Fact Checking the Morley Press Conference

JFK conspiracy researcher and author Jefferson Morley held a press confernce via Zoom on October 7, 2024 to promote his latest JFK "revelation" about an anonymous source who claims to have seen a secret JFK file archive. Morley has made a video of the press conference available to paid subscribers only. Morley stated he was hosting fifteen journalists but only seven bothered to ask questions. One of the inquisitors was likely Fernand Armandi who introduced Antonio Veciana at a 2014 conference of the Assassination Archives and Research Center.

Morley used the beginning of the Zoom call to lanch into a seventeen-minute disertation on his theories. But was the information that he relayed to the assembled journalists really just propoganda? Morley's assertions to the group are in blue followed by my rebuttal.

And I went to [Jane Roman] with John Newman, a historian and army intelligence officer, and we interviewed her. And we showed her the newly declassified records from the Oswald, from the CIA's file on Oswald. And she said some remarkable things. She said that these documents showed, indicated a keen interest in Oswald before the assassination in her office at the highest levels of the CIA. And that that interest had been held on a need to know basis in her judgment, looking at the records. That, I thought, was a very important revelation…

Roman's remarks made after she was shown a series of documents by Newman and Morley out of context. Roman later said "My statements have been seriously contorted, taken out of context or, at best, misinterpreted." She told the Assassination Records Review Board that Morley's article about her was "sensationalistic, scurrilous" and "tendentious."

Read the complete story HERE

...the CIA had basically told the Warren Commission that they knew very little about Oswald before the assassination, that they didn't have an interest in him.

Morley is very fond of repeating this factoid usually mixing in the notion that CIA boss Richard Helms stated the agency's knowledge of the assassin was "minimal." But researcher Paul Hoch points out that Morley is mischaracterizing a discussion between between Helms, Allen Dulles and John McCone and taking Helms' remarks "badly out of context." In a discussion on a private email group, Hoch noted "The discussion was clearly about information provided to the CIA by the State Department relating to Oswald’s defection and time in Russia, It was not about what the CIA had at the time of the assassination."

Click HERE for a full discussion of the matter.

When asked direct questions about who was running the DRE in 1963, Joanides said he didn't know, when in fact, he was the answer to the question.

Morley is correct to the extent that Joannides was the DRE case officer in 1963. But where is Morley's documentation proving that Joannides was specifically asked by the HSCA who the DRE case officer was? To my knowledge, all Morley has are the assertions of HSCA staffers whose conspiracy orientation is well known.

Turned out Joannides had a residence in New Orleans where Oswald lived in 1963. He'd gotten a medal for his work, a career intelligence medal.

Yes, Joannides had a home in New Orleans as did millions of other people. And the medal was for his cumulative CIA work. It was not, as Morley has falsely claimed on several occasions, for "stonewalling" the HSCA.

Congress mounted in 1976, an investigation which came to the conclusion that Kennedy had been caught in crossfire and was thus the victim of a conspiracy.

Morley is being deceptive at best. What the HSCA concluded was that "Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third shots struck the President. The third shot he fired killed the President." Morley's "crossfire" comes from the long debunked acoustics evidence which was the sole justification for their finding of "probable" conspiracy. The committee only said there was a "probable" conspiracy since they could find no other conclusive evidence of a plot and the grassy knoll gunman could have been just another lone nut.

Win Scott wrote a memoir and said, we definitely took pictures of Oswald in Mexico City.

Morley is refering to a document by Scott titled "Foul Foe" with a byline of Ian Maxwell. Scott's exact purpose in writing this document is unknown but given the fact that he used an alias anything that Scott says in it should not neccessarily be taken to be gospel truth. Especially the assertion that the CIA had photos of Oswald which they have always denied and which have never surfaced even though their existence would help the agency which has maintained Oswald was in Mexico.

I asked the CIA for comment And they basically don't dispute any of the facts in this story.

The CIA has a long history with Morley, who has sued them for records, and they mostly ignore him. The fact that they don't respond to any specific request proves nothing.

So that's the import of the story, but along with the Oswald surveillance photos and George Joannides' personnel file, all of this remains off the record.

