George Joannides, chief of CIA covert operations in Miami in 1963.

A federal court ruled Tuesday that my lawsuit for the records of deceased CIA officer George Joannides “serves a public benefit” and ordered a lower court judge to reconsider his decision to deny the award of legal fees.

A three-judge appellate panel declared that Judge Richard Leon had erred in his September 2012 decision that the governnrnent did not have to pay my court costs for 10 years of litigation. In 2007 the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of arguments made by my attorney, James Lesar, who contended that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) obligated the CIA to release more records about Joannides. Plaintiffs who prevail in FOIA and civil rights cases are often awarded legal fees to discourage the government from resisting meritorious claims.

In its unanimous decision, the court cited its ruling in a recent FOIA case, Davy v. CIA (also argued by Lesar), that disclosure of records “about individuals allegedly involved in President Kennedy’s assassination serve a public benefit.”

The court’s ruling is a moral victory that awaits substantive fulfillment.

My lawsuit, Morley v. CIA, has shed new light on events the CIA has long sought to conceal: Joannides’s shadowy role in the JFK assassination story. The CIA did not disclose his actions in 1963 to the Warren Commission or to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). His story did not come to light until the Assassination Records Review Board declassified a handful of records from his personnel file in 1998, and I wrote a story about him for the Miami New Times in 2001.

At the time of JFK’s assassination, Joannides served as the chief of CIA covert operations in Miami. A career undercover officer with a specialty in “psychological warfare,” he funded a Cuban exile student group whose leaders publicized the pro-Castro activities of accused presidential assassin Lee H. Oswald three months before Oswald allegedly killed JFK. After JFK was dead, Joannides’s agents used CIA funds to link Oswald to Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In 1978, Joannides resurfaced as the CIA’s chief liaison to the HSCA but never disclosed his knowledge of the events of 1963. “The CIA set me up,” HSCA general counsel G. Robert Blakey told the Washington Post in 2005.

Retired CIA officer George Joannides (left) received the Career Intelligence Medal from deputy CIA director Bobby Ray Inman on July 15, 1981.
(Photo credit: CIA)

The litigation has forced the agency to acknowledge  previously undisclosed facts about Joannides, including that he

— served in an “undercover” capacity while funding Oswald’s antagonists among Cuban exiles in the summer of 1963.

— travelled to New Orleans twice in the spring of 1964 when the Warren Commission was taking testimony from members of the anti-Castro group he guided and monitored;

— served in an “undercover” capacity when he stonewalled congressional investigators in 1978.

— received one of the agency’s highest honors, the Career Intelligence Medal, for his “cumulative record of service reflecting a pattern of increasing levels of responsibility” and his “distinctly exceptional achievements.”

In the course of the litigation, the CIA was also forced to acknowledge that it retains at least 295 additional documents about Joannides that it has never made public in any form. In sworn court filings, Agency officials said that the release of the records — many of them more than 50 years old — would harm U.S. ”national security” today.

In their ruling Judges Harry Edwards, Stephen Williams, and Brett Kavanaugh emphasized that the standard for entitlement to legal fees established by the Davy case does not “disqualify plaintiffs who obtain information that, while not arguably of immediate public interest, nevertheless enables further research ultimately of great value and interest such as the understanding of a Presidential assassination.”

The court ordered Judge Leon to revisit the question of legal fees “in a manner consistent with Davy.” But the court took no position on whether Leon should actually award the fees, now estimated at $150,000. When Leon will decide that question remains to be seen.

The U.S. government and the CIA still have not paid any price for concealing from the public a key batch of JFK assassination records that will shed light on CIA operations involving Lee Harvey Oswald while President Kennedy was still alive. Much of the story remains out of public view.

See also:

“Why I sued the CIA for JFK records” (JFK Facts, Feb. 23, 2013)

“Justice Dept. denies CIA officer was honored for JFK cover-up” (JFK Facts, Dec. 19, 2012)

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Published last year by the JCS, the study presents an unvarnished view of an unprecedented mistrust between White House and Pentagon in the year before Kennedy was violently removed from power.

“Read this book and you are reading a real history of the American empire and defense establishment written for future leaders of the Pentagon and armed forces,” writes Swanson, who plans to publish his own study of the Cold War from 1945-1963 in the fall.

Some highlights from “Council of War:”

After the Bay of Pigs debacle JFK felt ill-advised by the JCS on the CIA’s invasion plan.

