Smoking-Gun Circumstantial Evidence in the JFK Assassination
Those who have claimed that there is no smoking-gun evidence in the CIA’s long-secret records relating to the JFK assassination can no longer make that claim. That’s because the CIA was just forced to release its records relating to CIA official George Joannides. For more than 60 years, the CIA, with the help of deferential U.S. federal courts, had succeeded in keeping its Joannides files secret. Until now.
No, I’m not referring to some videotaped confession by former CIA head Allen Dulles or any other CIA official confessing to having participated in the orchestration and carrying out of the assassination or the resulting cover-up. As I have long maintained, there is no reasonable possibility whatsoever that anyone within the national-security state would put something directly incriminatory into writing. That would be dumb, and one thing is certain — CIA officials back in the 1960s were not dumb. In fact, they were brilliant people and very good at engaging in their expertise of state-sponsored assassinations, cover-ups, and regime change.
What I’m instead referring to is circumstantial evidence, which, as every judge in the land will instruct juries, is just as valid and credible as direct evidence. It is circumstantial evidence, such as the fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. military establishment carried out on President Kennedy’s body, or the fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film that the CIA produced on the weekend of the assassination, that have convicted the national-security state of the Kennedy murder. (See my books and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)
Thanks to the release of the Joannides files, we now have more smoking-gun circumstantial evidence to add on top of the circumstantial evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy and the fraudulent film.
The release of the Joannides records was reported this past Friday on Axios in an article entitled “CIA Admits Shadowy Officer Monitored Oswald Before JFK Assassination, New Records Reveal” by Marc Cavuto. It’s worth taking a pause in reading my article and going over to read Cavuto’s article to get an overall context of these particular long-secret records that have just been released.
It’s first necessary to put things into the overall context of the assassination plot. As I set forth in my books An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story and , central to the plot was the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald for the crime. That’s what Oswald meant when he stated that he was “a patsy.”
As the years and decades passed, it became increasingly clear that Oswald, who served in the U.S. Marines, was recruited to be an operative for U.S. intelligence, one who was trained to work under the cover of being a communist. That would explain why Oswald was not subjected to arrest, torture, indictment, prosecution, or even just an interrogation after he ostensibly defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States with a Russian wife.
In October 1962, President Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which he promised that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. This was almost certainly the point at which the national-security establishment decided that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security and needed to be removed from office, given the Pentagon’s and CIA’s conviction that the Cuban communist regime posed a grave threat to U.S. national security.
Six months later, in April 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he made a big public hullabaloo to establish that he was a “communist.” Notice something important: Oswald had lived in Dallas for five months before moving to New Orleans and had made no big public hullabaloo in Dallas about being a communist. On the contrary, he hung out with rightwing people who had direct or indirect ties to U.S. intelligence or to the U.S. military-industrial complex.
While in New Orleans, Oswald went to work for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by a fierce anti-communist conservative. What are the chances that a fierce anti-communist conservative would hire a died-in-the-wool communist at the height of the Cold War? No chance at all!
While in New Orleans, Oswald made contact with an organization of fierce anti-Castro Cuban exiles called the DRE. While passing out pamphlets promoting a national pro-Cuba organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the CIA and FBI were trying to destroy, Oswald got into a big public altercation with the head of the DRE. The altercation had the appearance of being a staged event designed to publicize Oswald’s communist bona fides.
Oswald was arrested for disorderly conduct and put into jail . While incarcerated, he requested to speak to a FBI agent. The request was granted and the FBI agent came to visit him in jail. How many regular people are able to pull off something like that?
Later, Oswald and the head of the DRE appeared on a public radio broadcast that publicized Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union and his ostensible commitment to communism.
Two months after Oswald moved to New Orleans, in June 1963, while Oswald was still in New Orleans, Kennedy delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, which essentially was a declaration of war against the national-security branch of the federal government. In that speech, JFK effectively declared an end to the Cold War and an intent to move America in a totally different direction — one that was based on establishing peaceful and friendly relations with Russia, Cuba, and the communist world. That, of course, was anathema to the U.S. national security establishment. JFK’s Peace Speech undoubtedly solidified the decision to remove JFK from office.
Four months after JFK’s Peace Speech, in September 1963 Oswald went to Mexico City, where he engaged in a big public hullabaloo in which he made contact with the Soviet and Cuban embassies. For those who are still convinced that the Russians or Cubans employed Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, it’s worth asking: If that’s really true, would they really want to advertise their connection to the assassin in such a big way?
After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the DRE immediately put out a press release stating that the president had been killed by a communist and detailing Oswald’s communist bona fides. The information in the press release was spread across the nation in the mainstream press.
But there was one significant thing that people didn’t know: The DRE was being supervised and generously funded by the CIA, specifically by CIA official George Joannides. For all practical purposes, the DRE was one of the CIA’s infamous front organizations.
It was former Washington Post reporter Jeff Morley who discovered in the 1990s Joannides’s role with the DRE. Morley sought Joannides’s records from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. The CIA refused to comply with the act. Morley sued the CIA in federal court for the records. The CIA fiercely opposed the lawsuit for more ten years. Ultimately, the U.S. federal courts, not surprisingly, deferred to the CIA by letting the CIA keep its Joannides records secret. The entire saga of Morley’s fight against the CIA for the release of the Joannides records is set forth in FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation.
For decades, the CIA did its best to keep its role with the DRE secret. It also lied about Joannides’s role with the DRE to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).
Oh, but it gets worse. During the HSCA investigation, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement to ostensibly serve as an innocent, good-faith liaison between committee investigators and the CIA. In reality, he served as an obstacle to the investigation of the CIA’s possible role in the JFK assassination. Moreover, the CIA never revealed Joannides’ role in the DRE to the HSCA or, for that matter, to the ARRB.
It gets even worse. It turns out that the CIA awarded a medal to Joannides for his role with the DRE, his role as an obstacle with the HSCA, and for his lies and deception to official investigatory commissions.
So, what was going on here? Why did the CIA fight so fiercely for so long to cover all this up? Because the last thing the CIA wanted was for people to find out its role in setting up Oswald to take the fall for the assassination. Knowing the deeply seated Cold War fear of communists and communism that had been inculcated in the American people, the national-security state knew that the best thing it could ever do was to frame a “communist.” But obviously it would not be beneficial to the plot for people to know the role that the CIA had played in establishing the “communist” that was being framed.
With the fraudulent autopsy, the fraudulent Zapruder film, and now the incriminating Joannides files, the national-security establishment is guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt of the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no way around it, not even for the U.S. mainstream press, which, needless to say, continues hewing to the ludicrous lone-nut theory of the assassination.