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Last week, President Trump authorized the rapid release of almost 80,000 pages of previously classified or heavily redacted CIA and FBI documents relating to investigations into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But these documents are not likely to reveal much new information about the assassination. Most of these documents do not even directly relate to JFK’s assassination; those that do are often FBI or CIA efforts to trace down rumors, or only secondarily relate to the assassination. Many records in this collection were originally collected by the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1979), which included investigations into the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of these released documents appear to have grown out of the committee’s efforts to do background research on individuals, organizations, or intelligence operations mentioned in documents collected by the committee.
This is a disorganized, eclectic collection of crumbs, but even crumbs can contain useful information, though anyone expecting answers to the question of who killed Kennedy is going to be disappointed. Like many other Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) scholars I have been somewhat randomly sampling this massive collection trying to get some feeling for what is here. After thirty-some hours of rapid sampling I have started to get a preliminary idea of the range of documents in this release. If I were forced to estimate at this point of reading, I’d wager that far less than 20 percent of these documents directly relate to JFK’s assassination. My guess is that Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, provides as good an idea of what the CIA knows at this point about the truth of JFK’s assassination, which means we’re going to be left with a lot of questions.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these documents is that they are mostly unredacted. This includes not bothering to protect information that might have legitimately been protected under the Privacy Act. Trump’s hasty order to release all these documents without removing things like CIA officers’ home addresses, SSN, birthdates, and other information reasonably understood to be protected by the Privacy Act perhaps made him some new enemies within the intelligence agencies he hopes to weaponize for his own uses.
Some of these documents that have made headlines include unredacted segments of the CIA Crown Jewels report, extensive CIA personnel files, and documents showing that during the Cold War, almost half of the political officers in US embassies abroad were CIA operatives. While the presence of CIA officers in US embassies has long been known, the size and scope of this admission is impressive. John Marks’ classic 1974 article “How To Spot A Spook,” developed useful techniques using US Government State Department directories to identify CIA officers inside embassies and consulates; and these newly released documents confirm the validity of Marks’ methodology.
To give you some idea of the range of documents in this JFK release, I provide some brief descriptions of sample documents, with links to the documents at the National Archives. None of the below-linked documents have earth-shattering revelations, but they represent a decent sample of the types of documents made public in this JFK release. These include things like: records identifying Chamber of Commerce staff working as CIA operatives, documents detailing psychological warfare on Chile, instances of the CIA recruiting a TWA employee for intelligence gathering, 1963 requests for high explosives by Cuban operatives; unredacted details on establishing “backstop covers” for CIA operatives (including details on how the IRS was used to maintain cover), unredacted case officer reports on running Cold War agents in Germany and elsewhere; a CIA covert staff requisition order for a CIA safehouse in Silver Spring, MD (Safehouse #405); Over 300 pages of unredacted personnel file materials of James Walton Moore (recipient of CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal, 1977), whose many years as CIA officer in Dallas Texas and New Orleans made him naturally of interest to JFK assassination investigators, E. Howard Hunt’s personnel file, investigations of American students who in 1957 traveled from the Moscow Youth Festival to China, A rare copy of the CIA’s publishing secrecy agreement; 1997 CIA documents letting people know their names could be in JFK doc release; details of US intelligence agencies Cold War monitoring of mail correspondence between peoples of the USSR and the USA; an FBI report on a Russian source code named KITTY HAWK who claimed that Soviet disinformation campaign tried to blame LBJ for JFK assassination; a memo discussing concerns that the release of JFK documents could reveal Ford Presidency covert actions including meddling in elections and foreign labor unions; or an FBI report on journalist Drew Pearson’s claim that CIA’s McCone knew of plot where Oswald was paid in Mexico for the assassination.
As a scholar who, during the last three and a half decade,s has read over 100,000 pages of declassified CIA and FBI FOIA documents, I find that the most interesting documents in this release are short, unredacted memos—complete with names of CIA and FBI agents, informers, budgets, addresses, and other information routinely redacted in FOIA releases. These unredacted documents detail covert operations that scholars have long known about and documented, but usually, these FOIA-released documents have small but key details missing. Below are summaries of two such simple documents. The first is a short CIA memo detailing using American businesses to provide cover as part of a CIA “backstop operation,” the second describes the CIA’s creation of a fake Marxist political group to try and monitor and influence radical Arabs in the United States.
CIA Using Corporations for Cover
Since 1967, we have learned a lot about the CIA’s use of pass-throughs, backstops, and front organizations to run a variety of CIA operations during the Cold War. In 1964, with little public notice, Congressman Wright Patman first accidentally discovered the CIA’s use of foundations and front organizations to fund various projects. It wasn’t until 1967, after Ramparts Magazine exposed the CIA’s funding and control of the National Student Association that widespread exposure of dozens of these CIA fronts occurred. I spent much of the last decade documenting how the CIA created and used The Asia Foundation as a CIA-controlled front from 1951 until the New York Times exposed its receipt of CIA funds in 1967. Though the Times stopped far short of exposing the extent of the CIA’s control of the foundation, after this disclosure, the CIA severed its ties to the Foundation. While working on my book, Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA I read hundreds of archival and FOIA documents relating to the mechanisms of CIA funding front finances, yet these new JFK documents provide some of the clearest, non-redacted views of how Cold War CIA fronts contacted and used US corporations and masters of industry to provide cover and launder funds.
