The Joannides Scandal Unfolding Within the JFKA Community

[Gerry Down]

​Rob Clark and Joe Borelli did a show last Friday in which they questioned if the Joannides narrative that Jeff Morley has been giving us for the last few decades has now been proven wrong. Here is the podcast (the relevent section starts at 55 minutes):

The claim has been that Joannides was brought out of retirement by the CIA to twart the HSCA investigation. On the Friday show, Borelli presented a number of documents that show Joannides was in fact still working in 1978 and not due to retire until January 1979. And with the HSCA being set up in Sept 1976 and Joannides not coming on board until June 1978, his impact was allegedly minimal because the CIA were well in control of what they were giving to the HSCA by that point. The podcast states the documents appear to suggest Joannides was put onto the HSCA to give him an easy job after just having heart surgery and to tide him over until he was due to retire in Jan 1979, and that apparently the CIA wanted Joannides to retire after his heart surgery but Joannides was insisting he was good for a few more months.

I see things differently however, and I think the documents Joe Borelli presented on the show potentially raise even more suspicion on Joannides than before.

Joe Borelli posted the following memo from the “Reinvestigation Section”. I don’t know what the “Reinvestigation Section” is, but I think its not referring to the HSCA investigation but rather to a component inside the CIA which is reinvestigating the employment status of older employees to see if the agency can arrange for them to retire as a cost-saving measure for the CIA. But I could be completely wrong about that. Whatever the “Reinvestigation Section” is, the memo says that Joannides was so eager to work in early 1978 just after having heart surgery that he got caught working when he really should have been taking it easy after the heart surgery:



The following document shows that Joannides was trying to prevent the CIA sending him overseas because of his recent heart surgery:



So Joannides was on the one hand saying he was too sick to be sent abroad working for the CIA, but at the same time he was well enough that he was sneaking around CIA working when he wasn’t supposed to be.

The document says Joannides is trying to get his designation changed from “D” (which i think is the Directorate of Operations – ie the Clandestine service) to “E”. I don’t know what “E” is but I suspect (I have no proof but I suspect) that such a designation would facilitate him getting onto the HSCA investigation. The reason I suspect this is because this is ultimately what happened – he got onto the HSCA investigation where he proceeded to frustrate Lopez and Hardway.

So what am I getting at?

I suspect that Joannides was closely following the HSCAs investigation, but because he was in the Directorate of Operations, he was not in a position at any point during the HSCA to actually get on the CIA liason team to the HSCA (perhaps because that would be a role within the Directorate of Administration). He was possibly even secretly helping the CIA liason team (Scott Breckinridge) in an unofficial capacity. After his heart surgery in 1978, he is caught working at the CIA when he wasn’t supposed to be. This fits with a suspicion that he might have been doing something unorthodox - ie helping the CIA liason team in an unofficial capacity. Joannides then used his heart surgery as an excuse to get taken out of the high octane Directorate of Operations and into a more sedentary role, perhaps within the Directorate of Administration, that would then enable him to apply to get on the CIA liason team to the HSCA. What might have happened is that someone within the CIA liason team to the HSCA investigation (quiet possibly Scott Breckinridge) coached Joannides into what to tell his superiors at the CIA that would help him get moved out of the “D” designation onto the “E” designation, which would be necessary to get onto the CIAs reinvestigation team at the HSCA.

I know there is a lot of speculation here of course, but i said i'd present it here to get peoples opinions on it.

P.S. At 1 hour 13 minutes in on the video, a document is produced stating that in 1976 one of Joannides job roles in the East Asia Division was handing FOI requests and Congressional inquiries (presumably in relation to Vietnam which would be the biggest story coming out of this division in the years after the Vietnam war ended). This experience therefore may have been a genuine reason why he was brought in the HSCA. 
​

[Benjamin Cole]

GD-

Certainly your speculation is plausible. That is the exasperating reality of so much in the JFKA research world...one can connect the dots (like stars in the sky and constellations) to make a donkey or an elephant.

My take is Jeff Morley has over-hyped the recent records releases and the Joannides angle, although perhaps if Joannides' unscrubbed operational files are ever released, I will stand corrected. 

(I always support records releases of any public file more than 30 years old, except for extremely rare circumstances involving bona fide national security or threats to lives.)