“Attempting to clear the air, Kennedy met with [the chiefs] in the Pentagon on May 27, 1961. Though no detailed records of the meeting survived, Kennedy at one point apparently lectured the chiefs on their responsibility for providing him with unalloyed advice, drawing on a paper [Gen. Maxwell] Taylor wrote earlier. But the response he got was “icy silence.” (p. 216)

JFK and the JCS barely communicated during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

“To manage the crisis, Kennedy improvised through an ad hoc body known as the Executive Committee, or ExCom … Even though the Joint Chiefs were actively engaged in contingency planning throughout the crisis, they were not directly privy to ExCom’s deliberations or even much of the information that passed through it. General Taylor was the sole JCS member on the ExCom and one of its few members with significant military experience … In his memoirs, Taylor acknowledged that some of the chiefs distrusted him. He added, however, that over the course of the crisis he repeatedly volunteered to arrange more meetings with the President, but that none of the Service chiefs showed any interest.” (p. 229)

JFK did not ask the JCS to assess his deal to end the missile crisis.

“The Joint Chiefs were never consulted, nor were they given an opportunity to comment on the strategic implications of this settlement. General LeMay was disappointed that the President, with a preponderance of strategic and tactical nuclear power on his side, had not demanded more concessions from the Soviets. ‘We could have gotten not only the missiles out of Cuba,’ LeMay insisted, ‘we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba at that time.’” (p. 232)

The JCS thought JFK’s peaceful resolution of the crisis had actually helped the enemy.

“The consensus on the Joint Staff was that the United States had come out on the poorer end of the bargain.” (p. 233)

By the end of 1962, the Pentagon felt its relations with the White House had never been worse.

“By the time the Cuban missile crisis ended, relations between the Kennedy administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor excepted) were at an all-time low. In contrast, Kennedy’s public stature and esteem had never been higher. Lauded by his admirers and critics alike for showing exemplary statesmanship, fortitude, and wisdom in steering the country through the most dangerous confrontation in history, the President emerged with his credibility and prestige measurably enhanced. But to end the crisis he made compromises and concessions that his military advisors considered in many ways unnecessary and excessive.” (p. 233)

The JCS felt that JFK’s successful drive for a partial nuclear test ban treaty in the summer of 1963 diminished its influence even further.

“In contrast, the overall authority, prestige, and influence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a corporate advisory body had never been lower than by the time the test ban debate drew to a close. Though JCS views still carried considerable weight on Capitol Hill, the same was not true at the White House and elsewhere in the executive branch.” (p. 236)

In the fall of 1963, the JCS resisted JFK’s plans to withdraw from Vietnam.

“Shortly before his death, President Kennedy said publicly that he was confident most U.S. advisors could leave Vietnam in the foreseeable future and turn the war over to the ARVN. But he had no fall-back strategy in case he found withdrawal ill advised and remained averse to putting pressure on North Vietnam, other than through limited, indirect means, to cease and desist its support of the Viet Cong. Though the Joint Chiefs grudgingly accommodated themselves to the President’s wishes, they had yet to be convinced that a policy of restraint would succeed. What they saw evolving was an ominous repetition of the stalemate in Korea — a remote war, offering no sign of early resolution, consuming precious resources, and diverting attention from larger threats. Hence their support for a more aggressive, immediate strategy to confront the enemy directly with strong, decisive force.” (p. 281)

“Council of War,” it is worth noting, makes no mention of Operation Northwoods, a JCS scheme to provoke a U.S. invasion of Cuba with deception operations that JFK rejected in March 1962.

The author misuses a genuinely signficant new document discovered by the investigator Russ Baker — a June 1963 letter from former Vice President Richard Nixon to Donald Kendall, CEO of Pepsi, that makes reference to the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

The letter is interesting because it documents Nixon’s long-standing interest in the fallout from Bay of Pigs, which his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, believed was related JFK’s assassination and because Kendall is not known to have any role in the Bay of Pigs operation.

Unfortunately, the author uses this promising material to inflict on readers an incoherent mash of factoids and speculation ending with the unsupported and improbable insinuation that Kendall had something to with JFK’s death. If taken seriously, it will only confuse people seeking to understand the causes of Kennedy’s death.

Please don’t tell me that this line of analysis is “interesting” or “raises important new questions.”  It isn’t and it doesn’t. There is no reason to believe — and no evidence to suggest — that Kendall was involved in Kennedy’s assassination. The Nixon letter is interesting. This writers’ handling of it is amateurish and not worthy of interest.

Which, alas, is true of a lot of dumb JFK conspiracy theories.

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More JFK fact checking:

“Did the Fed kill JFK?” (JFK Facts, Jan. 25, 2013)

“If there was  JFK conspiracy, wouldn’t somebody have talked?” (JFK Facts, Jan. 2, 2013)

“Did the CIA track Oswald before JFK was killed?” (JFK Facts, Jan. 8, 2013)

Rob Lowe as JFK

Taylor  Marsh, the self-described ”recovering beauty queen” turned political blogger, comments on the aesthetics of Rob Lowe as the iconic JFK in National Geographic’s forthcoming JFK feature and she wonders about the credibility of the script by the JFK fabulist Bill O’Reilly.

