Trump has ordered the release of a whole trove, over 80,000 pages, of formerly classified CIA and FBI documents purportedly dealing with the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963. The killing has been the source of endless conspiracy theories about who was responsible, throwing doubt on the official Warren Commission finding that it was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone.
David Price has done a quick sampling of the documents and estimates that less than 20% of them deal with the actual events leading up to that day and those who are expecting bombshell revelations are going to be disappointed. However, he says that there is a lot on interesting information that is revealed about how the CIA (and FBI) operates because Trump has released information that is usually redacted.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these documents is that they are mostly unredacted. This includes not bothering to protect information that might have legitimately been protected under the Privacy Act. Trump’s hasty order to release all these documents without removing things like CIA officers’ home addresses, SSN, birthdates, and other information reasonably understood to be protected by the Privacy Act perhaps made him some new enemies within the intelligence agencies he hopes to weaponize for his own uses.
Some of these documents that have made headlines include unredacted segments of the CIA Crown Jewels report, extensive CIA personnel files, and documents showing that during the Cold War, almost half of the political officers in US embassies abroad were CIA operatives. While the presence of CIA officers in US embassies has long been known, the size and scope of this admission is impressive.
…Since 1967, we have learned a lot about the CIA’s use of pass-throughs, backstops, and front organizations to run a variety of CIA operations during the Cold War.
The Asia Foundation, Research Institute of America (RIA), Union for Revolution are named as front organizations used by the CIA.
So what did he learn?
It is important to remember that the size of this collection makes it difficult to immediately understand what important details may emerge as people carefully sift through these pages. Nothing definitive about JFK’s assassination will likely emerge, but with the elimination of widespread redactions, other details unrelated to JFK will emerge, shedding new light on elements of American intelligence operations.
In 1975 the book Inside the Company: CIA Diary by Philip Agee, a former CIA agent, was released in which he revealed how the CIA operated using journalists, academics, students, and others to destabilize and subvert countries deemed to not be sufficiently supportive to US interests.
The London Evening News called Inside the Company: CIA Diary “a frightening picture of corruption, pressure, assassination and conspiracy”. The Economist called the book “inescapable reading”. Miles Copeland, Jr., a former CIA station chief in Cairo, said the book was “as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere” and it is “an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British ‘case officer’ operates … All of it … is presented with deadly accuracy.”
The book describes how U.S. embassies in Latin America worked with right-wing death squads, and funded anti-communist student and labour movement fronts, pro-U.S. political parties and individuals.
…Agee identified President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976) of Mexico and President Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–1978) of Colombia as CIA collaborators or agents.
The full text of the book is now available on the Internet Archive.
In Sri Lanka we had many Americans who came to work as teachers and on aid projects and at the US cultural center which served as a library and also occasionally showed films. I (like many others) assumed that many of them were working for the CIA, though we did not of course know which ones, and that they were using the contacts they obtained through these friendly channels as sources of information or to identify and recruit sympathetic locals as agents. Agee’s book confirmed our suspicions.
The fact you assumed at that time they were CIA agents is interesting to me. What did you know back then, which guided this assumption? We don’t get much of this perspective from inside the united snakes.
It was not a particularly clever conclusion. In the developing world, it was pretty much taken for granted that the US and British and French secret services were meddling in local affairs, as part of continuing the imperial project following independence of those countries. The murders of Patrice Lumumba and Che Guevara were fresh in our minds, as were the coups in so many countries (Iran, Chile) to overthrow any leaders who challenged western hegemony.
i’ve heard or read bits of these things as an adult, but never in school. safe bet that situation ain’t getting any better.
There’s a question I keep coming back to: Besides doxxing people (SSN and all) some of whom are still living, what exactly was the point of releasing this information?
You answered that in part of a quote; the malignant Oval Office Oompa-Loompa is trying to dismantle the USA’s nation’s security groups. As anyone working for Putin would.
Mano, any chance that some of the people who visited Sri Lanka were Peace Corps volunteers--or other charitable organizations’ volunteers?
Well, you have to remember that conspiracist ideation is a big part of the Republican brand now… What he’s done is basically hand those people a gigantic box of unsorted Lego to play with. They will undoubtedly come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful creations over the coming weeks and months, which should usefully distract a fairly sizeable chunk of the electorate from the ongoing destruction of the very concept of constitutional government.
