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January 17, 2024 10 mins

An extended discussion with Jefferson Morley about the thousands of documents the US Government is still keeping hidden from the public. We discuss why these documents are still being protected 60 years later, what information may be in these documents, and what hope we have, if any, of the authorities releasing these materials.

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Four thousand, six hundred eighty four. That's the number of
documents related to the JFK assassination that as of November
twenty twenty three, still remain fully kept from the public eye.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
For those of us who want to know the truth
of who killed JFK, why after sixty years are documents
still being withheld.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
In December of twenty twenty two, the CIA released a
statement that the withheld information quote consists of intelligence sources
and methods, the release of which would currently do identifiable
harm to intelligence operations.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
The common refrain of protecting sources and methods gets harder
and harder to accept the further we get from nineteen
sixty three, with virtually all the people that were involved
no longer with us. Many of the documents that are
being withheld are from the CIA, which only increases suspicions
about their role. To discuss the JFK files, what might

(01:05):
be in them, why they're still being hidden, and what
we've learned from recent files that have been released, we
asked Jefferson Morley to join us again. If we want
to understand the story of these withheld documents, where do
we begin?

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Okay, So, the JFK Records Act called for the disclosure
of all government related records, and as a result of it,
we got a huge body of records, mostly in the
nineteen nineties, and a steady stream ever since. The law
had a twenty five year sunset provision in it, which
said after twenty five years all the records should be
made public.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
To make the timeline clear, the JFK Records Act that
passed in nineteen ninety two required that all government agencies
send any records concerning the JFK assassination to the National
Archives and Records Administration. These records would then be held
by the National Archives twenty five years before being released

(02:02):
to the public on October twenty six, twenty seventeen, that is,
unless the President sees a quote identifiable harm coming from
their release. Between twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, more than
thirty four thousand records were released by the National Archives,
but on April twenty six, twenty eighteen, then President Trump

(02:26):
decided that government agencies could have until April twenty six,
twenty twenty one, to review the remaining documents to determine
whether withholding those documents from the public is still necessary.

Speaker 3 (02:39):
The CIA went to President Trump and said, we couldn't
possibly release all of these records. And Trump's CIA director
Mike Pompeo agreed with the agency and the government in
twenty seventeen requested the withholding of about fifteen thousand documents,
eleven thousand of which were CIA records. Well, when that happened,

(02:59):
the press start paying attention, and the press attitude towards
the JFK story started to change a little bit because
this level of secrecy after twenty five years just struck
people as kind of crazy. And the people who had
been in charge of the JFK records said, you know,
when we started this process, we thought in twenty seventeen
there might be one hundred records. We never expected fifteen thousand.

(03:24):
So the CIA took that loophole in the law and
they drove a giant truckload of documents through it. So
Trump gave the CIA what they wanted and said, we'll
revisit this issue in four years. So in October twenty
twenty one, now Biden's president, and the same question comes
to Biden. What Biden did was he issued an executive

(03:47):
order which effectively negated all of the deadlines and all
of the criteria of the JFK Records Act. From now on,
the CIA and the NSA will decide when JFK documents
can be public, So those four thousand documents are effectively
classified indefinitely. There is now no provision in the law

(04:08):
for them to ever be made public except when the
CIA and the NSA decide they want to.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
So the agency in charge of the decision is now
the agency that likely has the most to hide. It's
dullest on the Warren Commission and George Joanned's on the
House Select Committee all over again. You can't let us
suspect have control of potential evidence.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
Is it safe to say we're never going to see
those files?

