Jefferson Morley's Unbearable Lightness of Being

[W. Tracy Parnell]

Jon Banks,

I spent a week working on the Blakey article. The least you can do is read it and the ones Litwin has. Most of your questions/assertions would be answered.

[Jon Banks]

Jon Banks,

I spent a week working on the Blakey article. The least you can do is read it and the ones Litwin has. Most of your questions/assertions would be answered.

No thanks. I don't need you to explain what Blakey meant when I can read/hear what he has said about Joannides on my own.

Here's Blakey's take again:

Blakey, the committee's chief counsel, recalled how the CIA brought in Joannides to act as a middleman to help fill requests for documents made by committee researchers. "He was put in a position to edit everything we were given before it was given to us," Blakey said.

But Blakey didn't learn about Joannides' past until Morley unearthed it in files declassified years later.

"If I'd known Joannides was the case officer for the DRE, he couldn't have been liaison; he would have been a witness," Blakey told The Associated Press.

Blakey added: "Do I think I was snookered, precisely like the Warren Commission was? Yes."

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Blakey isn't optimistic about getting all of the documents from the intelligence agency.

"They held stuff back from the Warren Commission, they held stuff back from us, they held stuff back from the ARRB," he said. "That's three agencies that they were supposed to be fully candid with. And now they're taking the position that some of these documents can't be released even today.

"Why are they continuing to fight tooth and nail to avoid doing something they'd promised to do?"

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/5-decades-later-some-jfk-probe-files-still-sealed/1922978/



And in Jefferson Morley's defense, to my knowledge, he has never promoted the Joannides story as anything more than further proof (on top of the Angleton stuff) that the CIA hid the extent of their pre-November 1963 knowledge of Oswald. Which is widely accepted today even among LN researchers:

2013 -

Morley does not suggest the Joannides files point to agency involvement in the assassination itself, but more likely that their release would show the CIA trying to keep secret its own flawed performance before the assassination.

"The idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was some unknown quantity to CIA officers was false," Morley said. "There was this incredible high-level attention to Oswald on the eve of the assassination."

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/5-decades-later-some-jfk-probe-files-still-sealed/1922978/

2022 -

Morley has also advanced a version of this theory, but he told reporters last week that he believes Joannides may have used Oswald to undermine the work of Fair Play for Cuba. But whatever the nature of the CIA’s “operational interest in Oswald,” Morley said Thursday, “we don’t know. That’s why we need the documents.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article270075417.html#storylink=cpy

2025 -

Morley and some others who've written extensively about Kennedy's assassination believe rogue CIA agents might have been involved in the killing, but Morley's not ready to say Joannides was one of them.

Link - https://www.axios.com/2025/07/05/cia-agent-oswald-kennedy-assassination

Without directing me to your blog again, what specifically do you object to about Morley's take on Joannides?