Tag: jfk

There’s Probably No ‘Smoking Gun’ in the JFK or Epstein Cases. We Should Be Allowed To Look Anyway.

The CIA’s coverup about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is unraveling. Despite the agency denying that it knew anything about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder, newly declassified documents shed light on the links between Oswald, a Cuban guerrilla group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), and CIA case officer George Joannides.

Several months before the assassination, Oswald had offered to work for the DRE, a CIA proxy overseen by Joannides. Years later, Joannides—operating under a fake name—became the CIA’s liaison to Congress during a congressional investigation into the assassination. The documents add to a pile of evidence that the CIA had been following Oswald for years and deliberately covered it up afterward.

Oswald “really wasn’t alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years,” said Jefferson Morley, a historian who has long pushed for opening the Joannides files, in an interview with The Washington Post.

Decades of dogged investigative work have poked plenty of holes in the official story around Kennedy’s assassination. But they haven’t produced a smoking gun, a single document that demonstrates what the CIA wanted out of Oswald or what knowledge it had about his fatal plans. And that smoking gun may never turn up; Morley and others speculated to the Post that Joannides was running an “off-the-books” operation through the DRE.

The same is likely to be true about another case that’s in the news this week: that of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After he died in custody in 2019, calls have grown for the government to release the “Epstein client list.” As I argued several months ago, such a list likely doesn’t exist. What does exist is a scattered patchwork of evidence about the people Epstein associated with and leads waiting to be followed up on.

To be clear, the official story on Epstein has some troubling inconsistencies. Last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that they found “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” But it has been publicly reported that Epstein attempted to extort tech tycoon Bill Gates over Gates’ (legal) extramarital affair.

The Trump administration has not exactly inspired confidence in its transparency or diligence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that bombshell information was “sitting on my desk,” then released a heavily redacted set of documents labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1,” most of which were already public. Last week, the Department of Justice claimed it would release “raw” surveillance footage from Epstein’s prison wing on the night he died, then published a sloppily compiled video clip with a minute of footage missing.

President Donald Trump himself told his followers on Saturday not to “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” (It was a change in tune from last year, when Republican politicians attacked the Democratic administration for not pursuing the Epstein case enough.)

Government coverups rarely involve compiling one document that lays out all the wrongdoing in detail—such as the CIA’s “family jewels” in the 1960s—and hiding it from the public. It makes far more sense for officials to keep the wrongdoing from being put to paper in the first place. Conspirators make informal plans off the record. Internal investigators turn a blind eye to evidence that they think might lead to inconvenient places.

Epstein was only arrested in 2019, after all, because reporting by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald and a lawsuit by victim Virginia Giuffre forced the federal government to reopen the case. Authorities had originally struck a plea deal with Epstein in 2007 that gave him a short prison term along with immunity for any co-conspirators who might come to light.

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The CIA reveals more of its connections to Lee Harvey Oswald

For more than 60 years, the CIA claimed it had little or no knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. That wasn’t true, new documents unearthed by a House task force prove. The revelation raises further questions about the agency’s awareness of — or involvement in — the plot to murder the president.

The documents confirm that George Joannides, a CIA officer based in Miami in 1963, was helping finance and oversee a group of Cuban students opposed to the ascension of Fidel Castro. Joannides had a covert assignment to manage anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups, even as the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying.

The CIA-backed group known as DRE was aware of Oswald as he publicly promoted a pro-Castro policy for the U.S., and its members physically clashed with him three months before the assassination.And then, a DRE member said, Oswald approached them and offered his help, possibly to work as a mole within his pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The CIA had long denied any involvement with the Cuban group, or any awareness of Oswald’s pro-Cuba advocacy. After the most recent release of documents, the agency did not respond to a request for comment.

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CIA Psych Warfare Operative Contacted Lee Harvey Oswald Months Before JFK Assassination, Bombshell Docs Reveal

JFK shooter Lee Harvey Oswald was contacted by a high-level CIA psychological warfare operative months before he assassinated the president, according to new bombshell documents declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency this week.

In a 1963 memo, released Thursday as part of President Trump’s JFK disclosure efforts, “George Joannides,” a deputy chief of the CIA’s Miami branch, is identified as a “special agent” being assigned a covert identity, complete with a fake address, driver’s license, and the alias “Howard Mark Gebler.”

