Jefferson Morley's Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Fred Litwin
- 20 hours ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 6 minutes ago
Now that the entire personnel file of George Joannides has been released, Jefferson Morley has now published his unified theory of nothingness.
As I have already written, there is absolutely nothing in the Joannides' personnel file that substantiates any of the allegations made by Morley over the years. There was no "Oswald Operation." There is nothing in the CIA's medal citation that says he received the award for "deceiving" the HSCA. And there is no mention of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The only thing that we learned is that Joannides did have a cover using the name "Howard." The CIA officer who told the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that Howard was not Joannides' alias never checked the Joannides' file. He just relied on an internal database of registered aliases.
[Barry] Harrelson graciously took the call. With good recall of his work with the ARRB, he asked for a couple of days to review his notes. When we spoke again he acknowledged his 1998 memo was wrong about “Howard.” He explained that he had not seen Joannides’ personnel file at the time he wrote it. He said he only checked the Agency’s database of registered aliases. The fake driver’s license in the name of “Howard Gebler” had not shown up in that search, he said. His memo was inaccurate, he admitted, but not intentionally.
So, it was sloppy work, rather than an intention to deceive.
Harrelson probably didn't search the databases himself. But perhaps he was asking for the wrong name. Morley wrote a memo to the ARRB asking about Howard, and he included this memo:
Fernandez-Rocha typed the alias as Guebler, rather than Gebler.
Did the CIA search the database for Guebler and come up empty?
And now Morley has convinced the Washington Post to embrace his allegations about the CIA and Joannides. But, I'll get to that article later in this post.
Morley starts off by claiming that the CIA is finally coming into compliance with the JFK Records Act:
With the release of a portion of a long-suppressed CIA file on July 3, the saga of the JFK assassination files has entered a new phase. The longtime gatekeepers of CIA records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 have been replaced by Director John Ratcliffe. CIA records related to JFK’s assassination not previously shared with the National Archives are now being released. For the first time since 2017, the CIA is coming into compliance with the 1992 JFK Records Act, which mandates “immediate” release of all JFK files in the government’s possession.
But Morley will not tell his readers that the ARRB reviewed the Joannides' personnel file in 1998, released about 12 pages, and deemed the rest to be irrelevant. And the ARRB knew that Joannides' was the case officer for the DRE and that he had worked with the HSCA.
Morley makes his usual claim about an Oswald Operation:
The Joannides file is a breakthrough in the understanding of how the 35th president was shot dead in public and no one was ever brought to justice for the crime. It reveals the existence of a covert operation involving Oswald, authorized by senior CIA officials, that was not disclosed to any investigation of Kennedy’s murder.
But what was this covert operation? And where is this evidence? Morley does say this:
A fake driver’s license shows how Joannides’ operation targeting the accused assassin was taken “off the books” in early 1963.
Here is the memo about the driver's license:
How is this evidence of an operation?
Morley is convinced that the "Howard" alias was intended to be "invisible."
That was a telling detail. Joannides was using an unregistered alias in his undercover assignment as “Howard” in 1963. He and his superiors (presumably including Deputy Director Helms) did not put his alias for handling the AMSPELL program into the agency’s internal record keeping system. His alias as “Howard” was not discoverable, even 35 years later. It was as if Joannides’ new assignment was intended to be invisible to the rest of the CIA. Starting in December 1962, his work with the Cuban students was, in the lingo of espionage, highly compartmentalized, if not “off the books.”
But, of course the alias was "discoverable" because there are memos about the alias. Had the CIA really wanted to hide the alias, there wouldn't be memos in the system.
And the Gebler alias wasn't really "off the books." You can see the DRE document above with the Joannides alias in plain view.
“Thanks to the work of the ARRB, though,” Hardway went on, “we now know that not only was DRE still a CIA operation all through 1963, but its controlling case officer was also none other than George Joannides."
But, Hardway is just plain wrong and he should know it. The HSCA knew that the CIA was funding the DRE and that the funding continued until 1966.
Hardway also told the Luna Committee that "It was also denied that any CIA officer was assigned to work with them in 1963." Here is another excerpt from that same HSCA draft report:
The report notes that "with this discovery, someone immediately called the DRE's case officer at the Miami CIA station." I still wonder why the HSCA could not figure out that Joannides was the DRE case officer. Did they not ask Lanusa?
