Conspiracy author and researcher Jefferson Morley, who testified before a Congressional Task Force on April 1st, needs to do something to clarify the record. In a prepared statement submitted to the Task Force, Morley stated the following:
Three top CIA officers lied under oath about JFK’s assassination.
In the statement, Morley went on to identify the CIA men as James Angleton, Richard helms and George Joannides. I have previously addressed Morley's allegations concerning Helms. Fred Litwin has a five-part series discussing Morley and Angleton.
That brings us to Joannides. Morley claims:
In response to a direct request from HSCA investigator Dan Hardway, Joannides denied knowing who ran the AMSPELL program in 1963 — when, in fact, he himself had run it.
It is true that Joannides was the case officer for the DRE in 1963. But what evidence is there that Hardway asked Joannides about the DRE either "under oath" or informally? According to Robert Reynolds, who is an expert on the JFK file releases and has studied Joannides extensively, the evidence is just about non-existent for a Hardway request to Joannides regarding the identity of the DRE chief. He told me the following in a group email:
There are several lists of HSCA requests to CIA for information, There were hundreds of requests, and CIA kept close track of them, because they were accused by HSCA of delay and bad faith more than once. The CIA lists include both written and oral requests. Last year I looked through these and found no requests for the identity of the case officer of DRE, either written or oral.
Reynolds continues with a series of questions of his own:
Let's be specific about what Hardway is saying. He says he asked Joannides and Joannides gave him what would have been an evasive answer ... Did Hardway ever put down in writing his question to Joannides and Joannides response? If not, can he give us any specifics about when he asked Joannides? What were the circumstances, i.e. WHY did he ask Joannides this question? Was he researching DRE? Was he writing about DRE? When did Hardway research the DRE? Did Hardway sign the log sheets for DRE files? I've found at least 13 log sheets for DRE docs, and the only name on them is Betsy Palmer's, who looked at them all in August 1978.
There is a section on DRE in the HSCA report. Who wrote that? I'm sure Betsy Palmer at least assisted. Did Hardway assist in the writing of that? If Hardway is not researching the DRE, and not writing about the DRE, under what circumstances did he ask Joannides about the case officer of DRE?
The report mentioned by Reynolds was indeed written By Palmer and Gaeton Fonzi with Palmer listed as "researcher."
Reynolds finished his analysis with the following statement:
There are lots more questions I have about Hardway's claim. At this point, I don't find Hardway's statement credible.
It would seem that Morley needs to clarify the record. What specifically is the source of his statement that Joannides denied knowing who ran the DRE in 1963? Was this statement made "under oath" or not? If it was not, will Morley correct his sworn statement to the House Task Force?
In another matter, Morley is asking for a retraction from CBS News. On X, Morley wrote:
Your reporting about my appearance [at the] JFK hearing is false and defamatory. None of my books argue for “conspiracies.” I intend to sue for libel if this libel is not retracted.
But this may be a grey area at best for Morley. While it is true that he has not written a book whose sole purpose is to argue for a specific JFK assassination conspiracy theory, his 2020 eBook, Morley v. CIA, contained the following passage:
Perhaps now, observant people can understand how JFK’s enemies pulled off the “greatest magic trick under the sun,” [refers to a poem by Bob Dylan] how they made Oswald a patsy for their crime. They did it with covert psychological warfare schemes, like the AMSPELL program, whose workings are still protected by state secrecy.
Morley's belief that JFK's enemies killed him and that Oswald was just a patsy was echoed in his oral testimony before the Luna Task Force.
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