The CIA was monitoring LHO? So what---should not they have been? After all, LHO defected to Russia, and then visited Valerie Kostikov in MC. Should the CIA have been clairvoyant and arrested LHO pre-11/22? Maybe.

(CIA'er Angleton did not and could not have ordered LHO off of FBI watchlists---that is a a canard smear promoted by a dufus named Max Blumenthal, and voiced again by Morley).

As it is, we have JFKA experts who say LHO was a CIA asset, and those who say he was only an earnest Marxist (Larry Hancock and David Boylan). In other words, you can believe what ever you want to believe.

It may be that JFKA research community, with its roots in the left-wing 1960s, and reflexively anti-US, has not followed up JFKA-CT leads outside the CIA enough, such as US Army intel, or the KGB or G-2.

In JFKA-land, the ideology determines the agenda, and the agenda writes the narrative.

And Morley is very, very left-wing, with an agenda a mile wide.

I always get a kick out of this:

 “A May 15, 1973, memo in the files of researcher Richard Popkin recounts a conversation with former CIA official Victor Marchetti in which Marchetti reportedly offered "a theory he claimed to have heard that fits with his own picture of the chaos in the CIA; namely that the KGB has infiltrated the CIA and the CIA has infiltrated the KGB so it is impossible at the present stage to tell who is who (he mentioned a case of having been sent to meet somebody and being shown all sorts of identification and then being totally unable to tell whether he was dealing with a U.S. or Russian agent). Marchetti thinks it is the KGB branch of the CIA that killed Kennedy and that the U.S. CIA is too embarrassed to investigate and reveal the real state of affairs."      

---30---

So...IMHO caveat emptor, and draw your own conclusions.

[Tom Graves]

As it is, we have JFKA experts who say LHO was a CIA asset, and those who say he was only an earnest Marxist (Larry Hancock and David Boylan).

And we have those who, like me, say Oswald was a (probably unwitting) asset of the KGB-controlled CIA and used in a 1959 op that lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart, and drove James JESUS Angleton nuts.


As I always say, "Fauces mea cochleari nefanda KGB opprimite."

[Benjamin Cole]

Quote from: Benjamin Cole on Today at 02:41:58 AM
As it is, we have JFKA experts who say LHO was a CIA asset, and those who say he was only an earnest Marxist (Larry Hancock and David Boylan).

And we have those who, like me, say Oswald was a (probably unwitting) asset of the KGB-controlled CIA and used in a 1959 op that lasted nine years, tore the Soviet Russia Division apart, and drove James JESUS Angleton nuts.


As I always say, "Fauces mea cochleari nefanda KGB opprimite."---TG

You may be right. Marchetti suspected as much.

Marchetti was smart in a senior position, embedded in the CIA....but not on the SRD or counter-intel staffs.

I wonder if LHO was coopted by G-2'ers...

[Michael T. Griffith]

Gerry, this is a useful, informative post.

Yes, Joannides smelled to high heaven.

HSCA staffers Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway have described how Joannides frequently stonewalled and obstructed them. Hardway discusses this in his written statement to the Luna subcommittee:

https://share.google/0ZXJkXzefkwzXMvnD

Some other sources on this:

"The HSCA and the CIA," by Dan Hardway (2013)
https://share.google/bwc7EMJKeyTf0vsjK

Lopez and Hardway at the 2014 AARC Conference
https://aarclibrary.org/aarc-conference-2014-the-hsca-and-the-cia-the-view-from-the-trenches-and-the-view-from-the-top/

[Tommy Shanks]

Gerry, this is a useful, informative post.

Yes, Joannides smelled to high heaven.

HSCA staffers Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway have described how Joannides frequently stonewalled and obstructed them. Hardway discusses this in his written statement to the Luna subcommittee:

As usual, you miss the point. Nobody is debating what Lopez and Hardway have relayed about their experiences working with Joannides. The point is that Jefferson Morley has completely misrepresented the circumstances of Joannides' placement on the HSCA liason team. He was not "brought out of retirement" -- a description that has always made it seem far more nefarious than it actually was. It's a pleasure to see even conspiracy-minded JFK researchers like the Lone Gunman podcast hosts call out misinformation when they see it.