“Bill O’Reilly’s memory is playing tricks on him, to put it kindly, because there are witnesses that know he wasn’t where he said he was in his book,” she writes.

Want to know more about Bill O’Reilly, historian?

See:

“Investigator’s tape exposes Bill O’Reilly’s JFK fib” (JFK Facts, Jan. 31, 2013)

“Bill O’Reilly’s ‘fun’ JFK fictions” (JFK Facts,Feb. 4, 2103).

As Rex Bradford notes in this 2008 speech in Dallas, “this group shared with the rest of us disbelief in the lone disgruntled gunman story, What we don’t find [in their comments] for the most part are strong indications that they really knew the answer to ‘Who killed JFK?’ beyond intelligent hunches. But some of their statements offer interesting clues and point the way toward information they had which has since gone missing.”

More original reporting from JFK Facts:

“Top 5 JFK Files Brennan Should Make Public” (JFK Facts, Feb. 5, 2013)

“Two More JFK Files for Brennan’s Review.” (JFK Facts, Feb 12, 2013)

“Why I sued the CIA for JFK Records”  (JFK FActs, February 23, 2013)

“I can understand that some people may be offended,” a league spokeswoman said. “But that’s not what we’re all about. The name is about taking something negative and being tongue-in-cheek and being light about a gritty situation.”

Former Florida Senator Bob Graham

I must confess that I am a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. My theory is that the attacks on New York and Washington were the result of a plot organized by Khalid Sheik Muhammed, funded by Osama bin Laden, and carried out by Muhammed’s extended family and other men enlisted by the lead co-conspirators.

The historical validity of that conclusion doesn’t mean we know the whole story of the 9/11 attacks.

So says Bob Graham, the former Florida Senator and 9/11 Commission member.

Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers broke the story last week in the BrowardBulldog.org, an independent south Florida news site.

In a sworn deposition that Christensen and Summers obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Graham charged the FBI is hiding the results of an investigation of a well-connected Saudi man living in Florida who was reportedly contacted by several of the hijackers in the summer of 2001.

“I am troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the Sept. 11 attacks,” Graham said

The story was picked up by the 9/11 family group which asked the FBI to “come clean.”

The story concerns Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a senior Saudi prince, who hastily deserted his home in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida in the summer of 2001.

In September 2011, Christensen and Summers broke the story that the “FBI found direct ties between 9/11 hijackers” and Ghazzawi yet did not share the information with Congress or investigators.

Christensen and Summers reported that two well-placed sources — an unnamed U.S. counterterrorism official and a Sarasota property manager — said that gatehouse logbooks and security camera photographs of license plates showed that vehicles used by the future hijackers had visited the home where Ghazzawi lived. Analysis of phone records also linked the hijackers to their house, the counterterrorism officer said.

Four of the hijackers lived less than 10 miles away from Ghazawwi’s house in 2001 and two attended a nearby flight school where they learned how to pilot commercial airliners.

Graham says the 9/11 Commission never learned about the FBI investigation of Ghazzawi. The FBI denies that it found any connetion between Ghazzawi and the hijackers.

Graham says the FBI is still withholding evidence. He cited a Sept. 16, 2002, FBI report about Sarasota that he was allowed to see after making inquiries at the FBI. That report has never been publicly released, he said.

Christensen is the editor of the BrowardBulldog. Summers is co-author (with Robbyn Swan) “The Eleventh Day,” an account of the 9/11 conspiracy. Summers is also author of “Not In Your Lifetime,” about the assassination of JFK. (Full disclosure: Summers is a friend.)

The role of the U.S. government agencies in systematically spying on its citizenry to advance U.S. policymaker goals extends back to the 1930s (as James Bamford recounts for Reuters.) The sense of scandal is not new. In Washington, deja vu is spiking. The excesses of the surveillance state have been exposed before, with domestic spying scandals generating headlines in 1975 and again in 2006.

What Americans see is the scandal of the new normal in Washington.

The constitutional republic envisioned by the Founding Fathers has been superceded by a national security regime that has created a surveillance state (said to be indispensable to public safety) and a secrecy system that insulates both from scrutiny, accountability, and law.

Popular suspicions of this national security order are not new. They are driven by fear of the worst. Such fears first became a force in public opinion in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy 50 years ago. It was JFK’s violent death under enigmatic circumstances–and the factually limited explanation provided by the CIA and FBI–that first alerted the American people to the troubling nature of the secrecy system that operates out of Washington in their name. Deep suspicion (some say paranoia) have governed the American thinking about the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies ever since.

