Speaker 1: Four thousand, six hundred eighty four. That's the number of
Speaker 1: documents related to the JFK assassination that as of November
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, still remain fully kept from the public eye.
Speaker 2: For those of us who want to know the truth
Speaker 2: of who killed JFK, why after sixty years are documents
Speaker 2: still being withheld.
Speaker 1: In December of twenty twenty two, the CIA released a
Speaker 1: statement that the withheld information quote consists of intelligence sources
Speaker 1: and methods, the release of which would currently do identifiable
Speaker 1: harm to intelligence operations.
Speaker 2: The common refrain of protecting sources and methods gets harder
Speaker 2: and harder to accept the further we get from nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty three, with virtually all the people that were involved
Speaker 2: no longer with us. Many of the documents that are
Speaker 2: being withheld are from the CIA, which only increases suspicions
Speaker 2: about their role. To discuss the JFK files, what might
Speaker 2: be in them, why they're still being hidden, and what
Speaker 2: we've learned from recent files that have been released, we
Speaker 2: asked Jefferson Morley to join us again. If we want
Speaker 2: to understand the story of these withheld documents, where do
Speaker 2: we begin?
Speaker 3: Okay, So, the JFK Records Act called for the disclosure
Speaker 3: of all government related records, and as a result of it,
Speaker 3: we got a huge body of records, mostly in the
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties, and a steady stream ever since. The law
Speaker 3: had a twenty five year sunset provision in it, which
Speaker 3: said after twenty five years all the records should be
Speaker 3: made public.
Speaker 1: To make the timeline clear, the JFK Records Act that
Speaker 1: passed in nineteen ninety two required that all government agencies
Speaker 1: send any records concerning the JFK assassination to the National
Speaker 1: Archives and Records Administration. These records would then be held
Speaker 1: by the National Archives twenty five years before being released
Speaker 1: to the public on October twenty six, twenty seventeen, that is,
Speaker 1: unless the President sees a quote identifiable harm coming from
Speaker 1: their release. Between twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, more than
Speaker 1: thirty four thousand records were released by the National Archives,
Speaker 1: but on April twenty six, twenty eighteen, then President Trump
Speaker 1: decided that government agencies could have until April twenty six,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, to review the remaining documents to determine
Speaker 1: whether withholding those documents from the public is still necessary.
Speaker 3: The CIA went to President Trump and said, we couldn't
Speaker 3: possibly release all of these records. And Trump's CIA director
Speaker 3: Mike Pompeo agreed with the agency and the government in
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen requested the withholding of about fifteen thousand documents,
Speaker 3: eleven thousand of which were CIA records. Well, when that happened,
Speaker 3: the press start paying attention, and the press attitude towards
Speaker 3: the JFK story started to change a little bit because
Speaker 3: this level of secrecy after twenty five years just struck
Speaker 3: people as kind of crazy. And the people who had
Speaker 3: been in charge of the JFK records said, you know,
Speaker 3: when we started this process, we thought in twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: there might be one hundred records. We never expected fifteen thousand.
Speaker 3: So the CIA took that loophole in the law and
Speaker 3: they drove a giant truckload of documents through it. So
Speaker 3: Trump gave the CIA what they wanted and said, we'll
Speaker 3: revisit this issue in four years. So in October twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, now Biden's president, and the same question comes
Speaker 3: to Biden. What Biden did was he issued an executive
Speaker 3: order which effectively negated all of the deadlines and all
Speaker 3: of the criteria of the JFK Records Act. From now on,
Speaker 3: the CIA and the NSA will decide when JFK documents
Speaker 3: can be public, So those four thousand documents are effectively
Speaker 3: classified indefinitely. There is now no provision in the law
Speaker 3: for them to ever be made public except when the
Speaker 3: CIA and the NSA decide they want to.
Speaker 2: So the agency in charge of the decision is now
Speaker 2: the agency that likely has the most to hide. It's
Speaker 2: dullest on the Warren Commission and George Joanned's on the
Speaker 2: House Select Committee all over again. You can't let us
Speaker 2: suspect have control of potential evidence.
Speaker 1: Is it safe to say we're never going to see
Speaker 1: those files?
Speaker 3: There is no schedule for their release.
Speaker 2: In the past, whenever a batch of documents would get released,
Speaker 2: researchers would scramble to make sense of it.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking of this example of a document that came
Speaker 3: out in December. This guy writes a detailed memo. His
Speaker 3: name didn't come out until twenty twenty two, you know,
Speaker 3: And when we get the name, you going, look, the
Speaker 3: guy died in twenty seventeen. If we'd had document in
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, that would have been a very important interview.
Speaker 3: The CIA knows what they're doing. The point of this
Speaker 3: secrecy is that witnesses die and they can't talk about it,
Speaker 3: and the story becomes harder to get.
