The assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We just can’t shake it. The 53rd anniversary comes next month. It’s not one of those ten-year marks, but it will certainly stir conspiracy theorist chatter to a familiar old pitch. I’d thought Vincent Bugliosi of Charles Manson fame put it all reasonably conspiracy theories to rest in 2007 with Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet, they continue feeding on it, and we keep smirking. Then, something new comes to light that encourages them, and raises everyone else’s eyebrows.
Indeed, there was a conspiracy surrounding the Warren Commission Investigation. Indeed, the CIA had contact with Oswald before he killed the president. Indeed, the CIA covered that up. Indeed, that cover-up was a conspiracy. Last fall, Politico’s Philip Shenon stumbled across another one of those declassified documents at George Washington University. That history of former DCI John McCone that told a new story. Shenon shared it in “CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up.”
CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE
David Slawson, who worked with the Warren Commission, told Shenon something that’s disheartening because it sounds like people are going to quit caring. And what Slawson says implies there’s still something important we don’t know. Slawson told Shenon, “’The world loses interest, because the assassination becomes just a matter of history to more and more people.’” The declassified report, however, is important.
In Shenon’s view, “the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement—half a century after the fact—of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission.” Along those same lines, I find it important because we’re reminded every time one of these newly unclassified documents comes to the fore that there is a lot more going on out there than we understand.
It’s worth noticing that the declassified report reveals that the intelligence community was illegally opening mail (some of it) before there was an e- preceding it. And it’s worth noticing that inter-agency collaboration has always been—and likely remains very much—a problem. In retrospect, we saw that in the run-up to 9/11 when better information sharing may very well have produced significantly different outcomes. Back in 1963, given that the FBI and CIA and the Warren Commission were investigating the assassination of our Commander in Chief—what investigation deserves more selflessness and utter seriousness?—you’d think (naïvely) they’d work together to get to the truth. Instead, “Agency-Bureau relations had grown tense . . . because of jurisdictional disputes,” and “relations between the two agencies worsened during the post assassination period.”
SECRET//NOFORN NO MORE
Politico’s Shenon is a great summary, and you can read the actual report yourself, and read between the lines. For instance, the CIA told Shenon that “it decided to declassify the report ‘to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,’ including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination.” Actually, the report—and the CIA’s strange justification for declassifying it . . . I mean, is the CIA really worried about “crazy” conspiracy theorists pointing their fingers at the Agency? As Shenon notes, “The declassification of the bulk of the 2013 McCone report might suggest a new openness by the CIA in trying to resolve the lingering mysteries about the Kennedy assassination. At the same time, there are 15 places in the public version of the report where the CIA has deleted sensitive information . . . .”
One thing’s for sure. I’m going to start spending some time picking through the offerings at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