The CIA’s golden age of pass-throughs and front organizations was between 1951 and 1967, and the JFK release includes a somewhat routine 44-page CIA document recording CIA staff efforts to use existing businesses to disguise the CIA’s flow of money and people. While this is a routine enough document from this era, the lack of redactions hiding names, dates, and other vital information gives a taste of just how different such documents would be for scholars to work with if the government routinely released such documents in full.
This memo describes how the CIA contacted personnel at the Research Institute of America (RIA) to arrange using it as a “backstop” (providing cover) for William J. Acon, who would soon be working for the CIA overseas. Acon has “been a research analyst on economic and financial problems in Italy.” Acon’s unredacted resume is included and shows the sort of international economics background the CIA often used in its Cold War international operations. A secret transmission from New York City to Washington, D.C. confirms that at the CIA’s meeting, RIA President Leo Cherne (who would later serve on the US Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, 1973-91) agreed to provide this requested CIA cover. These documents also include a similar request for cover being made to Mr. William A. Barron, Chairman of the Board of Gillette Safety Razor Company, and Mr. John E. Toulmin, Senior Vice President of the First National Bank of Boston. Barron was unwilling to use the Gillette Safety Razor company for CIA cover, while “Mr. Toulmin, on the other hand, was most cooperative.” A thickly bureaucratic paper trail of memos documenting meetings, form letters, a denial to provide any document confirming this backstop arrangement, and documents establishing the planned funds transfers provide an unobstructed view of how (without the usual redactions) such CIA transactions were finalized.
Having done extensive FOIA and archival research into two CIA funding fronts (the CIA codenamed DTPILLAR’s Asia Foundation, 1951-1967, and MKULTRA’s Human Ecology Fund, 1955-1965), I have read dozens of fragmentary accounts of such transactions. However, these unredacted releases provide an unusually clear picture of how such routine transactions developed.
The CIA’s fake “Union for Revolution”
A newly released February 13, 1970 internal FBI memo from D.J. Brennan, Jr. to S. J. Papich describes how the Central Intelligence Agency had recently established an organization known as the “Union for Revolution.” This organization was created and managed by the CIA, but it pretended to be a “communist-oriented” revolutionary organization seeking to “develop penetration and/or courses in revolutionary Arab groups in the Middle East.” This FBI memo was written after the CIA alerted the FBI to the existence of this CIA operation to prevent the Bureau from interfering with the Union for Revolution should FBI agents stumble upon it.
The Union for Revolution operated out of Post Office boxes in Philadelphia and Boston. The memo states that its primary “activity in the U.S. will be restricted to the production of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, etc., which material will be mailed to various Left Wing groups in foreign countries.” There was reportedly no Union presence in the US beyond these mailing operations which were being run by CIA officers using “fictitious names.” The CIA hoped “that once the propaganda begins circulating, Arab groups will become interested and will endeavor to establish contact with ‘officials’ of the organization. If this develops, CIA will then proceed to use its own personnel under ‘suitable’ cover to make the contact. From then on, the CIA will maneuver to penetrate the target group.” This information was provided to the FBI by the CIA’s Norman Garrett. Because the CIA’s charter prohibits its involvement in domestic operations and the obvious likelihood that this propaganda spread to domestic audiences, this appears to be an illegal CIA operation. The CIA wrote to the FBI’s Liaison Agent that the CIA would provide the FBI with samples of propaganda from this operation. As Edward Said’s FBI file shows, during this same era, the FBI was intensifying its spying on a variety of Arab-American groups, such as the Arab-American University Graduates or the Palestine-American Congress; but this document shows the CIA moving beyond monitoring to the role of agent provocateur.
Like many of the fragmentary documents that are part of the latest batch of JFK release, more questions than answers arise from these documents. Chief among these relate to how this CIA propaganda effort spread within the United States, what was the blowback from this effort to nurture Arab radicals? Did the CIA yet again feed a political movement that later generated conflict or violence?
There are thousands of unredacted memos on hundreds of other subjects that can similarly provide new details on topics unrelated to JFK’s assassination. I know that the lack of documents answering key questions about JFK’s murder is disappointing to many people. If such government records ever existed, it seems unlikely they survive, or that they would ever be released. In some very real sense, that isn’t what this collection is really about, though the secrecy surrounding all these non-JFK-related documents raises its own questions given what it does not contain. It is important to remember that the size of this collection makes it difficult to immediately understand what important details may emerge as people carefully sift through these pages. Nothing definitive about JFK’s assassination will likely emerge, but with the elimination of widespread redactions, other details unrelated to JFK will emerge, shedding new light on elements of American intelligence operations.