Axios explains: “Until Thursday, the agency had denied that Joannides was known as ‘Howard,’ the case officer name for the CIA contact who worked with activists from an anti-communist group opposed to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro called the Cuban Student Directorate [DRE],” a group covertly funded and directed by Joannides’ CIA branch.

Members of the DRE confronted Oswald on August 9, 1963, as he handed out pro-Castro pamphlets in New Orleans, just months before the Nov. 22 assassination.

Oswald also debated DRE activists later that month, reinforcing his image as a Communist sympathizer – a year and a half after the Pentagon’s proposed false flag plan, Operation Northwoods, which aimed to blame acts of terror on the Castro regime in order to justify a military overthrow of Cuba. That plan, which President John F. Kennedy ultimately rejected, followed the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion just one year prior.

Later, Joannides and others inside the CIA helped conceal his role, slow-walking document requests, misdirecting congressional investigators and running “covert ops” intended to undermine investigations.

The bombshell document comes as previous releases have already shown the CIA lied under oath when questioned about the DRE during previous congressional testimony, Axios reports:

“All the records disclosed so far show how the CIA lied about financing or being involved with DRE. That includes the agency’s interactions with the Warren Commission (1964), the Church Committee (1975), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977-78) and the Assassination Review Board (until 1998).”

Axios notes while the memo blows Joannides’ cover, “The new documents don’t shed any additional light on Kennedy’s shooting or settle the controversy over whether Oswald acted alone. Nor is there any evidence showing why the CIA covered up Joannides’ ties to DRE.”

The document release, shedding light on the CIA’s long-suspected hidden hand in the assassination, was celebrated as a victory in transparency for the Trump administration, including by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets.

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The CIA Compiled a 194-Page Dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald Before JFK Was Killed

Last November JFK Facts reported a previously unknown fact: the CIA compiled a 181-page dossier on accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

This figure that that has now been fact-checked—and revised upward.

My interest in the pre-assassination Oswald file was piqued in April 2023. That’s when the last redaction in file was lifted. All of the 42 document in the file had been completely redacted as of 2017. All that remained classified was one name

In April 2023 it was revealed CIA operations officer, Reuben Efron had monitored Oswald’s private correspondence for the first 18 months of JFK’s presidency. At the time Efron reported to counterintelligence chief James Angleton, one of the most powerful men in the CIA.

Even the New York Times took note of this JFK development in July 2023.

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CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination, new records reveal

For the first time since President Kennedy’s assassination nearly 62 years ago, the CIA has tacitly admitted that an officer specializing in psychological warfare ran an operation that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the Dallas killing.

Why it matters: The disclosure Thursday — nestled in a batch of 40 documents concerning officer George Joannides — indicates the CIA lied for decades about his role in the Kennedy case before and after the assassination, according to experts on JFK’s slaying.

  • The linchpin document: A Jan. 17, 1963, CIA memo showing Joannides was directed to have an alias and fake driver’s license bearing the name “Howard Gebler.”
  • Until Thursday, the agency had denied that Joannides was known as “Howard,” the case officer name for the CIA contact who worked with activists from an anti-communist group opposed to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro called the Cuban Student Directorate.
  • For decades, the agency also falsely said it had nothing to do with the student group, which was instrumental in having Oswald’s pro-Castro stances published soon after the shooting.

The bottom line: “The cover story for Joannides is officially dead,” said Jefferson Morley, an author and expert on the assassination. “This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  • The information comes to light as part of President Trump’s order that the government meet its obligations to disclose all documents under the JFK Records Act of 1992.
  • Little was known of Joannides’ involvement in the case until disclosures in 1998 under the records act. New disclosures of previously hidden records keep adding slices of information to the story.

Zoom in: Joannides was the deputy chief of the CIA’s Miami branch, overseeing “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare.” That included covertly funding and directing the Cuban student group, commonly referred to as DRE for its Spanish-language initials.

  • On Aug. 9, 1963, more than three months before Nov. 22 assassination, four DRE operatives got into a scuffle with Oswald in New Orleans when he was passing out pro-Castro “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” pamphlets. The subsequent court hearing was covered by local news media.
  • On Aug. 21 , 1963, Oswald debated DRE activists on local TV, providing more media attention to him as a communist.
  • After the assassination, DRE’s newsletter identified Oswald as a pro-Castro communist, and the Miami Herald and Washington Post covered the story.
  • A year before Oswald became known as pro-Castro, the Pentagon formulated a plan called Operation Northwoods to stage a false-flag attack in the United States, blame Cuba and then attack it.

