I caught up by phone with best-selling author David Wallechinsky after he included 1,172 still-secret CIA documents related to JFK’s assassination in his Huffington Post article “11 Secrets Documents the American People Deserve to See.”
“Its been 49 year years, good grief,” Wallechinsky told me. “Who is going to be hurt if you release these documents?”
Wallechinsky, editor of AllGov, a government watchdog site, says he has been interested in the assassination story ever since he heard JFK had been killed while sitting in 11th grade chemistry class in Palisades, California. He says he relied on Rusty Rhodes, a Dallas native, in compiling the JFK assassination entry in “The People’s Almanac,” a best-selling book that Wallechinsky compiled in 1975.
“I don’t think we necessarily know the whole story. Its quite possible that Oswald acted alone,” he said. “The CIA could be covering complete embarassment over its handling of Oswald. Or it could be something worse.”
“Any time you tell me, there’s something I can’t see,” he adds, “I want to see it.”
Sign the Change.org petition calling for the release of these documents.
I have signed the petition, and have urged others to do so as well. I think the CIA in particular is trying to hide something embarrassing to that agency, so they don’t want to release the final set of files.
However, I brought this up to a skeptical friend of mine, and he asked me: “What if the CIA cannot even find the files?” He went on to say that the CIA is a bunch of “keystone cops” who bungle all sorts of things, etc. I told him that the CIA is one of the most anally organized organizations in the world, along with the NSA and some other agencies. But does anyone know if there is any validity to my friend’s question/argument about CIA not knowing where it’s files are located?
The CIA is, among other things, are large bureaucracy and so it has dsyfunctional moments but to generalize the CIA as a “bunch of keystone cops” is simply wrong. Your assertion that the CIA is obsessive about the organization and retrieval of information is much more accurate than you’re friends uninformed claim.
And in the case of the missing JFK records we know right where the documents are.
My lawsuit Morley v. CIA has identified 295 records of the late George Joannides, a CIA officer whose Cuban agents collected intelligence and generated propaganda about Lee Harvey Oswald three months before JFK was killed. The CIA has been fighting the release of these records for a decade. It it wanted to release them, it could located them in 5 minutes.
In the case of the 1,172 CIA documents that are sought by the petition, they are held by the National Archives here in the Washington area. They too could be retrieved in a day.
If you google “George Joannides” you will see a picture of him (with Bobby Ray Inman) receiving the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal for “exceptional achievement” in July, 1981. This is just a few years after the close of the HSCA.
Bobby Ray Inman happens to live down the street from me in Austin, TX. I interviewed him in 2009 (specifically because I wanted to ask him about the JFK assassination).
Inman told me that if we ever have a coup in America it will happen just like the movie “Seven Days in May.”
Inman also told me that at every intelligence job he had he looked for evidence that Oswald was US intelligence but he could find nothing on him in the files.
Inman also told me that “I will go to my grave thinking that Fidel Castro killed John Kennedy.” Inman did not seem receptive to any information that would contradict that nor did he seem especially knowledgeable about the JFK assassination. He has found his comfortable lie to believe in.
Inman also told me that he had “no doubt” that the Republicans in 1980 made a deal with the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after the 1980 election.
Robert, about the Iran hostage deal-I could be wrong here, but wasn’t it finalized shortly after Reagan was sworn in in 1981 so history couldn’t say that Carter was still President when the deal was done? Please correct me if need be.
“Its been 49 year years, good grief,” Wallechinsky told me. “Who is going to be hurt if you release these documents?”
Well, if the government murdered John Kennedy, wouldn’t that be embarrassing to many folks if documents were released – especially relating to David Atlee Phillips – that might support that?
When I say “government” I mean CIA-military-LBJ-Hoover as well as the outside “shadow government” of Texas oil families with legacies to protect; for example Hunt family, Johnson family, Bush family and maybe even Rockefeller family if David or Nelson Rockefeller were in on the JFK assassination.