Of course, Lanusa did not wait for Joannides - he immediately called the press. Even Morley admits that, "These headstrong young people accepted CIA funding but often resisted CIA control."
Morley claims that the CIA denied funding the DRE in 1963:
In January 1998, Harrelson sent his memo to the board in which he asserted the Agency had no relationship with the Cuban Student Directorate in 1963.
But that memo says nothing of the kind. It just says that the DRE was not taking direction and that the CIA was reducing the level of funding:
Morley also claims that the CIA did not reduce funding for the DRE:
But policy differences did not cause the Agency to reduce its funding nor curb the Directorate’s criticism of JFK.
So we see here that the CIA was not going to support the DRE's military plans. Morley also does not quote from this HSCA report on the DRE:
And here is a memo from 1965 about the relationship between the CIA and the DRE:
Here is another paragraph from the same memo:
Morley says that the budget for the DRE was $51,000 per month.
The Cuban students were generously funded with $51,000 a month (the equivalent of $500,000 a month in today’s dollars) under a secret CIA program code-named AMSPELL.
But by mid-1964, the budget had shrunk. Here is an excerpt from the May 1964 report:
Morley also discusses a propaganda article in SEE Magazine in November 1963:
“The C.I.A. Needs Men — Can You Qualify?” asked one headline, next to an Old West-style poster bearing the bearded likeness of Fidel Castro. “Wanted, Dead or Alive” for “Crimes Against Humanity,” said the poster. “$10,000,000 reward.” The issue was dated November 1963.
Morley makes it sound like the two articles are related and are next to each other. But this DRE memo says the article on the CIA was "unrelated" and was on a different page:
Morley also repeats again his ridiculous claim about Helms and the CIA:
That was the CIA’s story for 62 years [disavowing knowledge of the "Howard" alias]. The claim was consistent with what Deputy Director Helms told the Warren Commission in 1964: Its officers had no real knowledge of Oswald before JFK’s assassination.
But that is NOT what Helms told the Warren Commission.
Mr. Dulles: Looking back now that you have the full record, do you feel that you received from the State Department adequate information at the time that they were aware of Oswald's defection and later activities in the Soviet Union, did you get at the time full information from the State Department on those particular subjects?
Mr. McCone: Well, I am not sure that we got full information, Mr. Dulles. The fact is we had very little information in our files.
Mr. Helms: It was probably minimal.
Representative Ford: In this case, Oswald attempted to defect, he did not, he subsequently sought the right to return to the United States, he had contact with the Embassy. Was the Central Intelligence Agency informed of these steps, step by step, by the Department of State?
Mr. McCone: You might answer that.
Mr. Helms: Mr. Ford, in order to answer this question precisely I would have to have the file in front of me. I have not looked at it in some time so I don't have it all that clearly in mind. But it is my impression that we were not informed step by step. When I say that there is no requirement that I am aware of that the State Department should inform us and when I said a moment a go that we had minimal information from them, this was not in any sense a critical statement but a statement of fact.
A large part of Morley's article concerns Carlos Bringuier and Lee Harvey Oswald. Morley does not believe that Oswald possessed any agency -- or rather that he possessed too much "Agency."
First, Morley says that the DRE sent "Howard" the tape of Oswald's debate with Bringuier. But here is what the HSCA said about that:
Lanusa told the HSCA that the tape was already in the file (see above). Morley also reproduces this .jpg:
The two stories are at odds, unless the DRE folks made a copy for Joannides.
And then Morley asks this question:
What did Joannides report to his superiors about contacts between his AMSPELL network and the future accused assassin of the president of the United States?
It is not even clear that Joannides knew the name Oswald before JFK was killed. It was Lanusa who recognized the Oswald name after the assassination and then searched the files and found Bringuier's letter and the tape of the debate.
Secondly, Morley believes that Joannides directed the DRE people to blame Castro for the assassination:
Joannides’ job description for 1963 said he sponsored the Cuban students for “political action, propaganda, intelligence collection and a hemisphere-wide apparatus.” On November 22, they delivered.
But, as we have already seen, Lanusa did not wait for CIA approval to contact the press. He couldn't wait. Nobody had to tell Bringuier, Lanusa, or other people involved with the DRE to blame Castro.