The Joannides personnel file is not part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection and the CIA is under no obligation to release it. If the agency released a record every time they were sued by an individual like Morley there would soon be no secrets at the CIA. But in this instance, there is more to the story. Michelle Combs, an ARRB researcher who Morley respects, stated after viewing the Joannides files "The descriptions of his duties and accomplishments in the personnel file are very general and contain no specific reference to his relationship with the DRE. There is no mention of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the file and no information relevant to the assassination in the file (emphasis added)." Combs' evaluation is why the Joannides file was not declared an assassination record.

...the intelligence methods that Joannides was using at the time of his agents were in contact with Oswald...

Joannides' "agents," who were DRE members based out of Miami, were never "in contact" with Oswald. First, It is important to make a distinction between the Miami-based DRE and the New Orleans DRE delegation. The Miami DRE members were the ones on the CIA payroll, the ones who had CIA cryptonyms and the ones who interacted with CIA officials up to and including Richard Helms. And the Miami DRE members were the individuals that were managed by case officer George Joannides. None of these Miami DRE members had any connection whatsoever to Lee Harvey Oswald. It was the New Orleans DRE delegation (Carlos Bringuier and Celso Hernandez) that had the contact with Oswald. Note that the contact between Oswald and DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier was initiated by Oswald not the other way around.

My Timeline of the Early Life of LHO Now Available

Ancestry and Early Life 1880-1943 is now available. This timeline expands on one that I did many years ago for an old website called the Lee Harvey Oswald Page, which ran from about 1998 to 2004 and is still online although it is no longer updated. The purpose of that timeline was to give students and newcomers a very general overview of LHO's life.

The goals of this timeline are threefold. First, I want to provide a chronological look at an important part of the life of LHO that can be used as a tool for researchers. Secondly, by using quotes and correspondence from the principal figures in his life as well as documents created by the Warren Commission and other investigations, I hope to present a narrative that may be appreciated by anyone interested in twentieth century history. Finally, I hope that the logical progression of the chronology format will help to convince readers that LHO was exactly who he appeared to be and that he killed JFK acting alone as my own research since 1984 has convinced me is the case. Having said this, I believe this will be an extremely useful tool for anyone interested in researching LHO's life, even those who desire to debunk the official version of events.

I have more sections of the timeline completed but they need to be coded in HTML which is time consuming. I'll see how much interest there is before doing any more.

A Heritage of Nonsense by Fred Litwin Now Available

Fred Litwin, one of the top JFK researchers and authors around, has written his fourth book. It's called A Heritage of Nonsense. Fred does something not all JFK authors do. He goes out and visits document archives of all types and obtains primary material. Please check out this fine book which features debunkings of nine Garrison myths including Rose Cherami and Richard Case Nagell. The Kindle version is a steal at $4.99.

Morley-Revelation or Nothingburger?

Introduction

On October 4, 2024, conspiracy author Jefferson Morley began promoting a forthcoming article that he called the “most important JFK story I’ve ever done.” On "X" Morley claimed:

I've been reporting on the JFK assassination story for three decades now. Next week, I'll be publishing a revelatory story that penetrates and disrupts the government's 60-year-old account of the assassination. The story adds more detail to what I reported in my Dec 2022 “smoking gun" revelation at the National Press Club: the existence of a top-secret CIA psychological warfare operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald from Jan to Nov 1963 that the CIA still conceals via overclassification.

Of course, Morley’s much ballyhooed 2022 presser turned out to be not a “smoking gun” at all but rather simply more suspicions on his part about an alleged “Oswald operation” conducted by the CIA. At that press conference, Morley displayed a document that some media outlets attached an unwarranted significance to. All of this is explained in my report on the matter.

Despite this history of overstatement, the conspiracy community was abuzz with the news. Even the skeptical (like myself) wondered what Morley might have now. I postulated on one forum that it might be related to Jose Lanuza a DRE member who made the news with comments sympathetic to Morley’s position right about the time of the 2022 presser. An email correspondent speculated that Morley might have discovered the identity of the Cuban man who appeared in a film handing out leaflets with Oswald in New Orleans.