Previous scandals

Popular demands that the federal government produce a more credible explanation of JFK’s death in the mid-1960s constituted one of the first real challenges to the culture of secrecy that had grown up in support of America’s Cold War against international communism. And these demands had real world impact.

Amidst a wave of popular skepticism about the findings of the Warren Commission, Congress passed the Freedom of Information (FOIA) in 1966, promising to make U.S. government records open to the citizenry. In time, the FOIA, while flawed to be sure, became an indispensable tool of accountability and open government in the United States and a model for governments around the world.

Suspicion of U.S. national security agencies flared in the mid-1970s, again with visible results. In 1975 revelations about CIA and FBI misconduct in the JFK assassination story provoked outrage in Congress. The Senate launched into its first serious investigation of the national security agencies that had been given free rein since the end of World War II.

For the first (but not last) time, the American people learned about illicit surveillance programs set up by the CIA and the National Security Agency.

In December 1974, the New York Times exposed two illicit surveillance programs run by the CIA with the kind of evocative but cryptic code names that remain in style with America’s covert operators.

The first, known as HTLINGUAL, opened and copied hundreds of thousands of letters mailed from the United States to Russia and China since 1952. (Among other accomplishments, HTLINGUAL enabled legendarily ominous CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton to keep close tabs on an obscure young man named Lee Harvey Oswald from November 1959 to November 1963.)

The second illicit CIA operation, known as Chaos, had been ordered by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Overseen by Angleton, Chaos was a mammoth domestic spying operation that tried (and failed) to find foreign involvement in the student anti-war movement.

NSA’s track record

The exposure of HTLINGUAL and Chaos in 1975 was followed shortly by the exposure of two similar, but much larger electronic surveillance networks, called “Shamrock” and “Minaret,” which were run by the National Security Agency.

Operation Shamrock had started three decades before in 1947 with the now-familiar collaboration of the leaders of the telecommunications industry.

Bamford writes:

“Codenamed ‘Operation Shamrock,’ agents would arrive at the back door at each telecom headquarters in New York around midnight; pick up all that day’s telegraph traffic, and bring it to an office masquerading as a television tape processing company. There they would use a machine to duplicate all the computer tapes containing the telegrams, and, hours later, return the original tapes to the company.”

The secret agreement lasted for 30 years. “It only ended in 1975, when the nation was shocked by a series of stunning intelligence revelations uncovered by a congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church,” Bamford writes.

Collectively, the disclosure of HTLINGUAL and Shamrock showed the abuse of power was not the exclusive province of the CIA nor the product of a lone bureaucratic nut but the result of systemic ideological corruption. The operators of the U.S. surveillance system seemed to respect no limits prescribed by the law or the Constitution.

“The illegality and vast breadth of this one operation stunned both the left and the right, Republicans as well as Democrats,” Bamford notes of Operation Shamrock “The parties came together to create a new law to make sure nothing like it could ever happen again.”

That was 1975. Now it has happened again.

The Cold War has been succeeded by the global war on terror. “HTLINGUAL” and “Shamrock” have morphed into “Boundless Informant” and “Prism.” The enemy has changed. The technology has changed. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the insistent demand for secrecy, now and forever.

That’s why suspicion of intelligence agencies is flaring again in 2013.

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If you liked this article, check out:

Building America’s secret surveillance state, by James Bamford, Reuters

Who was James Angleton? by Jefferson Morley, JFK Facts.

Did the CIA track Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed? by Jefferson Morley, JFK Facts.

As the current issue of Arms Control Today documents, JFK’s June 10 speech at American University would influenced the arms control vision all of the presidents who followed him. And as this New York Times column notes, his often-overlooked nationally televised address on June 11, 1963, signalled his evolution as a civil rights leader.

Kennedy announced that the two black students had been enrolled at the University of Alabama, overcoming the objections of racist Gov. George Wallace, and he announced that after more than two years in office and two years of violent segregationist backlash in the South, he was introducing comprehensive civil rights legislation. In an evening, JFK went from timid and calculating on civil rights issues to bold and visionary.

Speaking during the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation — an anniversary he had assiduously avoided commemorating, earlier that year — Kennedy eloquently linked the fate of African-American citizenship to the larger question of national identity and freedom. America, “for all its hopes and all its boasts,” observed Kennedy, “will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

The opposition would prove violent. Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, was murdered by white supremacists that night, and the news would overshadow Kennedy’s speech. The Southern congressmen who dominated Congress disdained the civil rights proposal and Martin Luther King began to organize a march on Washington to rally support.