In a new sworn declaration filed in federal court, former JFK investigator Dan Hardway tells the story of how the CIA stonewalled him and other investigators for the House Select Committee of Assassinations in 1978.
Hardway’s first-person story is the most vivid and powerful account of how the CIA obstructed Congress’s attempt to investigate JFK’s assassination in 1978 since Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation. Hardway adds new detail to the story Fonzi told by detailing the obstructionist tactics of George Joannides that he personally experienced.
Hardway also documents the “public benefit” of disclosures forced by my Freedom of Information Action lawsuit, Morley v. CIA, now in its 13th year. The court is now considering the issue of whether the government has to pay the legal fees of my attorney James Lesar, who prevailed over government attorney’s three times during the course of the litigation.
Hardway’s declaration highlights how Joannides prevented the HSCA from clarifying the relationship between the CIA and the Cuban Student Directorate, an agency-funded anti-Castro group whose members had contact with Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963.
Hardway notes that the HSCA didn’t probe the issue in 1978 because CIA “had firmly represented to the HSCA that all ties between the DRE and the CIA had been terminated prior to1963.”
That representation was false, as the records from Joannides’ personnel file, which I obtained in the lawsuit, demonstrate. In fact, Joannides served as case office for the DRE from April 1962 to May 1964.
Hardway also highlights one of the key documents that the CIA is withholding: a job evaluation, written September 20, 1978, “not long after Mr. Joannides began his job undercover as liaison with the HSCA. “(p. 29).
Read and/or download the Hardway Declaration here.
———
Jefferson Morley’s new ebook, CIA and JFK: The Secret Assassination Files, available on Amazon, provides the fullest account yet of the JFK records that the CIA is still concealing in 2016 and why they should be made public in October 2017.