Morley's Revelation

But we were wrong. Morley’s “revelation” concerns the allegations of an unnamed (and apparently still current) government employee Morley calls a “whistleblower.” Morley’s source (hereafter referred to as the source) makes two claims. First, the source says that while at a “CIA declassification facility” in Herndon, Virginia (located at 399 Grove Street according to researcher Joe Backes who is also skeptical of Morley's article) in a special room dedicated for JFK assassination records, they saw a “gray plastic video case” that was marked with the words “Oswald in Mexico, or Oswald in Mexico City.” The video case was allegedly dated September 1963. “The detail is significant,” Morley writes. “If the CIA possesses film or video that depicts JFK’s accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, it would rewrite the JFK assassination story.”

But who ever said that the CIA had a film of Oswald? What has been alleged by Morley and others is that the CIA photographed Oswald when he visited the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities in the Mexican capital. According to this theory, the CIA is covering up the existence of these photos (or has destroyed them) for nefarious purposes even though they would confirm that Oswald was in Mexico which has always been the position of the Warren Commission and the government in general.

Greta Goyenechea

Later in the piece to bolster his source’s story, Morley mentions the case of Greta Goyenechea, a CIA employee who was chief of LIEMPTY-14, a base charged with surveilling the Soviet Embassy. Morley recently told The Hill’s weekday morning show Rising:

[Andre Goyenechea said his mother Greta told him] I took Oswalds picture coming and going and she remembered the face very clearly she… she attached no significance to it but Andre said you know we knew very well who was an American who was a Russian just by we've been doing it for years we knew all the people who worked in that Embassy so after the assassination when Greta Goyenechea saw Oswald she told her son yeah I took his picture coming and going.

So Greta Goyenechea “attached no significance” to the alleged photo of Oswald yet she immediately recalled photographing him after the assassination? Perhaps she experienced what dozens and dozens of witnesses who spoke to investigators following the assassination did. Those individuals reported seeing Oswald before the assassination but attached no importance to the encounter until after the murder. But it was proven that these persons could not have seen the real Oswald. Granted, Greta was in a position to have seen or photographed Oswald. But that doesn't prove she did.

Other possabilities are that Andre may have simply misremembered or misinterpreted what his now deceased mother told him. Another explanation is that Greta was embarrassed by the lack of photographic production by her base so she told her son a “white lie.” Or perhaps her employees falsely told her they had obtained the photos to cover their own ineptitude. My point is that such common-sense explanations are not considered by Morley. Instead, he refers to the non-existent “CIA surveillance photos of Oswald taken by Greta Goyenechea” as if their presence is now confirmed by his anonyomus source.

A Damning Document?

The second allegation (and obviously most important from Morley’s perspective) from the source is their discovery of a document (in a different facility) supposedly created by the CIA Inspector General’s office in the late seventies. The purpose of this forty-to-fifty-page document was to determine “whether the HSCA [House Select Committee on Assassinations] probe had compromised secret CIA operations.” The source was disturbed by the document because they felt it showed “an attempt to deceive.” According to Morley such a document does not exist in either the material released under the JFK Records Act or the material yet to be fully made public. All of this goes hand in hand with Morley’s favorite topic of a CIA cover-up in the JFK matter.

The problems with the account of the source are numerous. The first is the ostensible purpose of the document. Initially, Morley says that the purpose of the document was to determine “whether the HSCA probe had compromised secret CIA operations.” Fair enough. Such a document would make sense because numerous individuals had access to classified material during the HSCA investigation. But later, the document morphs into a “blueprint for how to hide things from the public and how to prevent investigative committees, appointed by Congress, from seeing documents that might incriminate offices of the government,” which is a less reasonable scenario in my view.

But the source wasn’t finished. “They conducted an investigation to see if they had succeeded in misleading the American public about Kennedy’s assassination and they concluded the lie had worked,” the source maintained. Again, how likely is it that the CIA would document their malfeasance in the JFK case in such a manner? After all, anything put in writing and preserved could turn up someday. And how likely is it that such an incriminating document would be placed in a records facility where any government employee could “inadvertently” discover it which is how the source characterized their finding of the report saying they weren’t even looking for JFK records. Similarly, how likely is it that this explosive document, which essentially incriminates the CIA in a JFK cover-up, could be taken by the source to an "offsite facility" as the article maintains?

An "Intellectually Uncurious" Blakey?

