ALAN DALE: We're speaking with Jefferson Morley and we just touched, a moment ago, upon the complexities which relate Cuba to the circumstances surrounding President Kennedy's assassination, and that brings us to the figure who is at the center of your ten-year quest to force the CIA to comply with the law in the release of relevant materials pertaining to President Kennedy's assassination, and that figure is a man named George Joannides. Jeff, could you tell me how you became aware of Joannides and how this particular chapter in your life began? Because there was a point at which you had never heard of George Joannides; there was a point where all we knew about him was that he was appointed to come out of retirement to be the CIA's liaison to that congressional investigation. So how did it all begin for you in relation to George Joannides?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: I first became professionally interested in the assassination of President Kennedy in the early 1990s. Congress had just passed the JFK Records Act in response to the success of Oliver Stone's movie, and in response to that controversy Congress said the US Government should release all assassination-related records in its possession as a way of clearing the air. And when that law passed I realised that there was going to be a whole new body of information coming out.
I'd read a lot of books about JFK's assassination; I'd never been particularly satisfied by any of them. I read the official story and found myself unconvinced by that as well. So I thought in this mass of new information surely there would be interesting stories about JFK's assassination.
I had no illusions about solving the crime; I just thought that in this extraordinary moment, that had been the subject of widespread popular interest, there would be stories that the reading public would be interested in, and that these might shed light on the circumstances of the assassination.
And so I began to study the assassination and I, in the course of that, met John Newman, who had recently retired as an Army Intelligence Officer, had written a book about JFK and Vietnam, and was turning his attention to the assassination. And so I began to look at the new records and what to make of them, and one thing that another person had said to me as I was reviewing these documents, Paul Hoke, who was a long-time scholar of the assassination, a computer programmer at the University of California and very knowledgeable.
And he had pointed out to me one thing that was interesting, which was in the conflicts in the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of killing President Kennedy, there was an interesting incident in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 in which Oswald got into an altercation – a series of clashes really – with anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans. And what Paul pointed out to me was interesting was that in the course of that these opponents of Castro had issued a press release in which they called for a congressional investigation of Oswald. And I thought was remarkable, that three months before Oswald became world famous, here were these people saying Congress should investigate him. And, knowing something about the anti-Castro movement, I suspected that those anti-Castro exiles might have been in the pay of the CIA. I thought that would be an interesting story.
ALAN DALE: Were you with the Post at this point? Were you working as a reporter?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes, I was working as an editor in the 'Outlook' section – the Sunday opinion section - of the Washington Post, and I was pursuing this on the side, with the idea that if I found an interesting story that would be something I could run in the Post. And so I pursued the idea that Paul had said to me – that this was an interesting incident – and I found records that were relevant in the new documents that were emerging as a result of the JFK Records Act, and those were records that concerned an anti-Castro organization called the Revolutionary Student Directorate, or Cuban Student Directorate, or in its Spanish acronym, DRE. So DRE, Cuban Student Directorate, and Revolutionary Student Directorate are all the same thing. It was a Cuban student group composed of middle-class Catholic students, mostly from the University of Havana, who were disturbed by this Communistic trend of Castro's revolution and opposed him, and then took up arms against him.
And so I found these records that concerned the DRE, and they were CIA records, and it was clear from those records that the DRE had a relationship with the CIA, and that they were in touch and, at that point I assumed were funded by them, although I didn't know that for sure. And so these records made reference to a man named Howard: the Cuban students would send Howard information that they had gotten, they would tell him about what they doing. And I thought that was interesting: so who was Howard? I thought that – and when I showed these records to John Newman he agreed - that would be an interesting thing to run down.
So I went and I looked up the former members of the DRE and I found them, in Miami, and they were mostly middle-class professional men who had been active in the anti-Castro cause in their early days, and then had abandoned it and then gone on to lead normal lives as doctors and engineers, book-publishers and the like. And so I went to them and I said: "Who was this guy Howard?" and they said: "Oh, well we remember him well" and they told me about him. He was a guy from New York, he would dress very well, he was an impressive character; very forceful, knew what he was talking about and, yes, he gave them money to support their activities, but he was also quite demanding about what he expected, so they described a close but conflicted relationship with this man Howard. But they said they did not know his real name; that he only went by this name Howard, or Mister.
