the lawsuit tooth and nail. The suit went on for about ten years. In the end, the CIA prevailed. As they have done ever since the federal government was converted to a national-security state, the federal courts deferred to the majesty of the CIA and its demand to keep its Joannides files secret. (Morley is also the author of FFF’s book CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files.)
As I detail in my newest book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, an essential aspect of the plot to assassinate Kennedy was to blame the assassination on a communist. Remember: 1963 was the height of the Cold War. Most everyone hated and feared communists. The Pentagon and the CIA had inculcated the notion in most everyone’s minds that the Reds were coming to coming to get us.
Thus, by framing a communist, the Pentagon and the CIA could be virtually certain that hardly anyone would question or challenge the official narrative — that a no-good, rotten communist had killed their president. If they did, the national-security establishment could (and did) immediately claim that the critic was a communist sympathizer.
As I detail in my book, it’s a virtual certainty that Oswald was working as an intelligence agent when he was framed for the crime. After all, he had been a U.S. Marine. How many Marine communists have you ever met? He learned fluent Russian, something that is impossible to do on one’s own. They have language experts in the military for that purpose. The Navy stationed him at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, where the top-secret U-2 spy plane was based. His friends in the military were calling him “Osvaldovitch” because he was studying Marxism while serving in the Marines. Would the Marines really let an avowed Marxist remain in the military, which would enable him to report troop movements and other secret things to the Russians? (Yes, those Russians!)
That’s what Oswald’s all too public pro-communist activities in New Orleans were all about — to make it look like he was a genuine communist. That’s why he was also sent to Mexico City to visit the Cuban and Soviet embassies — to connect this “communist” to the supposed International communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow.
Immediately after the assassination, a group in New Orleans called the DRE issued a press release advertising Oswald’s communist bona fides. What the DRE and the CIA kept secret was that the DRE was effectively a front organization for the CIA. The CIA had been secretly funding the organization and controlling its activities through none other than CIA official George Joannides. Thus, for all practical purposes, it was the CIA that sent out that press release immediately after the assassination advertising Oswald’s communist bona fides.
Can you see why the CIA would fight Morley’s lawsuit tooth and nail? Can you see why they would want to keep Joannides’s CIA file secret forever?
Do those still-secret CIA files include the CIA’s files on Joannides? If I had to bet, I’d say: Not a chance! I’d say that given the ferocity by which they fought Morley’s lawsuit, there is no possibility that they included those files in the records they turned over to the National Archives that are still being kept secret.
But one big advantage of keeping those records secret is that, of course, we can’t be certain of that. The CIA knows that once the remaining records are released, assassination researchers will say, “Where are the Joannides files?”
The same holds true for the CIA’s records relating to the Zapruder film. As I detail in An Encounter with Evil, for decades the official narrative was that the Zapruder film, which captured the assassination, went to LIFE magazine’s printing plant in Chicago.
In fact, the film was secretly diverted to the CIA’s photographic center in Washington, D.C., and then taken to a super-secret CIA operation named “Hawkeyeworks” at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, where a super-quality altered copy of the film was produced on a state-of-the-art optical printer. That super-secret altered copy became the new Zapruder film “original.” The complete operation did not come into public view until the late 1990s.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the Zapruder film is, without any doubt whatsoever, a JFK-assassination-related record. Given such, why weren’t the CIA’s records relating to its handling of the Zapruder film in Washington, D.C., and Rochester on the weekend of the assassination turned over to the ARRB in the 1990s? After all, if the Zapruder-film operation was on the up-and-up, there would have been log-in records and records relating to what they were doing with the film.
Instead, they have continued to keep the entire Zapruder-film operation secret. Why?
Is it possible that the Zapruder film records are included in those still-secret records? Anything is possible, but it’s a virtual certainty that they do not. Something that incriminating would be kept secret forever. But as long as the CIA succeeds in keeping that final stash of records secret, it is impossible to ask, “What about your Zapruder records? What happened to them? Why aren’t they included in that final stash of secret records?”
Unfortunately, all too many Americans don’t want to ask these types of questions. That’s because deep down they know what happened but they don’t want to “know know” for certain. They would rather just keep wishing that it had never happened and prefer that we just “move on.” But the Kennedy assassination was such an enormous rupture in American society — one that moved our nation to the dark side of militarism, wars of aggression, coups, more assassinations, empire, alliances with dictatorial regimes, foreign interventionism, torture, indefinite detention, and, of course, a perpetual hostility toward Russia and China — that it can’t be swept under the carpet. Even though it’s been almost 60 years since that particular U.S. regime-change operation, it is essential that we confront it and deal with it. Our national well-being depends on it.
