The correspondence, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act,
shows that the Archives has tried, and often failed, to insist that
other agencies comply with the 1992 law by declassifying more documents.
The struggle was especially fierce in 2017, when then-President Donald
Trump sided with the CIA and FBI and agreed to waive a supposedly
concrete legal deadline that year to release all classified documents
related to the JFK assassination. . .
The internal correspondence from the Archives helps resolve one
lingering mystery about the documents: In their negotiations with the
White House and the Archives in recent years, how have the CIA, FBI, the
Pentagon and other agencies justified keeping any secrets about a
turning point in American history that occurred decades ago — an event
that has always inspired corrosive conspiracy theories about government
complicity?
In the past, those agencies have provided the public with only vague
explanations about their reasoning, citing potential damage to national
security and foreign policy.
✓ The Archives correspondence reveals, for the first time, their
detailed justifications, providing a rare window into reasoning inside
the CIA and FBI. In many cases, it shows, the CIA and FBI pressed to
keep documents secret because they contained the names and personal
details of still-living intelligence and law-enforcement informants from
the 1960’s and 1970’s who could be at risk of intimidation or even
violence if they were publicly identified.
Many of those sources — now elderly, if not close to death — are
foreigners living outside the United States, which means it would be
more difficult for the American government to protect them from threats.
The CIA has also withheld information in the documents that identifies
the location of CIA stations and safehouses abroad, including several
that have been in use continuously since Kennedy’s death in 1963.
✓ The Archives correspondence shows that, while much of the
still-classified information is only indirectly related to the
assassination, some of it comes directly from the FBI’s “main
investigative case files” about the president’s murder. That includes
the all-important case files on Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin,
and Jack Ruby, the Dallas strip-club owner who murdered Oswald two days
after Kennedy’s death.
The Archives paperwork shows that the FBI and Drug Enforcement
Administration have fought particularly hard to protect the identity of
informants in organized-crime investigations — an argument that will
intrigue conspiracy theorists who believe the Mafia was behind Kennedy’s
death. Many assassination researchers argue that the assassination was
blowback for the so-called war on organized crime waged by the
president’s brother, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
In fact, the correspondence shows the overwhelming majority of the
documents that the FBI has withheld from the public in recent years
somehow involved organized-crime investigations. Of the nearly 7,500
documents that the FBI kept classified at the time of the 2017 deadline,
6,000 were from “various files of members of organized crime or La Cosa
Nostra.”
✓ The DEA made a special plea to black out the names of six
confidential informants identified in assassination-related files
involving organized-crime investigations: “Given the well-documented
propensity for violence by the Mafia, it is reasonable to expect the
individuals, if alive, remain in significant danger of retaliation for
their assistance,” the agency said in a 2018 letter to the Archives.
✓✓ The internal correspondence and emails from the Archives were
provided to POLITICO Magazine by Larry Schnapf, a New York lawyer who
filed a federal lawsuit last month against President Biden and the
National Archives, demanding release of all the still-classified
assassination documents. Schnapf, whose clients in the lawsuit include
the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an assassination-research group, obtained
the internal correspondence from the Archives under a Freedom of
Information Act request.
Even though he is now suing the National Archives, he said in an
interview he was impressed by the aggressiveness of Archives officials
in trying to force the CIA, FBI and other agencies to abide by the 1992
law, which called for the declassification of all assassination-related
documents within 25 years — a deadline reached in October 2017. The fact
that so much information remains classified today “only feeds a lot of
the more bizarre conspiracy theories” about Kennedy’s death, he said.
The 1992 law, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
Act, was adopted by Congress in hopes of controlling a firestorm of
conspiracy theories whipped up the year before by the release of Oliver
Stone’s popular, conspiracy-soaked film JFK, which suggested Kennedy was
killed in a coup d’etat involving his successor, President Lyndon
Johnson.
Opinion polls have shown consistently since the late 1960’s
that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death — that Oswald, assuming he was the assassin in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, did not act alone.
As a result of the law, millions of pages of documents were made
public in the 1990’s that rewrote elements of the history of the
assassination. The declassified files did not offer conclusive proof of
any sort of conspiracy in the president’s death. But they did reveal how
much evidence — especially about Oswald — had been withheld by the CIA
and FBI from the Warren Commission, . .The correspondence shows that the Archives, which has housed the
assassination records for decades, has long warned the CIA, FBI and
other agencies that they are failing to abide by requirements of the
1992 law, which allowed JFK-assassination information to remain
classified only if there was “clear and convincing evidence” of a
“substantial risk of harm” to national security or foreign policy.
. . . The National Archives said in a statement to POLITICO Magazine that
it had recently completed its review of the still-classified material
and provided its recommendations to President Biden about which
documents should be released on Dec. 15.
Bosanko, the Archives official overseeing the project, said in an
interview that the recent interagency review of the JFK documents had
been the most intensive in decades, involving a page-to-page inspection,
with the CIA, FBI and other agencies pressed to justify why any
information — including individual names and addresses — should continue
to be withheld from the public: “We looked at every single redaction in
these documents.” He said his team is continuing to negotiate with the
CIA and other agencies this month in hopes of convincing them — before
the Dec. 15 deadline set by the White House — to lift their opposition
to releasing some of the still-classified material.
A spokeswoman for the CIA said the agency was working closely with
the Archives with the goal of “releasing as much information in the
public interest as possible, consistent with the need to prevent harm to
intelligence operations.”
. . .
Archives officials and others in the government have cautioned for
years that the public should not expect to find bombshells in the
still-secret documents – at least no bombshells that can be easily
detected. Many of the previously declassified CIA and FBI files were
full of bureaucratic jargon, codenames and obscure foreign names and
addresses that made them incomprehensible at first, even for experienced
researchers.
And no matter what Biden decides, about 500 documents and other items
in the collection will remain secret, since the 1992 law exempts them
from public release. Among them are documents produced by federal grand
juries and by the Internal Revenue Service, including the tax and
employment records of Oswald, Ruby and many of their associates.
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It also includes tape recordings of six interviews conducted in 1964
with Jacqueline Kennedy and former Attorney General Robert Kennedy by
the journalist William Manchester, who was authorized by the Kennedy
family to write a history of the assassination. Those tapes were turned
over to the Archives by the Kennedy family in exchange for an agreement
they would not be made public until 2067 — the 100th anniversary of the publication of Manchester’s bestselling book The Death of a President.
The law also exempted the public release of what the Archives index
describes as five “very personal letters” that Mrs. Kennedy wrote to
President Johnson, including at least three she sent to him in the week
after the assassination.
What might be on Manchester’s tapes has long tantalized historians
and assassination researchers. He later wrote in his memoirs that he
recorded 10 hours of wrenching conversations with Mrs. Kennedy, in which
she offered a detailed account of events in the days surrounding the
assassination, including a description of the horrifying scene inside
the president’s limousine as the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. “She
withheld nothing,” he wrote. The interviews in Mrs. Kennedy’s home in
Georgetown were bearable only because of the cocktails they drank
throughout, he suggested. “Future historians may be puzzled by the odd
clunking noises on the tapes,” Manchester wrote. “They were ice cubes.
The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid
of great containers of daiquiris.”
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