Speaker 3 (04:36):
There is no schedule for their release.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
In the past, whenever a batch of documents would get released,
researchers would scramble to make sense of it.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
I'm thinking of this example of a document that came
out in December. This guy writes a detailed memo. His
name didn't come out until twenty twenty two, you know,
And when we get the name, you going, look, the
guy died in twenty seventeen. If we'd had document in
twenty seventeen, that would have been a very important interview.
The CIA knows what they're doing. The point of this

(05:07):
secrecy is that witnesses die and they can't talk about it,
and the story becomes harder to get.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
It's so frustrating. I mean, it's the greatest murder mystery
in the history of this country, and with so much
disinformation amplified by the Internet, it's becoming almost impossible to
get the truth out.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
What's come out in recent releases and what else might
still be in there.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Another document that came into view last a year ago
was a story that we had never known before, which
was the CIA station in Miami. At a time when
the White House, the FBI, the Dallas Police, and the
Secret Service were saying one man alone did it. The
CIA station in Miami rejected that idea and began to

(05:50):
investigate anti Castro exiles for a possible role in Kennedy's assassination.
The people who hated him the most, so the people
who knew the Cuban exiles the best, did not believe
the loan gunman theory, not for a second. They investigated
the alternative hypothesis that Kennedy had been killed by his

(06:10):
enemies who were trying to lay the blame on Cuba.
We never knew about that investigation before, and the results
of that investigation were never shared with the Warren Commission
and have never been made public.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
This is another one of those moments where you think,
how is this possible? People within the CIA were so
suspicious of the Cuban exiles that they conducted their own
investigation and their results remain hidden.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
The fact that the CIA did their own investigation into
the assassination and wanted to hide it from us is
a perfect example of why there's been such a loss
of trust in our government.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Do we know anything about what might be in that
report from the Miami CIA office?

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Their premise was that it was not a loan gunman,
and they never released the results. They have never released
the results of that investigation to this day.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
What else should we know about these records?

Speaker 3 (07:06):
I talked before about the CIA was reading Oswald's mail,
the story about Ruben Ephron. We knew that they were
reading Oswald's mail. We didn't realize how high that went
up in the CIA because of who Ephron was. The
other example is are the files of George Johannedes, the
man who ran the Cuban students who had encounters with
Oswald and who stonewalled the Congressional investigators.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Joan Edes died in nineteen ninety.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
His records from nineteen sixty three when he handled the
Cubans in nineteen seventy eight, when he stonewalled Congress, those
records are classified at the very highest level. Rod whatever
Joan Edes was doing in nineteen sixty three, the CIA
is determined to keep it secret forever, and so right
now we have no prospect for ever seeing those types

(07:53):
of documents and answering those types of questions.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Do you think that if we're given the access to
the documents that are still being witheld, that we would
find a smoking gun in there.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
I think that the Joeannedese file would be smoking gun
proof that senior CIA officials were running an operation using
Lee Harvey Oswald in late nineteen sixty three for their
own purposes, which they are still keeping secret. Right if
the Joan Edese documents are released and it's shown that
senior CIA officials were running an operation using Oswald and

(08:27):
they've been hiding it for sixty years, that'd be a
devastating blow to the CIA.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Which is why the CIA will likely never release them.
Why do you think this is still important today?

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Why it matters today is, you know, can government be
held accountable? It's a test of American democracy.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
And for us to pass that test, we have to
trust our institutions. The JFK story is the perfect test
of that.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Who killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me
Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner,
Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me Solidad O'Brien.
Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell.
Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pineto. Our

(09:37):
senior producer is Julie Pineto. Our producers are Tristan Nash,
Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are
Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Laudo. Our project
manager is Carol Klein. Our associate producer is emilse Kiros. Mixing,

(09:58):
mastering and sound design by Ben la Julier, Research and
fact checking by Girl Friday and emilse Kiros. Business affairs
by Hennan Nadea. And Jonathan Furman. Our consulting producer is
Razanne Galliini. Recorded in part at CDM Studio and Fourth
Street Recording Studio. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Production assistants

(10:23):
by Rocco Deel Prior and Grace barn Special thanks to
Johenig Rose Arsa and Dan Storper. If you're enjoying the show,
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Who Killed JFK as a production of Solidad O'Brien Productions
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Soledad O’Brien

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