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JFK’s Radical Grandson Accuses Vice President J.D. Vance of ‘Killing the Pope’ in Unhinged Online Rant

Jack Schlossberg—grandson of former President John F. Kennedy—lashed out on social media Monday morning, accusing Vice President J.D. Vance of “killing the pope” just hours after the Vatican announced the death of Pope Francis.

The accusation comes after Pope Francis’s passing, ending his 12-year tenure as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Vance, a Catholic convert since 2019, had a brief private meeting with the pontiff at Casa Santa Marta on Easter Sunday.

The meeting lasted about 15–17 minutes, during which they exchanged Easter greetings.

According to reports, Francis gifted Vance chocolate Easter eggs for his children, a Vatican tie, and rosaries. Vance noted the Pope’s frail health but expressed appreciation for the audience.

The meeting followed an initial rebuff on April 19, when Vance met with Vatican officials instead of Francis, which some interpreted as a snub due to their disagreements, especially on immigration.

Hours after that historic meeting, the world learned that Pope Francis had passed away at the age of 88.

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Witnesses Tell House Task Force To Reinvestigate JFK Assassination

A panel of expert witnesses that included renowned filmmaker Oliver Stone told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on April 1 that more work is needed to uncover the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“Let us see past the lies, and let us hear what happened,” Stone told the task force. “The truth is the greatest treasure a Socratic soul can attain in this lifetime.”

The three-time Academy Award-winning director released a movie titled “JFK” in 1991 and followed that with a documentary in 2021 called “JFK: Revisited.”

He questioned the role played by the CIA, saying it “operates arrogantly outside our laws.”

A litany of motives for removing Kennedy existed at the time, including those related to expanding the Vietnam War and securing power for the military-industrial complex, among others, according to the director.

“He was changing things, changing too many things too fast. It was a major problem for some, and he was going to win a second election,” Stone told The Epoch Times after the hearing. “And he had a brother, a younger brother, and there was fear of a dynasty. They were terrified of that possibility.”

Expressing doubt about the Warren Commission’s findings in 1964, which fingered Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone gunman responsible for Kennedy’s murder, he asked the committee to reopen an investigation into the incident.

Some lawmakers on the dais acknowledged a need to follow up on questions regarding the chain of custody of evidence and discrepancies in testimony and records related to the crime, saying the lack of transparency over nearly 62 years has eroded trust in government.

“For over six decades, questions have lingered, shrouded in secrecy and speculation,” task force chairwoman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said during opening remarks. “What has been alarming to me is the amount of stonewalling the federal government put forth to hide this information from the American people.”

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JFK files reveal CIA officials ‘lied’ about awareness of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald: researcher

President Trump’s release last month of “long-secret documents” on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy revealed that “three top CIA officials lied” to investigators about the agency’s awareness of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, according to dogged researchers who have studied the tragedy for decades.

Jefferson Morley — an independent journalist and author whose foundation runs the largest online database of JFK records — testified to members of the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets that the files made public March 18 show the spooks “fooled the Warren Commission.”

Among the documents were nine critical memos on James Jesus Angleton, longtime chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence department, who was one of the trio that obfuscated the agency’s actions before both the 1964 presidential commission and congressional investigators.

Morley, 66, noted that Angleton ran a vast mail interception program out of a New York post office — and then lied about having targeted Oswald as part of the program when questioned by the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Oswald’s letters were intercepted at Angleton’s direction beginning in November 1959, weeks after the future assassin had defected to the Soviet Union.

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The JFK files and the curious case of Israeli exceptionalism

With the recent release of the JFK files, Twitter—sorry, X—is ablaze with amateur detectives sifting through the document dump with more fervour than an especially high Shaggy devouring Scooby Snacks. The question on everyone’s lips: whodunnit? The answer remains elusive, given the lack of a definitive smoking gun, but what is clear is that the lone gunman theory is dubious at best. What is clear is that Kennedy had managed to upset a lot of important people, and the list of suspects remains extensive.