Speaker 2: It's so frustrating. I mean, it's the greatest murder mystery
Speaker 2: in the history of this country, and with so much
Speaker 2: disinformation amplified by the Internet, it's becoming almost impossible to
Speaker 2: get the truth out.
Speaker 1: What's come out in recent releases and what else might
Speaker 1: still be in there.
Speaker 3: Another document that came into view last a year ago
Speaker 3: was a story that we had never known before, which
Speaker 3: was the CIA station in Miami. At a time when
Speaker 3: the White House, the FBI, the Dallas Police, and the
Speaker 3: Secret Service were saying one man alone did it. The
Speaker 3: CIA station in Miami rejected that idea and began to
Speaker 3: investigate anti Castro exiles for a possible role in Kennedy's assassination.
Speaker 3: The people who hated him the most, so the people
Speaker 3: who knew the Cuban exiles the best, did not believe
Speaker 3: the loan gunman theory, not for a second. They investigated
Speaker 3: the alternative hypothesis that Kennedy had been killed by his
Speaker 3: enemies who were trying to lay the blame on Cuba.
Speaker 3: We never knew about that investigation before, and the results
Speaker 3: of that investigation were never shared with the Warren Commission
Speaker 3: and have never been made public.
Speaker 1: This is another one of those moments where you think,
Speaker 1: how is this possible? People within the CIA were so
Speaker 1: suspicious of the Cuban exiles that they conducted their own
Speaker 1: investigation and their results remain hidden.
Speaker 2: The fact that the CIA did their own investigation into
Speaker 2: the assassination and wanted to hide it from us is
Speaker 2: a perfect example of why there's been such a loss
Speaker 2: of trust in our government.
Speaker 1: Do we know anything about what might be in that
Speaker 1: report from the Miami CIA office?
Speaker 3: Their premise was that it was not a loan gunman,
Speaker 3: and they never released the results. They have never released
Speaker 3: the results of that investigation to this day.
Speaker 1: What else should we know about these records?
Speaker 3: I talked before about the CIA was reading Oswald's mail,
Speaker 3: the story about Ruben Ephron. We knew that they were
Speaker 3: reading Oswald's mail. We didn't realize how high that went
Speaker 3: up in the CIA because of who Ephron was. The
Speaker 3: other example is are the files of George Johannedes, the
Speaker 3: man who ran the Cuban students who had encounters with
Speaker 3: Oswald and who stonewalled the Congressional investigators.
Speaker 2: Joan Edes died in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 3: His records from nineteen sixty three when he handled the
Speaker 3: Cubans in nineteen seventy eight, when he stonewalled Congress, those
Speaker 3: records are classified at the very highest level. Rod whatever
Speaker 3: Joan Edes was doing in nineteen sixty three, the CIA
Speaker 3: is determined to keep it secret forever, and so right
Speaker 3: now we have no prospect for ever seeing those types
Speaker 3: of documents and answering those types of questions.
Speaker 2: Do you think that if we're given the access to
Speaker 2: the documents that are still being witheld, that we would
Speaker 2: find a smoking gun in there.
Speaker 3: I think that the Joeannedese file would be smoking gun
Speaker 3: proof that senior CIA officials were running an operation using
Speaker 3: Lee Harvey Oswald in late nineteen sixty three for their
Speaker 3: own purposes, which they are still keeping secret. Right if
Speaker 3: the Joan Edese documents are released and it's shown that
Speaker 3: senior CIA officials were running an operation using Oswald and
Speaker 3: they've been hiding it for sixty years, that'd be a
Speaker 3: devastating blow to the CIA.
Speaker 2: Which is why the CIA will likely never release them.
Speaker 2: Why do you think this is still important today?
Speaker 3: Why it matters today is, you know, can government be
Speaker 3: held accountable? It's a test of American democracy.
Speaker 2: And for us to pass that test, we have to
Speaker 2: trust our institutions. The JFK story is the perfect test
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 1: Who killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me
Speaker 1: Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner,
Speaker 1: Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and me Solidad O'Brien.
Speaker 1: Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell.
Speaker 1: Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pineto. Our
Speaker 1: senior producer is Julie Pineto. Our producers are Tristan Nash,
Speaker 1: Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are
Speaker 1: Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Laudo. Our project
Speaker 1: manager is Carol Klein. Our associate producer is emilse Kiros. Mixing,
Speaker 1: mastering and sound design by Ben la Julier, Research and
Speaker 1: fact checking by Girl Friday and emilse Kiros. Business affairs
Speaker 1: by Hennan Nadea. And Jonathan Furman. Our consulting producer is
Speaker 1: Razanne Galliini. Recorded in part at CDM Studio and Fourth
Speaker 1: Street Recording Studio. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Production assistants
Speaker 1: by Rocco Deel Prior and Grace barn Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Johenig Rose Arsa and Dan Storper. If you're enjoying the show,
Speaker 1: leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform.
Speaker 1: Who Killed JFK as a production of Solidad O'Brien Productions
Speaker 1: and iHeart Podcasts