And Lanusa was busy:
Lanuza, the retired schoolteacher who served as spokesman for the DRE in 1963, told me in multiple interviews that he spent hours calling his contacts in the national press on the night of November 22. They included Hal Hendrix, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the Miami News (who went on to work for the CIA in Chile), Ruby Hart Phillips at the New York Times, and Mary Louise Wilkinson of the Miami News. He also contacted Clare Booth Luce, conservative columnist and wife of Henry Luce, CEO of the Time-Life publishing empire, who was a financial supporter of the DRE, and told her about Oswald’s connection to Castro.
But Carlos Bringuier had been trying hard to tell everybody that Oswald was an avowed supporter of Fidel Castro since the debate with Bill Stuckey:
Was the "press relief" part of the undisclosed Oswald operation? Did the CIA have to instruct Bringuier to issue this statement?
And right after the assassination, Bringuier continued, as one would expect.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from November 24, 1963:
Does Morley believe that Bringuier had to wait to have Joannides tell him to blame Castro for the JFK assassination? Wouldn't it be natural for Bringuier and other anti-Castro Cuban leaders to immediately blame Castro?
And Morley seems to understand this.
Here is a quote from his book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA: (page 175)
All the former DRE leaders emphasized that they did not take orders from the CIA, and there is good reason to take them at their word. In 1963, they were passionate young anticommunists who feared their homeland was in danger of slipping under one-party control forever. They did not need a CIA man from Washington to tell them to take against against a public supporter of Castro like Oswald.
If one goal of the supposed Joannides' operation was to blame Castro for the assassination, it totally failed. Having DRE leaders tell the press that Castro was the assassination mastermind did very little. The supposed CIA plotters would have better spent their time and energy trying to convince the FBI that Castro was behind the assassination.
And Carlos Bringuier in his book Crime Without Punishment, denies that he received any money from the DRE in Miami: (page 425)
I was just a Delegate in New Orleans of the DRE. I was not receiving instructions or orders from the CIA, I never received any money from the CIA, if others in the DRE at the Miami office were receiving money from the CIA that was not my case. I was working very hard as a salesman as comanager of "Casa Roca" to bring food for my family, I never received any money from the Miami DRE office or any other office of the DRE, on the contrary my delegation was sending small amounts of money to Miami headquarters. That is the historical truth.
And Bringuier is not even listed on this organizational chart of the DRE:
In addition, Bringuier wrote that he never met George Joannides: (page 419)
In her book Ms. Mellen portray me as a FBI or CIA informant and tried to associate me with George Joannides, according to her and others, as a CIA operative. I heard the name Joannides for the first time while researching some of Jefferson Morley's allegations and this Mr. Joannides had passed away. I never met, talked or had any direct or indirect contact with Mr. George Joannides but these recyclers of lies keep repeating the same lies.
In Morley's world, Bringuier and Oswald are just pawns of George Joannides and their actions can only be explained by an imaginary CIA operation.
The headline is just plain untrue. The CIA has only revealed that Howard was an alias for Joannides. Nothing more. And he conflates Bringuier with the DRE.
Yesterday, I sent Tom Jackman an email asking him to speak with me. He did not call me, nor does it appear that he called anybody who could have rebutted Morley's allegations.
And, just about everything in the article has been rebutted previously on my blog or by Tracy Parnell.
For instance:
Previously released records show that the CIA had begun reading Oswald’s mail in 1959, when he defected to the Soviet Union, a move that attracted American media attention. Oswald returned to the U.S. in 1962 with a new wife and daughter in tow and settled in Dallas. Morley has found that the CIA continued to monitor Oswald.
Fact. -- True, but the focus on Oswald as a target is misleading. The CIA ran a program called HT-Lingual which intercepted some mail going to and coming from the Soviet Union. On November 9, 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald's name was added to the watch list because of his defection to the Soviet Union. The Church Committee estimated that 75% of the letters that were opened were chosen at random, not because the name was on the watch list. The program intercepted a letter from Marguerite Oswald to her son and that was it. After the assassination, additional items of potential relevance to the assassination investigation were recovered from the HT-Lingual files, but those additional items did not include any correspondence to or from Oswald himself.
But Jackman does have one new story. Jose Lanusa told him that Oswald wrote a letter to the DRE:
“It was handwritten, two pages,” Lanuza recalled. “It was crap. A ranting thing. ‘I am willing to go to Miami to help you guys.’ It was all building up a legend. I was constantly getting letters from gringos who wanted to come in and dress up in military garb and show up in my office.” He filed it away.
Lanusa says he filed the Oswald letter away and then gave it to the FBI -- but there is no record anywhere of this letter. This the first time he has ever mentioned this.
