A couple of weeks ago an editor at a major newspaper contacted me--we have corresponded before, never met in person--and asked if I would like to do an op-ed on the Trump administration's pending release of new JFK assassination documents. It went through two drafts but he has decided not to use it. I'm very disappointed because it might actually do some good. Here is the text.
President Donald Trump, perhaps encouraged by his ally Tucker Carlson, recently ordered the declassification of all remaining records pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Carlson in 2022 accused the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in JFK’s assassination and claimed that the agency was still withholding critical documents — an example of the corrupt behavior of the “deep state” which, then as now, in Carlson’s and Trump’s view, works only for itself. Trump is presenting himself as a tribune of the people who will let them see the truth. The new release will probably include some interesting information, but it almost certainly will not transform anyone’s understanding of the assassination.
We must begin with the history of the withheld records. In 1977-1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA, led by chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, reinvestigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. The committee looked at millions of pages of documents from the FBI and CIA. Initially, those documents were sealed for 50 years, but in 1992, prodded by Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film JFK, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act and set up a review board to look at all the select committee’s documents and release whatever they could.
The review board did an excellent job, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, now holds an extraordinary collection of CIA and FBI documents on topics broadly related to the assassination, including FBI files on major organized crime figures and CIA files on many operations against Fidel Castro. I and several research assistants spent many weeks with those files in the early 2000s, culminating in the publication of my book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 2008. The HSCA had identified three two organized crime bosses—Santo Trafficante of Tampa and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans—as having the motive and opportunity to kill JFK, and new evidence allowed me to go further, confirming an organized crime conspiracy and identifying some of those involved in it.
The review board did withhold some documents broadly related to the assassination, mainly CIA documents. One must understand, however, that these are not CIA documents that no one else has ever seen. HSCA staffers and the review board saw them but found legitimate reasons not to release them — probably because, even many years later, they might compromise intelligence sources and methods. In short, no new release is going to reveal a sensational CIA officers’ plot to assassinate the president of the United States. The documents may contain important information about other CIA operations, but not that.
Most assassination specialists have adopted one of two conclusions: either that Oswald and Jack Ruby, who killed him while Oswald was in police custody, both acted alone, or that Oswald was probably innocent and a grand deep-state conspiracy killed Kennedy. The latter group cannot give up the idea that the CIA killed Kennedy over differences in policy toward Cuba — even though the documents that have already been released show that the president and the agency were still working hand in hand to overthrow Castro well into the fall of 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated.
The Trump administration’s move could fill in some gaps in the record. There are FBI and CIA files that should have fallen within the purview of the review board in the 1990s but which it never saw. I identified in my research one such CIA file on Eladio del Valle — a former intelligence officer in the Cuban regime overthrown by Fidel Castro — who was murdered in Miami in 1967 and later linked to the assassination. The CIA refused to release it. I also discovered long FBI files on Carlos Marcello that the review board hadn’t seen, and some of them were released to me with virtually every name in them redacted, making them useless. Journalist Jefferson Morley has long been seeking the release on CIA man George Joanides, the case officer for a militant Cuban exile group who became the agency’s liaison to the HSCA. The Trump administration should establish a small permanent review board to release documents like these, which could add to our knowledge of the case. Meanwhile, like the previous releases under President Biden, the unveiling of more review board documents will provide some interesting information without changing anyone’s views. Adherents of the deep-state theory likely stand ready to argue that the truth has been withheld, no matter what the documents show.
David Kaiser is the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) and The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008).
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