The CIA Killed JFK - So Of Course It Opposes Long-Promised Records Releases

jacobin  |   his isn’t the only major revelation that has come out of President Joe Biden’s December declassification. One is a secret 1977 memo unearthed by Morley and other researchers that was written by an employee of the foreign intelligence branch of the CIA’s Miami station, showing that far from assuming that Oswald acted alone or that the KGB was involved, officers there considered anti-communist Cuban exiles prime suspects.

According to the memo, when Kennedy was still alive, station chief Theodore G. Shackley ordered scrutiny of the movements and plans of “known dangerous Cuban exile activists” while the president was traveling the country, to get wind of and halt any “conspiracies” in that community to “exploit or interfere with the president’s movement.” After Kennedy’s death, the memo states, Shackley and other top station officials ordered agents to gather information about Cuban exiles who may have been involved in the assassination.

Sure enough, the decades that followed have seen serious circumstantial evidence of anti-Castro exile involvement come to light. One anti-Castro militant, Antonio Veciana, admitted that he had been introduced to Oswald in Dallas by his CIA handler, a man whom he later identified as David Atlee Phillips, head of the agency’s anti-Cuban operations. In late 2021, the son of anti-Castro fighter and CIA contractor Ricardo “Monkey” Morales revealed that his father had told him that he had trained Oswald as a sniper at a secret CIA training camp for an invasion of Cuba, and that he had been ordered by his CIA handler to go to Dallas for a “clean-up” mission two days before Kennedy was shot.

Another document from the December tranche found by researchers is a 1976 CIA memo attesting to the agency’s heavy involvement in the Warren Commission’s investigation. According to the memo, thirty-nine CIA personnel were involved, including “nine of whom were involved daily.” As Morley pointed out at the time, several of those listed in the memo are known to have misled the Warren Commission about the CIA’s interest in and knowledge of Oswald.

It’s further evidence of what even the agency’s own in-house historian in 2013 charitably called a “benign cover-up” by the CIA in its dealings with the commission, aimed at pushing it in the direction of what it considered the “best truth” — that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, for his own, inexplicable motives.

It builds on previous disclosures that show that the CIA had a keen and extensive interest in Oswald before the assassination that went right up to the agency’s senior officials.