“I now no longer believe anything the Agency [CIA] told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity…. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.” Read more
Tag Archive for HSCA
JFK’s physician: ‘…others besides Oswald must have participated’
“… his client, Dr. Burkley … had never been interviewed and … he has information in the Kennedy assassination indicating that others besides Oswald must have participated.”
— From a conversation with the lawyer for Dr. George Burkley, JFK’s personal White House physician who signed the death certificate and was the only doctor present both at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at the Bethesda autopsy. Richard Sprague, the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ Chief Counsel, wrote this memo to file after being contacted by Burkley’s lawyer about his client’s desire for an interview. Sprague, whose refusal to sign secrecy oaths with the CIA was causing unhappiness in Washington, was forced to resign days later. Five months afterward, Burkley received one brief HSCA telephone contact, but was never asked why “others besides Oswald must have participated.”
Investigator’s tape exposes Bill O’Reilly’s JFK fib
In his best-selling book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly tells a brief tale of an intrepid reporter — himself — chasing the historical truth of JFK’s assassination in south Florida. But the story itself is a fiction, as O’Reilly reveals here in his own voice.
JFK reality check for Bill O’Reilly
In the annals of the JFK assassination story, rife with CIA and FBI malfeasance, O’Reilly’s fanciful anecdote might seem trivial. It is not the saddest feature of a book that manages to ignore all of the high-quality JFK assassination scholarship of the last two decades.
But as O’Reilly’s yarn is presented as fact in USA Today and the Fort-Worth Telegram; as his book dominates the best-seller charts; and as a credulous National Geographic embarks on making a documentary of Killing Kennedy, O’Reilly’s credibility matters.
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RIP: Kevin Walsh, catalyst for JFK disclosure
A sad note from a JFK researcher informs us that Kevin Walsh, a former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, has died. Walsh’s simple suggestion to Oliver Stone led to the JFK Records Act and made a world of difference in expanding the historical record of the JFK assassination. Read more
DId the CIA destroy an Oswald tape?
Yes. The tape was probably destroyed in January 1986.
This question, prompted by a comment from reader JSA, is a natural follow up to yesterday’s question, “Did the CIA track Oswald before JFK was killed?” And there is a lot of evidence to support our answer. Read more
Justice Dept. denies CIA officer was honored for JFK cover-up
A Justice Department official denied in a federal court filing last month that undercover officer George Joannides received a CIA medal for deceptive actions related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 49 years ago but the claim cannot be verified.
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 CIA has consistently challenged the notion that a career award could be seen as explicit or tacit approval of any one assignment in Joannides’s 30-year career,” asserted Ronald Machen, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in a brief filed on Nov. 21 in the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Machen’s brief is the government’s latest legal salvo in my decade-old (today) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit over JFK assassination records. At issue are ancient but still-sensitive U.S. government documents related to the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
In recent years, the CIA has grudgingly acknowledged that Joannides served as the Miami-based handler of a Cuban exile group whose members who had a series of encounters with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald three months before JFK was killed.
The agency also acknowledges that Joannides served as the CIA’s principal coordinator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978 but did not disclose his role in the events of 1963 to investigators.
“That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities,” wrote reporter Scott Shane of the New York Times in 2009. Read more