So at that time there was an entity in existence called the Assassination Records Review Board. It had been created by the JFK Records Act and the Assassination Records Review Board had the job of enforcing the JFK Records Act. Congress said to the Government, and all agencies in the Government: "You have to make public all of your JFK records." and the Assassination Records Review Board was designed to review those records, make sure that there was no national security or privacy information contained in them, and then make them public, with appropriate withholdings of super-sensitive or private information, or whatever. The law mandated broad public disclosure, and the JFK Board was the entity that did this.
So I went to the JFK Records Board – to the staff - they had an office here in Washington, and I said: "If you're collecting JFK records from government agencies, why don't you ask the CIA for the records of this man named Howard, because he was in Miami running this Cuban student group; the Cuban student group had this contact with Oswald, indeed they had suggested a congressional investigation of him; so who was Howard?"
ALAN DALE: And at this point in time, for all we knew, Howard might still be alive; we could go see him.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes, and that was my hope; that Howard would be alive and could give his reaction to this prescient press release of the Cuban students that somebody investigate Oswald, and so what did he make of that? Did they investigate Oswald; did they care about that? What would he think? So I thought that he might well be alive, and I did a lot of research and talked to former CIA people, and nobody knew anybody named Howard working at that time who matched the description that I got from them. So I went to the JFK Review Board, to the staff, and I said: "If you're looking for JFK-related documents why don't you ask the CIA for the records of this man named Howard? That would be worth getting, and those might be revealing documents about Oswald and his antics before the assassination."
And so that was in late 1997, and about a year later I got notice that the JFK Review Board had located records, and in November of 1998 they released five fitness evaluations – annual personnel evaluations – of a man named George Joannides, who was in fact the case officer or the main person handling the contacts for the Cuban Student Directorate in 1963.
ALAN DALE: And does 'case officer' mean he's directing their activities? Is he their paymaster? Is he the source of their agenda? Is he directing the actual activities of the group?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, he is the CIA's point of contact with the group, which meant a couple of things: Yes, he gave the money to the group, so the money actually changed hands between him and the leaders of the group.
ALAN DALE: And the guy paying gets to choose what to do, right?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, no, I would not say he – he did not control the group; he did not tell the group what to do. This was a group of students who had been formed on their own, and then gained the support of the CIA. They thought of themselves as independent, although they acknowledged that they were dependent on CIA funding. So as I talked to the former leaders of the DRE they described a complex, not a simple relationship. It was not that the CIA controlled what they did. As one of them told me: "We worked with the CIA; we did not work for the CIA."
But on the other hand they were financially dependent in that the CIA paid the salaries of these young men; paid the rent at a couple of buildings in downtown Miami, where they had a headquarters. So they had to go along with what the CIA wanted. Now, they did share a goal, which was the overthrow of the Castro Government. They had their differences about the best way to pursue that: the CIA had its own agenda of course, so there was this complicated relationship but the fact was that when I learned in November 1998 that a man named George Joannides was Howard, and was the person who controlled this group, the story entered into a whole different dimension.
First of all I quickly found out that Joannides was dead; he had died in 1990 - his obituary had appeared in the Washington Post - so there was no possibility of interviewing him. But there were many people who obviously knew about him and I was very eager to try and figure out more about him. And so that's when I began reporting on who he was in the CIA and how did he fit into the CIA scheme of things. It was in November 1998, in those documents, that we also learned that Joannides had resurfaced in the JFK story in 1978, so in 1963 he is a case officer based in Miami, he's running covert operations.
ALAN DALE: And there are records. There are records of him.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Right.
ALAN DALE: Extensive, right.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Right. And so there would have to be records of him. I had, in the course of learning about the way the CIA worked, with the help of John Newman and others, had come to understand kind of how covert operations are run and how case officers handle client groups like the Cuban Student Directorate, and I came to an understanding that it's not like Hollywood; it's more like a bureaucracy, albeit secret, and albeit with special kinds of rules but in general, intelligence work involves a lot of paperwork: putting everything down on paper and reporting it and organizing it and trying to understand it is very fundamental to the enterprise of intelligence agencies.
