President Donald Trump has blocked the release of hundreds of records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, bending to CIA and FBI appeals, while the National Archives came out Thursday night with a hefty cache of others.
Officials who investigated the case and researchers who study the assassination point to a number of relevant documents known or believed to have existed that aren’t found in the JFK collection.
John Tunheim, who chaired the government’s Assassination Records Review Board from 1992 to 1998, also believes that some documents his review board did not deem relevant to the assassination two decades ago may very well be, given new details that have emerged in the years since, Politico says.
One such set of suspected files involves a shadowy CIA figure named George Joannides, whom a subsequent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed had possible links to Oswald that he hid from Congress.
Greek-American Joannides, who died in 1990, served as the CIA’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded there were strong indications of a conspiracy. But he had never divulged at the time that he had managed a group of Cuban exiles seeking to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro and had ties to Oswald.
Robert Blakey, who was the staff director of the House panel, is still livid at how he and his staff were misled and “the fact that I didn’t get to put him under oath.”
“We were never able to get the file of the group Lee Harvey Oswald met with,” Blakey, now a law professor at Notre Dame University, said in an interview.. “Joannides was the supervisor of that group.”
None of the documents released Thursday include any referencing Joannides, a search of the titles and subjects shows.
(Read Politico’s full story here)
George Joannides, the son of a journalist, was born in Athens, Greece, on 5th July, 1922. His family arrived in New York in 1923. After graduating from the City College he received a law degree from St. John’s University.
He worked for The National Herald before moving to Washington in 1949 to work for the Greek Embassy Information Service, according to Spartacus Educational.
He joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 and later became chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami. In this role he worked closely with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy, group. This was a group that Lee Harvey Oswald was in contact with in New Orleans in August 1963. Journalist Jefferson Morley says he knows of no evidence that Joannides was in contact with Oswald during this period.
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