What’s curious, though, is the feeling of uneasiness, a sense of hesitation when considering Israel’s possible involvement in the ‘63 assassination. Discussions about the Mob, the CIA (arguably the same entity in post-war America), the military, and the Fed all feel acceptable within the Overton Window, yet raising the question of Israeli connections feels problematic and that it must be treated with exceptional delicacy. Why does any criticism of Israel provoke an instinctive sense of foreboding, as if any questioning could incite the next Holocaust, invite accusations of antisemitism, and lead to cancellation or social exile, akin to getting a swastika tattooed on one’s forehead? The answer is simple: we have been indoctrinated and propagandised by a Zionist movement determined to pursue its goals without scrutiny, protest, or backlash.

This influence permeates all tiers of society. The CIA, for example, specifically demanded that all mentions of Israeli intelligence be redacted from the JFK files. Thankfully, they weren’t. The documents indicate that Israel, like the other key players, had the means, motive, and possibly the opportunity. This bizarre exceptionalism extends beyond public discourse into the very corridors of power. Trump is now pressuring universities with threats of defunding, arguing that it is antisemitic to protest against genocide. The paradox is staggering: recognising the Holocaust as one of history’s greatest atrocities somehow inhibits criticism of an ongoing holocaust against a minority group, ironically within the nation-state of Israel. The bullied have become the bully. Even asserting that Palestinians are human beings deserving of self-determination is almost as dangerous as being displaced to a refugee camp in the West Bank. Imagine if Putin had deliberately targeted refugee camps, hospitals, and women and children. The media would double down on the Hitler comparisons, yet when Netanyahu does it, we get justifications, sanitised language, and deflection tactics designed to desensitise us to human suffering—so long as the victims are Muslim and not Jewish. Without eyewitness videos capturing the daily brutality in Gaza, the mainstream media would still have us believe that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”. October 7th, of course, is the official start of history, with Hamas launching an entirely unprovoked and exceptionally evil attack that now somehow justifies the ongoing mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, mostly children.

Israeli exceptionalism is even evident in the way definitions are constructed. The Stockholm Declaration of 2000 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted by numerous governments, originally referenced only Jewish victims, omitting other groups targeted by the Nazis. Only recently were the Roma added as a secondary consideration, yet most people still equate the Holocaust solely with the murder of six million Jews, forgetting the communists, Slavs, intelligentsia, disabled people, and others who perished. It is also evident in political rhetoric: politicians can discuss Islamic extremism and Asian grooming gangs without fear of career-ending repercussions from Muslim lobby groups. But criticising Zionist influence in domestic politics? That is antisemitic. Al Jazeera produced an in-depth documentary exposing the role of Israeli lobbying in UK politics, demonstrating how a coalition of bad-faith actors—including figures from the UK military, intelligence services, and the Labour Party itself—helped neutralise the “Corbyn threat” due to his pro-Palestinian stance. Luckily, the British public, of course, opted for Boris Johnson instead, another pyrrhic victory in the ongoing destruction of the country to “Build Back Better’. That wasn’t sarcasm. Confessions of an Economic Hitman outlines what would have come next if Corbyn hadn’t been stopped by the PR wing of the establishment, aka the media—something confirmed by leaked emails between then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and top UK army generals. No one critical of Israel, capitalism, or the poverty gap will ever be allowed to hold real power. That’s not how pseudo-democracy works. The system’s genius lies in making people believe they have agency while using every cog in the machine to propagandise them into voting against their own interests, vilifying any true opposition, and infiltrating grassroots movements to sabotage them from within. Thatcher being Blair’s hero was no coincidence. Nor was it a coincidence that NHS privatisation began under a Labour government.

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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Accuses NBC of Withholding Bombshell Video Showing Lee Harvey Oswald Near JFK’s Limo — Claims He Wasn’t the Shooter

Chairwoman of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) ) has publicly accused NBC of withholding critical evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

During a recent interview on Fox News, Rep. Luna claimed that an unreleased video, which allegedly depicts Lee Harvey Oswald away from the infamous Texas School Book Depository at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, is in the possession of NBC News.

According to Rep. Luna, this video shows Oswald near JFK’s limousine when the shots were fired in Dallas, a claim that, if verified, would make it physically impossible for him to have been the shooter from the sixth floor of the Depository.

The congresswoman mentioned plans to formally request this footage from NBC, stressing the importance of transparency and accountability in this long-standing national mystery.

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