ALAN DALE: So if there's an interruption in that record, that paper-trail, the documents that explain or describe a particular officer's activities or duties or their travel records or things like that; if there's an interruption of those materials then that draws attention to itself, doesn't it?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes, because all of an intelligence officer's activities are very well documented, and one of the striking things about the records related to the Cuban Student Directorate was a hole in the records. The case officers who handled the group before and after Joannides always filed what was called a monthly progress report, and if you look at the whole body of records of the CIA in anti-Castro operations in the 1960s the monthly progress report is a standard reporting form for CIA-funded groups. The CIA gives the groups money and then reports on: How did they spend it? Did it help achieve US policy goals? Was it effective in X, Y and Z areas? What were the effectiveness of the leaders? and so on, and so the monthly progress reports are a detailed way for the Agency to keep track of its money and achieve its purposes.
So the case officers who came before George Joannides in handling the DRE in 1960, '61 and '62 had always filed monthly progress reports about the group and I found those in the archives, and I could understand how the process worked. But when 'Howard' took over the handling of the DRE in December 1962 there were no monthly progress reports, and for the next 17 months, from December 1962 to May of 1964, there were no monthly progress reports in the CIA files. And yet, as we learned in November 1998, Joannides was clearly the case officer for the group during that time.
So the question arose – one question in my mind was – where were those monthly progress reports? They should have existed. And I talked to retired CIA officers, and they said: "Yes, if you're running a large complex – running a relationship with a large complex organisation like the Cuban Student Directorate, which had maybe 20 employees and a wide variety of activities, then you have to write down that relationship. You have to record it so that anyone can come along and figure out: Is the Agency achieving its purposes here?" And those records were missing, so that was noteworthy, and interesting to me right away.
And so I began to do a lot more reporting about the group, and I realised just how important this relationship was. I found a document at the JFK Library in Boston which showed that in April of 1963 the CIA was giving the Cuban Student Directorate $51,000 a month. So if you want to understand that in – how much that would be worth in 2013 dollars - you should multiply by about six, so that would be like about $150,000 a month: well, that's like about $1.5m dollars a year.
ALAN DALE: It's a lot!
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yeah, so it's a significant relationship.
ALAN DALE: Yeah, not a modest commitment on the part of the CIA.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Right! Now what was interesting not only about the Cuban Student Directorate and the JKF story and Joannides' role in it, was the Cuban Student Directorate had played an influential role in the immediate press coverage of the assassination. On the day – within hours of – Kennedy's assassination and the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald the leaders of the DRE went public with their story about their clashes with Oswald, that he was pro-Castro, that he had attempted to infiltrate their group, that they had debated the Cuba issue on the radio with him, they had a tape-recording of that issue, so the role of the DRE in the JFK story was both before and after the assassination: before the assassination they had contact with Oswald; repeated contact in New Orleans; after the assassination they used the information that was gathered there.
ALAN DALE: To incriminate him.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: To incrimin… - well, to identify him publicly as a supporter of Castro. That was noteworthy to me, and then there was one more thing in the documents disclosed in 1998 that was worth noting, which was that in Miami Joannides was not only the case officer for the DRE; he also had a staff position, and he was chief of what was called the Psychological Warfare Branch of the CIA station in Miami.
And psychological warfare is the art of getting across information that helps you prevail in the political conflict at hand. So as a psychological warfare specialist it was Joannides' job to influence US perceptions of the Castro government, and to kind of confuse and confound and harass them, so as to hasten its overthrow. So to me it was very striking that a group that was paid for by the CIA, and in contact with a psychological warfare operation officer, had this influential role in the media. That's what psychological warfare operations are all about; is influencing media perceptions. And here was this officer who had done just that with his Cuban allies.
So I felt like that was a very good and interesting story at that point. I brought it up with my colleagues at the Washington Post, who were intrigued by the story, but I never found anybody who was willing to say: "We should put this in the paper." And I was very frustrated by that: I felt like this was compelling new information; it was interesting that the CIA's role - the CIA's financial connection to Oswald's antagonists in the Cuban exile community - had never been made public before. But nobody in the paper was willing to go to bat for the story.
