Newsweek, November 24, 2003
FULL DISCLOSURE
"I am afraid... they'll kill me. Let me in," the young
man pleaded in halting Russian, sobbing in front of several KGB agents in the
Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He desperately needed a visa to travel to Cuba,
to help the Castro government protect itself against future attacks by the CIA.
But the Cuban and Soviet governments had already turned him down. The KGB agents
were his last hope. Growing increasingly hysterical, the man reached for his
.38-caliber revolver, and swung it about in the air. "See?" he cried. "This is
what I must now carry to protect my life."
The man: Lee Harvey Oswald. The date: Sept. 28, 1963--less than two months
before he would be arrested in Dallas for assassinating John F. Kennedy.
The accounts of Oswald's desperate visit to those communist embassies in the
weeks before his rifle shots would change the course of history have long been
one of the case's most troubling issues. Was Oswald alone or with someone when
he went to the embassies? Did he threaten to kill the president? Did either
Cubans or Soviets encourage him to undertake the assassination? While Cuban and
Soviet officials--decades after the event--provided accounts of what transpired,
there might be definitive answers closer to home, inside CIA files, in documents
never released by the agency.
From 1992 to 1998, an independent federal body, the Assassination Records Review
Board, released thousands of records previously deemed too sensitive for the
public. But more is needed. While the massive document release of the past
decade reinforces the growing consensus that Oswald alone killed the president,
there is a continuing failure by key government agencies--particularly the
CIA--to disclose everything of relevance. Over the past 40 years the agency has
too often served its own interests in this case, at the expense of truth and
history.
In the late 1970s the CIA informed the House Select Committee on Assassinations
that it had routinely destroyed any audiotapes of Oswald in Mexico City prior to
JFK's murder, and that its surveillance cameras were not working on the days
Oswald visited. However, in 200 pages of documents released by the CIA to the
review board in September 1995, there are two memos, dated Dec. 10 and 12, 1963,
that conclusively establish the agency had inadvertently discovered copies of
Oswald's intercepts after JFK was murdered. Where are those intercepts? In 1971,
when Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, died of a heart
attack, counterintelligence chief James Angleton raced to Mexico and emptied
Scott's safe and files. Scott was running the Mexico City office at the time of
Oswald's visit, and Angleton had headed the CIA's minimal investigation into
JFK's death.
This is not the only instance of the CIA's foot-dragging. I am one of the
signatories on a letter to the CIA and the Defense Department demanding release
of all relevant records on a career CIA operations officer, George Joannides.
Declassified portions of Joannides's personnel file reveal that in August 1963
he was responsible for reporting on "propaganda" and "intelligence collection"
for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a prominent anti-Castro
organization known in English as the Cuban Student Directorate. That same month
Oswald attempted to infiltrate the DRE's New Orleans delegation. That
branch--subsisting on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided by Joannides--publicly
condemned Oswald as a Castro sympathizer.
In November 1963, Joannides ran the CIA's Psychological Warfare branch in Miami.
After the assassination, DRE members were among the first sources to expose
Oswald's pro-Castro activities in interviews with journalists. Within days of
JFK's assassination, the DRE published charges that Oswald had killed the
president on behalf of Castro.
In 1978 Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the CIA's liaison to
the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal
Joannides's role to the congressional investigators, even claiming it was unable
to identify the DRE case officer in 1963. Joannides never volunteered that he
was the person for whom investigators were searching. Eventually, the review
board's staff independently located records revealing it was Joannides.
This is not a performance that inspires public confidence and is a significant
reason there is little trust in the CIA's willingness to be truthful and
forthcoming on many important fronts. Needless conspiracy speculation is only
fueled by the CIA's stonewalling. The American public has a right to know
everything that its government knows about the president's murder and Lee Harvey
Oswald.
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