I fear that Dunc @5 has it figured out correctly.
I read somewhere that all this information had already been released by Biden in 2023. Maybe Trump re-released it with less redaction and pretended it was all new?
Also, as Mano said, they weren’t covering up any actual conspiracy to kill JFK, they were covering up an entire history of corruption, incompetence, and undisciplined cowboy shit in the US “intelligence” “community.”
I am sure anyone who was a higher-up in the alphabet soup of USA “intelligence” “assets” would tell me that I am receiving skewed data that simultaneously highlights their failures and hides their successes, but I honestly don’t see much that the country has gained from our spook corps. They utterly failed to detect that the USSR was falling apart at the seams. They did collect some chatter that Osama Bin Laden was trying to attack the USA, but the details of 9/11 were utterly missed. They worked hard to stomp out nascent democracies all over the world, instead turning many of them into vicious autocracies that generated anti-American feelings for generations. It really seems to me that if Kennedy or Johnson had just shut down our spy agencies back then, the world, the USA, and ordinary Americans would all be better off now.
Katydid @#4,
We did have Peace Corp volunteers in Sri Lanka, though they were expelled at one time. Most, if not nearly all, of the PC people were undoubtedly idealistic young people wanting to do good. The problem is that it was well known that the CIA has no scruples whatsoever about trying to infiltrate such programs or insert some of their own people into these programs. For example, look at how the CIA used the polio vaccination campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan to get at Osama bin Laden, thus putting all the vaccination workers and the entire program at risk.
If they succeeded with the Peace Corp, and to what extent, is not known. But the suspicions were always there.
And now it looks like Russia has been and still is using the USA’s own destabilization tactics against it. (I’m assuming that Trump et al. are knowing or unknowing puppets of the Putin regime.)
Welcome to living in a 3rd world country. See what it’s like to live in one of the USA satraps.
In The Deadly Assassin, a Doctor Who story that first aired in the fall of 1976, the Doctor’s TARDIS was forced to return to Galifrey. It was noted that the TARDIS was a Type 40; but the Matrix didn’t have any record of such still in operation. It turned out that one Type 40 had been removed from the rolls by the Celestial Intervention Agency.
moarscienceplz, @ #8: What you’re neglecting is that in addition to anti-American feelings, many of those vicious autocracies also generated significant profits for American businesses. As Major General Smedley D. Butler said in his 1935 book “War Is a Racket“:
And it’s only got worse since.
…I honestly don’t see much that the country has gained from our spook corps.
Our CIA did offer a lot of good and timely information on a variety of issues. The problem is that our political leaders either ignored it or misused it. The CIA warned as early as 1967 that our war in Vietnam was unwinnable. They also had at least a few good tips about the USSR falling apart. And they did warn of al-Qaeda plans for attacks within the US. And all of that was ignored because it was not what our leaders wanted, or were prepared, to hear, or because (at least in Bush Jr’s case) they just didn’t give a shit and cared more about cutting taxes.
One thing I remember reading something at least 20 years ago was an article about how much of what people saw as the conspiracy around JFK’s assassination wasn’t really a conspiracy, it was self-organizing.
Specifically that, yes, lots of people in high political office attempted to delay parts of the investigation and cover things up; but that doesn’t mean that they were covering up their parts in some massive assassination conspiracy: they could have been just worried that their own specific corruption would get turned up by the investigation and were busy burying their own personal skeletons deeper into the closet. People didn’t have to be involved in the specific target of the investigation to be worried that the investigation would find something they didn’t want found.
Because, really, which is more likely: half of Washington was engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy and nobody messed up their operational security enough to let it all show up, or half of Washington was just engaged in bribery, personal backroom deals, and porkbarrel politics and didn’t want those details becoming public?
(I mean, these days half of Washington is engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy, and it’s not as if they’ve been able to keep much of any of it secret. Or have even been trying to do so.)
The above comment reminds me of a classic comment in the uk House of Commons, when Dennis Skinner famously stated that half the people on the opposite benches (i. e. the conservative part) were crooks. He was censured byvthe speaker and instructed to retract, to which immediately replied “I take it back… half of them are not crooks.”