The source said the report mentioned the CIA’s handling of HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey who was demanding “a cache of documents about Mexico.” The CIA skirted the matter by supplying Blakey with a three-volume set of documents regarding Mexico City operations which was sanitized to suit the agency. When Blakey asked for no further documents, the CIA tricksters were relieved with one calling Blakey “the most intellectually uncurious human being I have ever associated with.” All of this in a report whose purpose was ostensibly to determine if agency secrets had been compromised.

Morley provides a memo “declassified in 2005,” as collaboration for his source. But Joe Backes points out the memo has been around since 1998 when many documents were made public. Rather than being any type of proof, the memo simply shows that the information regarding Blakey’s meeting with the CIA to view Mexico City records has been in the public domain for many years.

Additionally, there is the assessment of Morley's handling of the Blakey matter by historian and JFK expert Robert Reynolds who outlined the following issues during an email exchange. In his piece, Morley writes:

[At an August 1978 meeting between Blakey and the CIA’s deputy IG, Scott Breckinridge] Blakey was given a three-volume history of the CIA’s Mexico City station. The memo says Blakey “did not at any time raise any questions” about its contents.

But Reynolds points out that the memo actually says, "Mr. Blakey thanked me [Breckinridge], but did not at any time raise any questions about deletions." Reynolds notes that "Morley alters the context of Breckinridge's comment completely, even changing the word 'deletions' to 'contents'. He does this by using an end quote just before the word 'deletions'."

Regarding the "intellectually uncurious" accusation, Reynolds says, "Under Blakey's command, HSCA played its cards very close to the vest. They wanted the CIA to know as little as possible about their investigation's direction and strategy. Blakey did not ask questions because he did not want to let CIA know what he was looking for in the history. Breckinridge knew this and would never have said Blakey was ‘uncurious’.” So, the “CIA hand” that the source talks about could not be Breckinridge nor anyone else of consequence.

Debunking His Own Story

But possibly the best argument against Morley’s story is his own reporting. All told, Morley interviewed sixteen relevant individuals but only one agreed with the source. Morley spoke with former Assassination Records Review Board Chairman John Tunheim who told him such a document, "should have been shared with the board." Tunheim added, "If we had seen something like that we would have released it." But Tunheim's comment could be interpreted to mean that he is also skeptical of the document's existence.

An anonymous individual identified as a “consultant” stated, “I knew there was a SCIF [Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility] for those [JFK] documents.” But out of six other persons who had been inside the facility in question, only two thought there “might” have been a JFK archive in the SCIF. Four others knew of no such SKIF. Carmen Medina, former director of the Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, told Morley “whoever told you that may have been misinformed.”

Similarly, Kenneth McDonald, a former CIA historian told Morley, “I never heard of any SCIF dedicated to JFK records.” When asked about the plausibility of a CIA investigation into the HSCA, John Helgerson, CIA Inspector General from 2002 to 2009, told Morley, “Well, perhaps, but by no means necessarily.” Helgerson added, “Inspectors generals don’t usually get involved unless there’s reason to believe there’s malfeasance or wrongdoing or criminal activity. … I don’t know what the predicate would be here.”

The rest of Morley’s article is a mix of inaccurate and previously debunked material. Morley writes that the HSCA concluded that “JFK had been caught in crossfire and killed by conspirators who could not be identified.” This is totally false. The HSCA concluded that “Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy; the second and third shots he fired struck the President; the third shot he fired killed the President.” The committee did conclude that a second gunman fired from the grassy knoll, but this conclusion was based on the long-debunked acoustics evidence.

Other missteps by Morley:

• CIA officer Ruben Efron was reading Oswald’s mail for two years.
• Several claims about DRE boss George Joannides.

Conclusion

Rather than being a “revelation” or an “important” story, Morley’s report about his anonymous source is a nothingburger. I am not the only observer who believes this. Conspiracy researcher Joe Backes said in a Substack article, “I was hoping he had something.” Stealing my thunder, Backes concludes:

Is this a bombshell? Nope. So, what are we left with? A single source claiming there were, maybe still are, JFK assassination records in a SCIF at a CIA building in Herndon, VA. If we were reading any of them and they were indeed as claimed, then that would be a bombshell. I would love for this to pan out and be something. But right now it’s not. Sorry.

The fact that Morley believes his story is significant may say more about the state of his research and reporting in 2024 than it does about any JFK cover-up by the CIA. I will go so far as to say that this article is representitive of where the conspiracy community currently finds itself—with many suspicions but no proof.