In this piece for POLITICO Phil Shenon hews to the official theory of a lone gunman, but he makes an important point about the CIA’s changing JFK story. In 2013, the CIA’s Chief Historian David Robarge admitted the Agency had misled the American people about the man who supposedly killed Kennedy.
In fact, the CIA’s in-house historian conceded in 2013 that the spy agency, in its dealings with the Warren Commission, engaged in a “cover-up” of what it knew about Oswald. The historian’s report, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination, found that senior leaders of the CIA intentionally hid information from Warren’s investigation, including about the Castro murder plots, in an attempt to keep the commission “focused instead on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ — that Lee Harvey Oswald for as yet undetermined motives, acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”
Although it came half a century too late, the historian’s admission on behalf of the CIA was a shocking one. That concession alone should be proof of why, today, the public is entitled to know what else might be hidden away in the Archives.
Source: Opinion | What’s Missing From the New JFK Document Release – POLITICO
Here’s Robarge’s article, published in Studies in Intelligence, an open source CIA publication.
“Declassified government documents show that both agencies knew in the fall of 1963 that Oswald, a self-declared Marxist, traveled to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination and met there with Cuban and Russian spies, including a KGB assassinations expert.”
Really? In all my readings, I have never found any incontrovertible proof that Oswald was the guy who talked to Sylvia Duran, Cuban consular officers, Soviet Embassy personnel, KGB agents or anyone else official in Mexico City. In fact, even the accounts of Oswald “on the bus” and in other places in Mexico are shaky at best. But we’re supposed to believe Philip Shenon’s interpretation that “both agencies knew.” Why? If they’re withholding information, why do we buy anything they admit? I don’t buy it.
The red line will always be Oswald as a gunman. For people like Shenon and other Warrenites, Oswald is the “lone gunman.” For others, he’s “one of the gunmen.” For those of us who don’t think the evidence demonstrates he either fired a rifle that day or was on the sixth floor at the time of the shooting, there is double frustration at (1) the unjustifiable, continued withholding of files (why should there be any files at all if the guy was just a lone nut?) and (2) commentators like Shenon who cling to the idea that, whatever comes to light, Oswald must always be culprit number one.
Unimpressed.