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Four Points About Biden’s Decision on the JFK Files

Peter writes:

Thanks for making yourself accessible.  I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on Biden following Trump and continuing to withhold classification?  Stay well and all the best.

Thanks Peter. The only good news in President Biden’s October 22 letter is the announcement that the National Archives plans to digitize the entire JFK collection, which is welcome and overdue. In the digital age, the Mary Ferrell Foundation says the full record of JFK’s assassination should be available to anybody anywhere.

Otherwise, I have four observations for the press and the interested public on the 58th anniversary of JFK’s death.

Ricardo “Monkey” Morales Told His Sons He Knew Lee Harvey Oswald

From Nora Games Torres, Cuba reporter for the Miami Herald

The claims made by Ricardo Morales Jr. during a show on Miami’s Actualidad Radio 1040 AM, add to one of the long-held theories about the JFK assassination — that Cuban exiles working for the CIA had been involved. But the claims also point the finger at the CIA, which some observers believe could help explain why President Joe Biden backed off last week on declassifying the remaining documents in the case.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enforce the JFK Records Act: collect the key CIA cables and dispatches

Those of us who comb through the CIA’s records about Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Mexico City are frustrated that there is no easy way to find many of the key cables between Mexico City and Headquarters, or between JMWAVE in Miami and Headquarters.

What we have run into is the working equivalent of a CIA tutorial on how to avoid providing information mandated under the law.

The law requires that this problem be solved.

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