Tag: E Howard Hunt

You’d think all the JFK assassination records would be public after 50 years but did you know CIA files on seven individuals are withheld for reasons of “national security?” The CIA may be withholding as many as 50,000 pages of documents related to the assassination. But it doesn’t take much imagination to realize what they don’t want released might help reveal what they are trying to hide, so let’s look into these seven mysterious people.

1) George Joannides. Joannides was head of Psychological Warfare at JM/Wave in Miami, the CIA’s largest and best-funded satellite station, although he apparently lived in New Orleans much of the time, where two training camps were located north of Lake Pontchartrain. One of his primary duties was supervising the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), an anti-Castro exile group. When Oswald first arrived in New Orleans, he attempted to infiltrate the DRE before starting a one-man chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba. Soon Oswald had a confrontation with some members of the DRE in the streets of New Orleans that led to newspaper and radio coverage, sheep-dipping Oswald as being pro-Castro.

Immediately after the assassination, all information the press initially received about Oswald was released through DRE members in Miami on orders of Joannides. In other words, in his role as a propaganda expert, Joannides shaped initial press coverage on Oswald. Keep in mind, the assassination was essentially organized through JM/Wave’s ZR/Rifle Program. So Joannides’ work in this area must be viewed as psychological warfare conducted on the unsuspecting American public.

When the House Committee on Assassinations was formed in the 1970s, Congress sent two researchers to investigate the CIA files on the assassination, which could not be removed from Langley. Strangely, Joannides was brought out of retirement to stonewall and block those two investigators so all trails into JM/Wave could not be followed. But how transparent can you get, really? There should have been massive objection to Joannides as anything but a suspect in this case, and he certainly should not have been allowed to become the primary gatekeeper on CIA files.

2) William K. Harvey. Harvey became the go-to guy at the CIA’s Berlin station after he engineered the building of a tunnel under the Berlin Wall used to tap into Soviet communications. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, it would be revealed the Soviets had been tipped off to Harvey’s operation and manipulated this listening post to leak disinfo, once again proving the KGB was often somewhat strangely one step ahead of the CIA throughout the cold war thanks to their double agents in MI6.

After Harvey was moved from Berlin to head “Group W,” he placed Ted Shackley in charge of JM/Wave. The code name given to their new Executive Action Program was ZR/Rifle and Johnny Roselli was recruited to help kill Castro, an introduction made by Robert Maheu. But after JFK converted to work on world peace and wanted the anti-Castro operations shut down, ZR/Rifle was soon directed toward a new target: JFK.

Harvey instructed his wife to burn all his papers upon his death. When asked why this was done, John M. Whitten, who briefly investigated the assassination before being replaced by Angleton himself, replied: “He was too young to have assassinated McKinley and Lincoln. It could have been anything.” Strangely, Harvey’s obvious connections to this case have never really been been explored in the mainstream media.

3) David Morales. Morales was already the CIA’s top assassin in Central America when Harvey recruited him into the ZR/Rifle to become his number one go-to in-house assassin. According the E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession, Morales tried to recruit Hunt into the assassination plot, but Hunt apparently turned it down, which may be why he became an official CIA fallback patsy backstop. There’s a famous quote Morales gave while drunk one night, taking credit for being on the scene when both Kennedy brothers were killed.

4) David Atlee Phillips. Phillips was one of the few CIA officials seen in the company of Oswald prior to the assassination (under the name Maurice Bishop). This sighting occurred while he was Mexico City’s anti-Cuban officer, working under Winston Scott, but not really reporting to Win in regards to Oswald. After the assassination Phillips would quickly rise to become head of the western hemisphere operations and later created the anti-conspiracy propaganda operation known as the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), which became an important tool for holding back citizen researchers from uncovering the truth about the CIA’s involvement in killing JFK.

5) Anne Goodpasture. Goodpasture had an interesting trajectory through the CIA. She became a special agent of James Angleton’s and eventually ended up down in Mexico City working for Win Scott. Whether Scott fully trusted her, I can’t say, but she was involved in hiding evidence of Oswald in Mexico and later became very close with David Phillips. Although she looked like a librarian, she was a master spook and wrote a 500-page secret history of the CIA in Mexico that hopefully will one day be released.

6) E. Howard Hunt. As team leader on the Bay of Pigs, nobody seemed to hate JFK more than Hunt. And Hunt did become Angleton’s patsy in a way because he was falsely ID’d as one of the three tramps and then an Angleton memo placed him in Dallas that day. I suspect Hunt had little to do with this case, however, and was used as the in-house dead-end. His close association with David Phillips may have afforded him a window on what was going on, although spooks are often left in the dark when it comes to covert operations. But of all the people listed here, Hunt seems the most removed from the central core.

7) Yuri Nosenko. In April 1964, Nosenko tried to defect to the USA. He was a high-ranking KGB official who had recently reviewed the files on Oswald, someone the Soviets always suspected was an American agent and not a true defector. The CIA is hiding over 2,000 pages on Nosenko and his torture under the orders of James Angleton, who sought to break down Nosenko’s personality because he was contradicting Antoliy Golitsyn, a previous KGB defector who had become Angleton’s pet project. Golitsyn was also favored by British intelligence, but his material was wildly unreliable. Meanwhile, the more believable Nosenko, a true defector, was treated as harshly as possible, possibly in part due to his efforts to brand Oswald an American agent. You see, Oswald was an American secret agent, and he worked directly under James Angleton, which completes this circle of info and hopefully reveals some shadows of the team that killed JFK as well as some of the major players who helped cover up that event.