For over twenty years Morley has been chasing the ghost of George Joannides. He has found nothing except for a driver's license using the name Howard. That's it. The supposed Oswald operation is just a "thought pattern" in Morley's mind.
Stay tuned for more thought patterns.
Previous Relevant Blogs Posts on Jefferson Morley's Congressional Testimony
An analysis of Congresswoman Luna's Congressional Hearings
An FBI memo that quoted James Angleton is used by Morley to reach an unwarranted conclusion.
Morley misreads Angleton's testimony before the HSCA.
Morley believes a document proves the CIA did not believe that a lone gunman killed JFK.
Additional documents relevant to Part Three.
Morley claims that there is some connection between the suicides of Gary Underhill, Charles Thomas, George de Mohrenschildt, and the overdose death of Dorothy Kilgallen.
Morley believes that Agustin Guitart was spying on pro-Castro forces in New Orleans
Previous Relevant Blog Posts on Jefferson Morley
More Morley Nothingburgers on the way
Morley is requesting more documents -- they will reveal nothing about the assassination.
Morley got the headlines he wanted to a complete non-story.
Joannides did not come out of retirement to work with the HSCA.
There is no mention of an "Oswald Operation" in the Joannides' personnel file.
Morley believes that Dr. Robert McClelland's recollections provides proof of a shot from the front. Here is the truth about McClelland.
A reply by Nicholas Nalli to Jefferson Morley.
Morley suspected a redacted file would reveal major secrets. It didn't.
Several months ago, I posted an article, in association with several researchers, that showed what was contained in the redacted section of Schlesinger's memo.
Morley somehow knows what is in the supposed 2,400 recently-discovered FBI files.
Morley discusses Israel with Tucker Carlson.
Morley believes that the United States can never be great unless it solves the JFK assassination.
An analysis of the 13 documents Morley wants to see.
Morley claims I am a CIA apologist and then misquotes me.
It would be worthwhile for the CIA to release the Joannides file just to stop the incessant posts from Jefferson Morley.
Actually, Oswald stayed at two budget-priced hotels in Helsinki.
He keeps asking the same questions, and we keep posting the same answers.
Conspiracy authors are playing fast and loose with the facts.
There is no evidence that Diaz was involved in the JFK assassination.
There are clues as to what is in a redacted section of Schlesinger's memo.
Chad Nagle and Dan Storper's article on New Orleans gets everything wrong.
Believing Michael Kurtz is problematic.
Morley wrote that there are two redacted memos on CIA reorganization, but there is only one. He wrote about Goodwin's copy as if it was a different memo, rather than a copy of the Schlesinger memo.
The phrase 'who shot John' does not refer to the JFK assassination.
Only one word is redacted in Harvey's deposition.
There are no redactions in the Operation Northwoods document.
Kilgallen had nothing to tell.
An underwhelming interview of Marina Oswald.
Morley often repeats stories and changes their meanings.
Chad Nagle claims there was an assassination plot against JFK in Chicago in November 1963. One problem: There is no evidence of such a plot.
A response to Morley's Substack post alleging that I am a CIA apologist.
A rebuttal to Morley's response to my post Was Bill Harvey in Dallas in November of 1963?
There is no credible evidence Harvey was in Dallas in November of 1963.
Morley repeats the claim that Dulles was at a CIA training center during the weekend of the JFK assassination. He wasn't.
Morley's claims about Efron are all wrong.
Morley responded to my article "The Truth about Operation Northwoods." Here is my reply.
W. Tracy Parnell is one of the best JFK assassination researchers out there. Here is his look at Jefferson Morley with several important articles.
Operation Northwoods can only be understood as part of the Kennedys' war against Cuba and Operation Mongoose.
And a response from me.
There is no evidence that Dr. West petitioned the court to examine Jack Ruby before his trial.
There is absolutely no evidence that Dr. Louis Jolyon West interfered with Jack Ruby's case.
Jefferson Morley used a fake Oswald handbill in his press conference for the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
An examination of redactions in the JFK collection of documents.
Morley doesn't understand Alecia Long's arguments about homophobia and Jim Garrison.
Jefferson Morley asks why "what the CIA knew about Herminio Diaz is still off limits."
Morley misses that a lot of redactions are actually available.
Jefferson Morley's press conference presents evidence that belief in a conspiracy has dropped.