Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  Joannides was living in official retirement in 1978 when the CIA assigned him to Blakey. The agency had access to hundreds of active duty experts and document researchers on its payroll. But Joannides was perhaps the only one with specific knowledge of where the bodies were buried. He knew; he had buried a few of them. His job was to make certain that the unwitting Blakey never found them.

  In 1963, Joannides was a secret member of the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff. His assignment then was to provide funds and advice for the anti-Castro group “Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil” (DRE) based in Miami. The CIA referred to the group, the most militant of all the exile organizations, as the “Cuban Student Directorate,” and all of the American news media followed suit in hundreds of reports about the violent group.

  The leaders of the DRE were quite open about the goals of their CIA-directed media campaign. They wanted to create panic in Havana and build a wave of public support in the United States to attack Cuba. Castro was knowledgeable and concerned about the effort. The Cuban military was placed under its highest alert. On the evening of November 23, 1963, Fidel Castro addressed the people of his nation. He specifically discussed the DRE and its false claims and unequivocally stated that it was a CIA-directed provocation. Too bad Blakey had not tuned in to the broadcast.

  Joannides was based in Miami and was the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA’s station there. He had twenty-four staff members working for him and a budget of $1.5 million. Working under the CIA’s program called AMSPELL, he provided regular monthly payments to Luis Fernandez Rocha, the directorate’s leader.

  Almost immediately after the shots were fired in Dallas, the Joannides-guided group launched a media campaign to connect Fidel Castro to the murder. This was the first public result of the Mexico City fabrication created by the CIA. The members of the DRE had been well prepared for that moment. One DRE leader called Clair Booth Luce127 and assured her that the directorate knew that Oswald was part of a Cuban hit team organized by Castro. Similar allegations were simultaneously made to a reporter for The New York Times.

  Another DRE officer told Paul Bethel, who had been an officer at the State Department leading the campaign against Castro, that Castro was involved with Oswald. Likely many other media contacts were approached but the CIA refuses to release those documents.

  The DRE began to assemble documents to support the false charges that they released to the news media on November 23. They included photographs of Oswald and Castro under the headline “Presumed Assassins.”

  Thus it was the CIA and Joannides that paid for, organized and published the very first conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy. And all along, the CIA and the FBI and their assets in the media had repeatedly awarded me that honor.

  After Joannides died, his role as the secret hand, mind and financier of the DRE and its theories became known. Blakey was outraged, or so he said. “I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency cooperated with the committee.” Oh really, and just after you exonerated them from any misconduct in the murder of our president.

  He continued, “I was not told of Joannides’s background with the DRE, a focal point in our investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee.” Interrogated? Blakey had waived his right to subpoena power. He could not have deposed Joannides without his agreement.

  “He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents.” Documents are not “retrieved” by “a point of contact.” Lawyers obtain documents through legal process, motions, formal demands, and the exercise of subpoena power. The rules are clear. We have been engaged in this practice for two centuries.

  “In fact,” Blakey continued, “I have now learned that Joannides was the point of contact between the agency and the DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with the DRE. That the agency would put a ‘material witness’ in as a ‘filter’ between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would cooperate with the investigation.”

  And so we are left with this question. What did Blakey know and when did he know it? Is he now haplessly relying upon the excuse that he was so inept an investigator that he could not even discover who was his own main source?

  Blakey met his commitment to those who hired him. While he could not discover the names of all those who did participate in the murder he was able to state with absolute authority that he knew who did not. He declared that the CIA and the FBI were innocent.

  The Department of Justice was directed to conduct a further serious investigation. It declined.

  Notes

  118. Lafayette Journal and Courier, Indiana, April 19, 1975.

  119. The old FOIA had basically prohibited the release of documents in spite of its grand name that held out a promise of transparency in government. After the excesses of the Nixon administration during Watergate, which led to Nixon’s resignation under the threat of impeachment (in my view those acts did not rise to the level of impeachable crimes and in retrospect, they were minor compared with what was to follow at the start of the new century), the one prospective reform was the amendment to make the act as effective as its name implied. President Ford made it clear that he wanted to lead that effort. But two of his advisors, Donald Rumsfeld, his chief of staff, and his deputy Dick Cheney, warned him about “leaks” and insisted that he abandon the effort. One government lawyer, Antonin Scalia, assured Ford that the bill was unconstitutional. Some names follow us through the decades like a song we did not want to hear in the first place. Congress passed the bill and Ford vetoed it. Congress then passed it over the veto and it became law. By 1976, the availability of documents was restricted by new amendments. FOIA access was further limited starting in 1982 by executive orders issued by President Reagan. In 1995 President Clinton restored some of the act’s reach. But on November 1, 2001, Executive Order 13233 drafted by Alberto R. Gonzales was signed by President George W. Bush severely limiting the impact of the FOIA.

  120. Robert K. Tanenbaum, Corruption of Blood, (Dutton, 1995).

  121. These three formerly top secret documents are published in their entirety in this book in the chapter entitled “The CIA and the Media.”

  122. After the book had been rejected by almost all publishers in the United States, one offered $13,500 to me as an advance for world wide rights. I agreed but the publisher later withdrew the offer.

  123. The Church Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church, a former army intelligence officer. It concluded that the CIA had violated the law by attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, referred to the CIA as a “rogue elephant rampaging out of control,” and identified fifty American journalists directly employed by the CIA and many others who were affiliated with that agency and paid by it. It also concluded that the CIA withheld from the Warren Commission critical information about the assassination of President Kennedy and that the FBI had conducted a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) in an effort to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  124. Tony Boyle, the president of the United Mine Workers, was afraid that Joseph (Jock) Yablonski might bring democracy to that union, and hired hit men to kill Yablonski and his family.

