Charles Briggs, a retired CIA official who assisted the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas as a researcher and writer, once submitted a “dishonest” sworn affidavit in a high-profile arms smuggling case in Texas, according to a federal judge.
Briggs, who died November 4, served the CIA as a private contractor while assisting in the creation of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas in 1986. The Museum, which commemorates the assassination of President Kennedy, consistently endorses the official theory that one man, alone and unaided, caused Kennedy’s death. The Museum’s exhibits do not depict or make mention of the long-running debate about the causes of JFK’s assassination, and the Museum’s bookstore carries few books by JFK scholars who dispute the official theory.
Briggs’s veracity was called into question by federal Judge Lynn Hughes in 2003 when she heard the appeal of former CIA operative Edwin Wilson, convicted of selling explosives to Libya in 1983.
In an affidavit filed during Wilson’s trial in the early 1980s, Briggs asserted that the CIA had not asked Wilson “to perform or provide any services, directly or indirectly.” On appeal Wilson was able to produce records of at least 40 occasions where he worked for the agency after his retirement
Hughes threw out Wilson’s conviction saying his efforts to defend himself had been “contradicted by a dishonest agency memorandum.”
“Hughes found that federal prosecutors knew that Wilson had maintained close personal and professional ties to the agency, but nevertheless introduced a false affidavit from a top agency official, Charles A. Briggs,” the Baltimore Sun reported in 2003.
According to a Nov. 6 obituary in the Washington Post, Briggs was working as a U.S. intelligence contractor when he assisted the Museum.
“After retiring in 1986, he was called back in to serve the intelligence community as a private contractor with a combined total of 60 years. A notable contribution was serving as liaison for the creation of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, TX dedicated to the JFK Assassination.”
In response to a JFK Facts query about Briggs’s role in the creation of museum, spokesperson Megan Bryant wrote in email:
“The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza was saddened to learn of the passing of Charles A. Briggs, Sr. In the late 1980s, Mr. Briggs, during his retirement, worked part-time for about a year in the Washington, D.C. offices of noted museum exhibition design specialists, Robert Staples and Barbara Fahs Charles, as a researcher and writer. A well-respected member of the Staples & Charles team, Briggs along with his research partner, Abigail Porter, assisted in the development of The Sixth Floor exhibition, John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation. Briggs contributions are still evident and continue to be appreciated by Museum visitors today.”