Salon: Celebrated authors demand that the CIA come clean on JFK assassina

[kskiska]

Gerald Posner, Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo back lawsuit to open secret files on CIA mystery man tied to Lee Harvey Oswald.

By Jefferson Morley

A diverse group of authors and legal experts have announced their support for a lawsuit that demands the release of secret CIA records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

At issue in the suit, filed Tuesday in Washington, are records on the unexplained role of a Miami-based undercover CIA agent named George Joannides in the months prior to Kennedy's murder on Nov. 22, 1963. The authors supporting the suit include anti-conspiracist Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 book "Case Closed," and Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo, two leading novelists who have explored the mysteries surrounding accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Also backing the lawsuit are legal experts G. Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970s investigated Kennedy's death, and John Tunheim, a federal judge who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board of the mid-1990s.

The authors and experts differ on who was responsible for the president's murder, but all agree that the CIA must now come clean about Joannides, a career spy who died in 1990.

In 1963 Joannides served as chief of the CIA's anti-Castro "psychological warfare" operations in Miami. According to declassified CIA records corroborated by interviews, Joannides secretly financed exiled Cuban agents who collected intelligence on Lee Harvey Oswald three months before Kennedy was killed. Fifteen years later, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House committee looking into Kennedy's assassination, never having disclosed his own actions in 1963 to congressional investigators. It wasn't until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy's death, that Joannides' support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light.

" behavior was criminal," said Blakey, the former House committee counsel who was deceived by the CIA agent. "He obstructed our investigation."

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/17/joannides/index.html

[Merlin]

1. I don't trust ANY of these characters. Wonder what they're up to now.

Posner and Blakey are both CIA agents who have been actively involved in the cover-up. Lesar pretends to be a semi-conspiratorialist, but I have always had my doubts about him. Mailer is a CIA suck-up wannabe who traded his objectivity for the kind of access that allowed him to write the CIA insider tome "Harlot's Ghost." Tunheim is an anti-conspiratorialist who was picked to head the agency that was in charge of getting the records released.

So are they setting up Joannides--or the supposed info about him that they want their FOIA suit to disgorge--to further stigmatize Oswald? I don't know what their game is, but I just don't trust these guys.