So that relates to your first question about the journalistic lack of interest, and we can go into that, but I think that media criticism is one thing: I want to stay focussed here on the real history in the investigation. Frustrating as that was to me I decided that I needed to kind of generate news myself, and I decided to do that by seeking more documents. I was interested in what happened to the monthly progress reports that Joannides generated.
And the JFK Review Board in November 1998 had only released a handful of documents; these fitness evaluations, and so I thought that there had to be other records out there. So in – I'd done a lot more reporting, and in July of 2003 I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, very broadly speaking for all records about Joannides in his entire CIA career. And when the CIA wrote back and said that they had no documents responsive to my request I was certain that that wasn't true, and that's when I decided to file a lawsuit. So I filed the lawsuit in December 2003, seeking the records of George Joannides throughout his CIA career, and that lawsuit has been going on for 10 years now.
ALAN DALE: I need to ask you; I'm not clear about the chronology: Did I hear you say that in 1998 you discovered that Joannides had been brought out of retirement to be the liaison to the HSCA?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes, I forgot to mention that. In the documents released in November 1998, both describe Joannides's role - his activities and his assignment - in 1963 at the time of the assassination, but they also included this other fact; that in 1978 he had reappeared in the JFK story, resurfaced, when he was named to be the CIA's principal liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which had reopened the JFK investigation 15 years after the crime.
ALAN DALE: So that's a bit of a bombshell, is it not?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: That was – all of the information that came out at that time was interesting, and that was the single most interesting thing. Not only had he played a role in 1963; he had played a role in 1978, and I called up Bob Blakey, who had been the General Counsel for the HSCA investigation and was now a professor at Notre Dame, and I said: "Bob (who I knew slightly), Bob, do you recall this fellow Joannides who was the CIA liaison in 1978?" And he said: "Yes, I do. We had a few meetings with him." I said: "Bob, did you know what he was doing in 1963?" And he said: "Oh, well, he wasn't doing anything in 1963 connected to the assassination, because we had an agreement with the CIA that they would not assign people who had operational responsibilities in 1963 to the investigation." And I said: "Well, Bob, think again, because this guy was up to his neck in the events of 1963, in his handling of the Cuban Student Directorate." And Blakey was shocked, and subsequently said that he had changed his opinion of the assassination, based on the fact that he had been deceived by the CIA.
ALAN DALE: And that Joannides could be charged with Contempt of Congress, or lying to Congress.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well that's what Blakey said, based on what I told him, he said: "He was a material witness. If I had known who he was I would have put him under oath; I would have taken a statement from him." And of course that wasn't possible now that Joannides was dead. So that piqued my interest in the story all the more, and I found other members of the – other investigators for the HSCA and asked them about Joannides, and they were shocked too: Dan Hardway was one; Ed Lopez was another; Gaeton Fonzi was a third; and Fonzi said: We were trying to figure out who was the contact officer for the DRE when we were doing our investigation in 1978, and in fact we had gone to Joannides and we'd asked him: "Could you get those records? Who ran that?" And Joannides, who was the answer to his question, came back and said: "I'll see what I can find".
ALAN DALE: Oh, man! It's astonishing isn't it? Isn't it just enough to make you just soak your head? It's just beyond belief; it's reminiscent really of John Whitten being succeeded by, of all people, James Angleton to be the liaison from the CIA to the Warren Commission. I mean there's a pattern there of this kind of improbable irony, you know?
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Certainly what it showed was that Joannides' actions in 1963 were so sensitive that he was willing to risk Obstruction of Congress – a felony: he was willing to risk breaking the law in order to keep the secret, so to me that suggested that what he was doing in 1963 was extraordinarily sensitive. And in the course of my litigation with the CIA over ten years I learned exactly that, because the CIA said over and over and over and over again that the material I was seeking was national security information that could not possibly be released without harming the current US national security of the United States.