  125. The Third Decade Journal, November 1984.

  126. A recent trip to the Internet informs that The Australian is the most widely read national publication in the country and that its politics are decidedly conservative.

  127.Luce was an influential conservative with high-level media connections. Her husband, Henry Luce, was the publisher of TIME, Fortune, and LIFE and the editor in chief at TIME.

  BOOK FIVE

  THE INDICTMENT

  Introduction

  One month to the day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an article written by former president Harry S. Truman was published in The Washington Post.128

  It w
as during Mr. Truman’s presidency that he organized the Central Intelligence Agency to operate as an arm of the president and to coordinate intelligence reports. He was disturbed by the manner in which the CIA had expanded its role into areas that had never been contemplated by him. He objected to the fact that the CIA had become an operational and policy-making body of the government. As we explore the excesses of the Central Intelligence Agency, a group that now has its own air force and an agency which has committed murder and has planned the assassinations of heads of state with whom it disagreed, it is appropriate to read the words of President Truman as an introduction to this portion of Last Word.

  Harry Truman Writes: Limit CIA Role to Intelligence

  By Harry S. Truman

  Copyright, 1963, by Harry S Truman

  INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

  I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President’s performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

  Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

  But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what’s worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

  Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.

  I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

  Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”

  For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

  I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

  With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

  I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

  But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

  We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

  The CIA Today

  Just moments before this manuscript was sent to the publisher, the CIA was involved in adventures that would demonstrate that President Truman was correct; the agency had abandoned effective intelligence analysis and had focused instead upon policy making and overt operations activity.

  On Sunday, February 20, 2011, The New York Times featured on its front page a story about the government’s effort to hide details about one of the great alleged swindles of modern times. Following the September 11 attack, a recent Pentagon study found that it had paid $285 billion in three years to enterprising but apparently crooked entrepreneurs for programs to prevent future aggression. The payments were made to individuals or groups that were accused of fraud or other wrongdoing.

  The article featured the machinations of Dennis Montgomery, who had been paid many millions of dollars for computer codes that were fake. Montgomery’s former lawyer, Michael Flynn, now describes Montgomery as a “con” man. CIA officials had previously said that Montgomery’s codes comprised “the most important, sensitive” tool that the agency possessed. President Truman had established the CIA for the sole purpose of evaluating intelligence-related data. Apparently the agency is ill-equipped to even do that. The Montgomery group had been paid $20 million by claiming that his software could stop the next Al Qaeda attack on the United States. In December 2003 Montgomery claimed that he had decoded messages revealing that specific planes, headed toward the United States from France, Mexico and Britain, were targets of identified terrorists. There was discussion about firing on the planes, but the Bush administration instead ordered them grounded, causing a major international incident. The French government commissioned a secret study that found that the Montgomery technology was a fabrication. Perhaps the French experts could be retained after the CIA “experts” have been fired. Or even better, how about hiring the sharp-eyed business experts who supervise the Las Vegas gambling establishments. Montgomery is set for trial in Las Vegas for attempting to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos.

  Meanwhile, our government has declined to charge him with any wrongdoing or even attempted to have any of its, rather our, funds returned. The government has covered the events with a dense cloud of mystery and has even adopted a technique we last saw when I tried the E. Howard Hunt case. During that trial, two persons who never spoke on the record and declined to reveal their names or their association with any group were present when I deposed two highranking former CIA officials, each additionally protected and represented by his own counsel. The deponents both said that they would leave unless the two nameless suits were allowed to stay. Of course, they had no right to be there, and I was concerned that a bizarre precedent was being established. I expected to appeal the case and try to have the rule of law established. However, since we won the case an appeal was neither necessary nor possible.

 
In the Montgomery case The New York Times reported:

  The secrecy was so great that at a deposition Mr. Montgomery gave in November, two government officials showed up to monitor the questioning but refused to give their names or the agencies they worked for.

  The relationship between our government and an ally, Pakistan, appears to have become more complicated and more imperiled due to the actions of the CIA, as reported in The New York Times on February 22, 2011. An American arrested in Pakistan, Raymond A. Davis, according to Pakistan officials, has murdered two men; and a third person was killed as an unmarked vehicle, driving at speed the wrong way on a one-way street, was rushing to prevent the arrest of Davis. In spite of requests by the Pakistani that the driver be turned over to local authorities, our government has refused to do so. A similar act in the United States would likely be considered vehicular homicide.

  Davis claims that he was resisting two men who he thought were about to rob him and that he had acted in self-defense. The local police, after questioning Davis, who had fled from the scene to avoid arrest, discovered that Davis, using the powerful Glock pistol that he always carried, had shot the men through his windshield, then left the car to shoot them several times in the back.

  Davis was employed in secret activities by the Central Intelligence Agency. Since Pakistan is not an enemy, the laws of both the United States and Pakistan were regularly violated as he carried out his assigned tasks. After killing both men, Davis photographed them and then called the United States Consulate for assistance. Likely the response was dispatching a vehicle to the scene to spirit away Davis and prevent his arrest. That attempt resulted in another loss of life when the rescue vehicle struck a motorcyclist. The widow of one of the men, overcome by the death of her husband, then committed suicide.