On his Substack blog, journalist turned conspiracy advocate Jefferson Morley claims that you should subscribe to his site "To support the authoritative journalism that seeks to clarify the causes of JFK's assassination and to abolish the official secrecy that still surrounds it." Unfortunately rather than "clarifying" anything Morley is continuing to spread misinformation. For example, at the December 6th Mary Ferrell Foundation Press Conference, Morley said this:
David Atlee Phillips was the case officer who helped create and fund the DRE-AMSPELL operation and there is [a] credible uncorroborated uh report that Phillips was seen in Oswald's company in Dallas in 1963 ... What exact role [Phillips] played we don't know because we don't have the documents.
But as I showed HERE, Phillips was never a DRE "case officer." This Morley claim is evidently based on the book Flawed Patriot by Bayard Stockton. While Stockton did indeed claim that Phillips was the group's first case officer, he offered no citation. And my study of the DRE's founding showed no evidence that Phillips "created" or "funded" the group only that he may have recommended them to the CIA hierarchy.
Waiting to meet the DRE founders when they got off the boat in Miami was not Phillips but Ross Crozier (the real first case officer) and William Kent.
As for the "credible uncorroborated"(?) report, that is a reference to the ramblings of Antonio Veciana which I wrote an entire book about. The last paragraph of that tome reads:
Probably the most consequential conclusion in this book is one that was first provided by [Gaeton] Fonzi himself in his HSCA writeup. He wrote, “No corroboration was found for Veciana's alleged meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald.” Absent such confirmation, the Veciana story goes nowhere.
Seated beside Morley at the MFF presser was Fernand Amandi, a political analyst who thinks Veciana was “one of history’s most important individuals.” So, perhaps the recent misinformation campaign by Morley should not be a surprise.
Another claim from the presser that Morley repeated on the Glen Beck Show, is that the FBI's COINTELPRO was a "joint CIA-FBI program." But the Church Committee, which studied intelligence abuses, said it was "an FBI program." Morley seems intent on spreading this bit of misinformation to promote his theory that the CIA (through the DRE) and the FBI worked to create a "legend" that Oswald was a Castro supporter. Apparently Oswald's wife Marina and Marine Corps pal Nelson Delgado also worked to create this "legend" since they confirmed Oswald's pro-Castro proclivities.
During a dramatic audio-visual presentation, Morley showed the same phony 544 Camp Street handbill that was used in the Oliver Stone film Destiny Betrayed. Fred Litwin explained this issue in a recent blog article.
One piece of misinformation from the presser came not from Morley but from his friend Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA employee. Mowatt-Larssen said "I don't see how you can make it [the case for withholding documents] when our own government has established that there probably was a rogue conspiracy to kill the President." Morley greeted this remark with laughter.
But as Morley knows and Mowatt-Larssen should know, the government-endorsed "conspiracy to kill the President" was based on the HSCA acoustics issue. But that claim has been thoroughly debunked for years. Interested readers may consult Nick Nalli's review of Josiah Thompson's Last Second in Dallas for an excellent and reasonably concise summary of the matter. Those looking to dig deeper may see Louis T. Girdler's review of Thompson.
Of course, the biggest whopper from the press conference was Morley's claim that 44 documents from the file of George Joannides withheld by the CIA "include information about a CIA operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald that has never been disclosed." Since Morley has not seen the documents how can he know what they say?
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