So the CIA itself was vouching for the fact that Joannides' actions were extremely sensitive in 1963, and fifty years later most of those operations remain hidden from public view. So we don't know exactly what he was doing. But in the course of the litigation I obtained a lot of documents: first the CIA in December of 2004 provided a whole bunch of documents; their initial statement to me – their initial response to my FOIA request that they had no responsive documents was not true, and they admitted it was not true when they gave me a couple of hundred pages of information which came from Joannides' administrative file.
OK, there's two kinds of files in the CIA: there's an administrative file for Joannides which, like any administrative file, contained information about his health care benefits and his social security and FICA withholding and all that, and then there's operational files, about what he was doing in his day-to-day job. I didn't get anything from the operational files, but I got a lot from the administrative file. And the CIA said: Now we've complied with the law, please go away.
And the Federal Court judge in September of 2006 dismissed the case. The judge said there was not a scintilla of evidence that this had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination, which clearly wasn't true: I mean, Bob Blakey said that, and everybody who I talked to at the Post said: "Wow! This is an intriguing story." So my journalistic sense, verified by the statements of my sources, confirmed to me that there was a story here. So I appealed the CIA's decision and said: "No, you've not searched enough records; you've not explained why you can't find the monthly progress reports." - a whole variety of issues about CIA record-keeping that they really hadn't responded to.
And in December 2007 I won that case, unanimously, in the DC Court of Appeals, and a three-judge panel said the CIA had not yet complied with the law, and had to undertake a whole bunch more searches, which they did. And in August of 2008 I received another batch of information about Joannides, mostly from the administrative file. And in that batch of records there was yet another interesting – very interesting – disclosure. Actually there were two. And that was that in the spring of 1964 there were two travel records which showed that Joannides had gone to New Orleans – had gone to New Orleans in April and May of 1964. What was significant about that?
Well, that was the time when the staff of the Warren Commission went to New Orleans to investigate Oswald's contact with the anti-Castro exiles. In fact April 1st 1964 was the day that the Warren Commission wrote to Carlos Bringuier, the DRE's delegate in New Orleans and the man who had the most contact with Oswald in the summer of 1963, to tell him that they wanted to interview him for the Warren Commission and to learn more about his encounters with Oswald. That was the day; April 1st 1964; that Joannides went to New Orleans.
ALAN DALE: Probably just a coincidence!
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, there was no indication in the record about why he went. That would obviously be in the operational files, not in the administrative files, but he went there twice, in April and May of 1964, at the same time that the Warren Commission was there. So that was significant to me because it showed that Joannides' work did take him to New Orleans. One possible explanation of what had happened that I had to entertain was that Joannides in Miami simply did not know about the contacts between the DRE and Oswald in New Orleans: it happened in another city and he was never notified about it. I thought that that was unlikely for a variety of reasons: Joannides was a very diligent reporter and he kept very close track of everything the DRE did, but I had to consider it as a possibility. When I obtained the documents in August 2008 I had confirmation that no, his job duties took him to New Orleans and it was reasonable to conclude that he had known about the contacts between Oswald and the DRE that had taken place in New Orleans, so those records were certainly relevant.
The other thing that I obtained at that time was photographs that were taken at a medal ceremony held at CIA Headquarters in 1981, and the medal ceremony showed that Joannides had received what's called the Career Intelligence Medal: it's the second highest honor a CIA officer can receive, and that was the case; that Joannides had received this medal in July of 1981. That was two years after he had deceived the Congressional investigators about his actions in 1963. So not only had Joannides been financially related to the anti-Castro Cubans who encountered Oswald before the assassination and denounced him as a Castro supporter afterwards; not only had he deceived Congressional investigators who came to ask about that; but after all of that he had received a medal from the CIA.
ALAN DALE: For a job well done!
JEFFERSON MORLEY: So one could only conclude that one thing that he had done well was protected the Agency's interests, its sources and methods.
ALAN DALE: During a pesky Congressional investigation.
JEFFERSON MORLEY: Of the murder of a sitting president.
ALAN DALE: Right, right. Jeff, we need to take a brief intermission. I'm speaking with Jefferson Morley, author of 'Our Man in Mexico', and we'll take a brief intermission: we'll be right back.