Here is Jeff Morley's reply:
Fact Check on the Joannides File
SpyTalk formula for covering the JFK files: Deny the obvious, ignore the eyewitnesses, and impugn the witnesses
Jefferson Morley
Jul 18
The release of the personnel file of undercover CIA officer George Joannides, as covered by the Washington Post, has shifted the burden of proof in the discussion of JFK’s assassination from the critics of the official story to defenders of the official theory of a “lone gunman.”
Those of us who have exposed the CIA’s cover story that George Joannides did not exist in 1963 are no longer obliged to concoct conspiracy theories to explain the Agency’s false statements about Lee Harvey Oswald. Those false statements are now a matter of record. It’s up to the defenders of the CIA and the official story of a “lone gunman” to explain the malfeasance that has been revealed.
“Nonsense,” snort Mike Isikoff and Gus Russo of SpyTalk. To sustain their argument that the Joannides file is merely a “sleight of hand,” they resort to all-too familiar tactics.
Deny the Obvious
When the new evidence contradicts their claims, Isikoff and Russo proclaim that the evidence doesn’t exist.
“There is no evidence of an actual CIA “connection” to Oswald, much less an “operation,” to direct or manipulate him before he alone indisputably shot the president from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22.”
In fact, the Joannides file and other CIA records provide abundant evidence of the CIA’s connection to Oswald. Under the code name AMSPELL, the Cuban Student Directorate was funded by the CIA in 1963 to the tune of $51,000 a month. Here’s an excerpt from a document found in the JFK Library.
Joannides handled the AMSPELL portfolio from December 1962 to May 1964. Here’s a performance evaluation praising his handling of the Cuban students in that period.
In August 1963, the AMSPELL members in New Orleans generated propaganda about Oswald, the local leader of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Here’s a tape of Oswald’s radio appearance that DRE leader Luis Fernandez Rocha sent to “Howard,” a.k.a. Joannides.
As former DRE spokesman Jose Antonio Lanuza recently recounted to the Washington Post, the AMSPELL leaders spoke with Joannides on the night of November 22, 1963. The CIA man told them to go to the press and the FBI. The DRE proceeded to generate the first conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination: that Oswald and Castro were “the presumed assassins.”
Isikoff and Russo insist that Oswald was not directed or manipulated into this role by Joannides, which may well be true. Joannides’ undercover work included having a residence in New Orleans in 1963, but I have never said (and the Washington Post did not say) that he had direct contact with Oswald.
The first JFK conspiracy theory was published with CIA funds two days after JFK’s death in a special issue of the DRE’s newspaper.
In sum, we don’t know if Joannides had personal contact with Oswald but we do have abundant evidence of an operation that was funded by the CIA; that it generated intelligence, political action, and propaganda about Oswald before JFK was killed; that it generated propaganda after JFK was killed; that it was code named AMSPELL; and that it was run by Joannides, whose existence was denied for decades.
In response, Isikoff and Russo say there is “no evidence” of this “non-existent operation.”
Readers, fact checkers, and podcasters should click the links above and decide for themselves.
Ignore Eyewitness Testimony
The Joannides file shows, among other things, that Joannides won a CIA medal in part for his stonewalling of congressional investigators in 1978. He was saluted for his handling of an “unusual special assignment.”
But Joannides didn’t deceive the committee, claims SpyTalk source Fred Litwin. The self-published author claims it is “not clear” if the HSCA investigators ever asked Joannides about his connection to the DRE back in 1978.
In fact, HSCA staffers Bob Blakey and Dan Hardway have both said repeatedly — Hardway most recently under oath — that Joannides deceived them.
As Hardway told the House Task Force on Declassification in May
“When Joannides was introduced to the investigation, we were told that he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy investigation that was the subject of our investigation. In addition to that, the CIA assured us they had no working relationship with the DRE, an anti-Castro student group, when representatives of that group had an encounter in New Orleans with Oswald which they turned into quite a propaganda coup [after JFK’s assassination].”
A long time ago Blakey told PBS Frontline:
I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
Litwin cannot discredit the fact that Hardway and Blakey were deceived, so he seeks to impugn them.
Isikoff and Russo go on to assert that Oswald “alone indisputably shot the president from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22.”
“Indisputably” means without question. What about Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the doctors who sought to save JFK’s life? He saw the president’s head wound from about 18 inches away. In a 2013 interview with a fellow doctor, Dr. McClelland recounted his experience of that terrible day and gave his unequivocal professional conclusion: “that bullet came from the grassy knoll.”
In his May 20 testimony to the House Task Force, Dr. Don Curtis, a medical resident who was part of the team who tried to save JFK’s life, said Kennedy was killed by a shot from the front. (It’s worth noting here that JFK’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, also repeatedly declined to endorse the official finding that Oswald killed the president.)
In point of fact, Isikoff and Russo are mistaken. It is disputable that Oswald killed JFK with a shot from behind. It is disputed by multiple professional trained eyewitnesses who (unlike the SpyTalk scribes) actually saw the president’s wounds.
When Your Argument Fails, Go Ad Hominem
How does one fact-check the preening attitude, the sneering tone, the casual smears (conspiracy entrepreneur) that Isikoff and Russo display throughout their piece? They don’t mention my four non-fiction books, three of them about the CIA, because then the smear doesn’t really work, does it? It sounds more like envy, which I suppose it is.
Worse yet, they impugn Jose Antonio Lanuza, the former leader of the DRE, who told the Post the remarkable story of talking to “Howard,” a.k.a. Joannides, about Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of JFK’s murder.
Lanuza’s story is worth pondering. On the evening of November 22, when Air Force One was still in the air coming back from Dallas with JFK’s body, the chief of CIA covert operations in Miami was talking to his agents about the man who had just been arrested for killing the president of the United States — and the existence of that CIA man would be denied for decades. The implications of Lanuza’s well-corroborated story terrify defenders of the “lone gunman” theory, and it shows in SpyTalk’s screed.
Isikoff and Russo sneer that Lanuza is “in his dotage.” Note that neither of these two men who call themselves professional journalists bothered to call Lanuza to actually find out if he is “in his dotage.” If Isikoff and Russo had acted professionally, they would have called and learned that Lanuza is a smart, funny, 83-year-old retired schoolteacher who is certainly compos mentis.
Their lazy, baseless smear betrays their desperation. They hope to get rid of his remarkable story about Joannides by insulting him and then not giving him a chance to respond. They have failed as journalists, and they have failed to get rid of Lanuza’s story of November 22. To the contrary, they have only called attention to its importance.
