JFK Files - five decades later
Researchers are most interested in the file on George Joannides, a CIA agent who may have had a connection to Lee Harvey Oswald and acted as a liaison on a later assassination investigation
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, researchers are still investigating his mysterious murder.
Thousands of pages pertaining to the assassination are still sealed, and researchers are calling for a complete public release.
Jefferson Morley, former Washington Post Reporter currently suing the CIA to release the data, is most interested in a file containing about 300 pages on the now-deceased CIA agent George Joannides.
Joannides, Morley believes, may have had contact with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the shooting and later served as Langley's liaison for a JFK assassination investigation in the 1970s
The first official investigation found that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone, after failing to get a visa to Cuba and his wife Marina rejected his attempts at reconciliation.
Another investigation in the mid-1970s said that the assassination was probably a conspiracy, after discovering audio files suggesting a second shooter.
These contradicting opinions have led many to come up with conspiracy theories behind the president's death replacing the initial conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
Morley doesn't believe that the documents will reveal any big conspiracy, but it may prove that the CIA did know of Oswald before the shooting.
That would contradict the first investigation's findings that Kennedy's assassination was carried out by a lone-ranger, a completely random act that couldn't have been prevented.
Morley believes that Oswald may have been in contact with Joannides due to his noted involvement in an pro-Castro organization.
Oswald's membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was confirmed when he was captured by a local television station in an altercation with anti-Castro demonstrators.
But investigators later found that Oswald had pamphlets in his possession with an address of a local anti-Castro operation connected to a former FBI agent.
Researchers believe those pamphlets mean that Oswald was working with counterintelligence to discredit his pro-Castro group.
If that's the case he would have been in contact with George Joannides the CIA case officer for the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate - the same group Oswald got in a brawl with.
If Oswald was in contact with Joannides, it means that the CIA concealed the fact that Oswald was on their radar. But Joannides connection to the assassination doesn't end there.
A second investigation into the assassination convened in the mid-1970s and this time weighing audio evidence of a possible second shooter.
In the end the committee reported that the president was 'probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.'
The committee sifted through thousands of CIA records, and their liaison to Langley at the time was none other than George Joannides,
G Robert 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.
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.'
Assuming that Oswald fired the fatal shot, he said, 'These top CIA case officers are guilty of negligence.'
Blakey isn't optimistic about getting all of the documents from the intelligence agency, citing the agencies lack of cooperation with three previous investigations.
'That's three agencies that they were supposed to be fully candid with,' he said. '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?'
According to the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all documents pertaining to the assassination must be released by 2017.
The act does offer a little wiggle room to agencies who can petition records withheld if disclosure would compromise 'military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations'.
Most Americans believe Oswald conspired with others to kill JFK. In November of 1963 some 52% of Americans thought others were involved in the assassination. The percentage was 50% in 1966, 81% in 1976, 74% in 1983, 77% in 1992, 75% in 2001 and 75% in 2003. A 2004 Fox News poll found that 66% of Americans thought there had been a conspiracy while 74% thought there had been a cover-up in the case.
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