Tag: FBI

Biden pardons Abraham Bolden, the only Secret Service agent who sought JFK accountability

The good news is that President Biden has pardoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent, who was falsely convicted on bribery charges in the 1960s.

Abe Bolden
Abe Bolden, persecuted for doing his job and pardoned by President Biden.

The bad news is that initial reports emphasize Bolden was persecuted for the color of his skin, which is true enough but not the whole story.

Bolden was silenced because he raised questions about the causes of JFK’s assassination. For doing his job, he was targeted, defamed, and railroaded.

Monkey Morales redacted

Redacted JFK Files Show Ricardo ‘Monkey’ Morales Was a Trusted CIA Operative and FBI Informant

Ricardo Morales, the Miami man who told his son he met accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in a CIA training camp, was considered a credible source by the Agency and FBI. His heavily-redacted 130-page CIA personnel file, is found among the JFK assassination records whose release was postponed by the White House on October 22.

9) November 11, 1963: right-wing racist talked about how JFK would be shot

There were warnings in the fall of 1963 that President Kennedy’s life was in danger. JFK was hated by the political right for his increasingly forthright defense of peace and civil rights.

An undercover policer officer in Florida was canvassing his sources when he heard talk of a plot. And the details were specific.

FBI suspected leftist magazine was a foreign agent when it accurately reported on the CIA

Files recently released to MuckRock shed light on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the radical Ramparts magazine. Originally classified SECRET, the investigation described in the FBI files was an “internal security” matter relating to the magazine’s registration status. Paralleling and seemingly predicting some of the later investigations of WikiLeaks, the Bureau suspected that Ramparts “may currently be engaged in acts of distribution of propaganda, acting as a political agent,

Source: FBI suspected “Ramparts” was a foreign agent that provided propaganda and intelligence services • MuckRock

The CIA is still protecting its spy who shadowed Martin Luther King

The CIA shadowed  Martin Luther King during his stay at a Miami hotel in July 1966 with the help of a spy whose identity still remains a secret a half century later.

The revelation is found in a 48-page file on King, portions of which were made public late last year, along with thousands of JFK assassination files.

President Trump has ordered all federal agencies to release the rest of their JFK-related files by April 26, a directive which covers the agency’s King file as well.

Trump’s order, issued last October, exempts from disclosure only “the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living.”  So if the CIA’s spy is deceased, his or her name is supposed to be made public this week.

MLK Surveillance

“Surveillance was a joint effort of IDEN A [the spy] and local ODENVY [CIA’s code name for the FBI],” according to a cable from the chief of the agency’s south Florida station. The surveillance took place in July 1966 when King and two associates stayed at a Miami airport hotel.

While the FBI’s surveillance of King is notorious, much less is known about the CIA’s interest in the civil right leader. Such eavesdropping violated the agency’s charter barring operations on U.S. soil.

The cable describes the spy as a “cleared and witting contact,” meaning he or she had a working relationship with the agency at the time. Approximately five lines of text that identify the spy have been blanked out in the document released to the National Archives in November 2017.

The spy listened in on King’s conversations from an adjacent hotel room for six hours.

“References were made to the Florida Gubernatorial Race, a trip to Bimini [an island in the Bahamas] and several miscellaneous sex experiences,” the cable reported.

After King and associates checked out the next day, the CIA’s spy searched their rooms, according to the cable. The informant found a phone message in a trash can asking King to call Harry Wachtel, a New York lawyer who served as King’s legal counsel.

The CIA’s spy claimed, inaccurately, that Wachtel was “an identified member of the Communist Party.” In fact, the FBI only had a report that Wachtel once had been active in the National Lawyer Guild, a leftist organization that some charged was a communist influenced.

The spy also found an envelope bearing the name of an unmarried woman who supposedly stay in the hotel room.

It seems likely that the CIA spying on King’s private life and is hiding the results. Nine of the next ten pages in the King file are completely classified, along with the spy’s name.

The memo supports the idea that the CIA worked with the FBI to obtain defamatory information about the civil rights leader less than two years before he was slain in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

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You can read the CIA’s partially declassified King file here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

FBI wide shut: One key JFK file that remains redacted

Redacted FBI Oswald doc
Released in full. Not

I spent Friday at the Archives II in College Park Maryland in search of this Dec. 10, 1963 FBI report on the Bureua’s handling of the Lee Harvey Oswald file before JFK was killed.

At right is the version available on the Mary Ferrell site. The accompanying RIF sheet states the document is “released in full.”

I pulled the document at Archives II and it is not “released in full.” It remains heavily redacted. These black marks are a reminder that the Trump administration has yet to enforce the JFK Records Act. …

If Trump is serious about the last of the JFK files, he will release this one

A faithful reader sends a timely reminder: Birch O’Neal, the CIA’s unknown Oswald expert, dissembled to an FBI agent within hours of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I wrote about O’Neal yesterday. A career CIA counterintelligence officer who died in 1995, O’Neal is perhaps the most interesting new character to emerge from the tens of thousands of JFK assassination files released since last October.

His previously unknown saga sheds new light on a JFK secret the CIA and defenders of the Warren Commission still deny: the agency’s  pre-assassination surveillance of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. …

USA Today: CIA started to disavow knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of killing

Some of the best reporting on the new JFK files is coming from USA Today.
In today’s story, the national daily notes an essential newsworthy fact revealed in the newly declassified records.

Within hours of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA started to distance itself from any connection to suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, recently released secret records from the National Archives show.

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