JFK Assassination Records Update

If you have not been following the effort to obtain the release of known JFK related documents and the collection of additional assassination related materials, you may be unaware of the pending December deadline for a presidential decision on records release.  Past presidents, including Donald Trump, failed to authorize a full, legally mandated release of records, and last year President Biden postponed the mandated release. 

With another deadline imminent and no sign that the national security agencies will not once again manage to stall document release, the Mary Ferrell Foundation is now in court, seeking a legal decision which would force President Biden and the National Archives to comply with their designated responsibilities under the JFK Records Act – legislation passed by Congress some thirty years ago.

You will find a full description of what the law calls for and the failures to comply, as well as the current legal action at the Mary Ferrell Foundation web site:

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Main_Page.html

The main page of the site will give you links to information on the law suit as well as a recent press event at the National Press Club, which detailed the need for action and in which examples of documents which may be key to the history of the assassination, and to the CIA’s activities relating to Lee Oswald are described.

I plan to post more information on what we now know about the CIA’s knowledge of Oswald prior to the assassination (information which was withheld from the Warren Commission inquiry) as well as to the indications of operational use of Lee Oswald by the Agency – operational use which may well explain the extent to which that Agency has stonewalled release of records over the years.

Both the CIA and FBI’s actions in concealing information are remarkable for several reasons, but the CIA stands out as an ongoing bad actor, for years after the Warren Commission concluded its inquiry. During the press conference Jeff Morley related one area of noncompliance related to a CIA officer who was in charge of the anti-Castro student group (DRE) who Lee Oswald contacted in New Orleans in 1963 – and who, when assigned as a liaison in support of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, failed not only to make DRE reports and records available but actually concealed his role in that key period of time prior to the assassination.

Even in matters which would seem to be completely innocent the CIA has refused to fully release Oswald related documents.  When Lee Oswald and his wife returned to the US from Russia, the CIA’s Domestic Contacts officer (J Walton Moore) in the Fort Worth/Dallas area initiated an effort to monitor them, using sources within the local Russian community.  That sort of activity was certainly standard CIA operating procedure and few would have found fault with it.  Yet after almost 60 years some 200 pages of known CIA files on Moore remain unreleased and the documents we do have are heavily redacted.

For comparison, over the last decade the CIA and other agencies have released virtually every document related to the American spy satellite networks that were established during the decades of the sixties and seventies – with satellite capabilities specified and even the engineering diagrams for much of the equipment involved.  During those decades those satellites represented the epitome of Top Secret Code Word classification.

Which leaves us with the question, if that sort of national security related information is now released and public, why in the world would there be such obvious gaps in the file of a CIA Domestic Operations officer, who in 1962/63 was simply checking on Lee Oswald after his return from Russia – in what would seem to be routine, due diligence activity. 

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