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Gerald Posner, Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo back lawsuit to open secret files on CIA mystery man tied to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Dec 17, 2003 | 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 by the CIA to serve as the agency's liaison to the House committee looking into Kennedy's assassination. While working with the committee, the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. 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.
"[Joannides'] behavior was criminal," said Blakey, the former House committee counsel who was deceived by the CIA agent. "He obstructed our investigation."
"The agency is stonewalling," said Posner, whose bestselling book supported the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald, alone and unaided, killed Kennedy. "It's a perfect example of why the public has so little trust in the CIA's willingness to be truthful."
Anthony Summers, a former BBC journalist and the author of "Not in Your Lifetime," a bestseller that presents strong evidence of a JFK conspiracy, sees the Joannides case as "new evidence of CIA subterfuge -- perhaps the most blatant such evidence."
"The agency should come completely clean," said Tunheim, the federal judge in Minnesota who oversaw the panel that declassified 4 million pages of once-secret JFK records.
Tom Crispell, spokesman for the CIA, insisted that the agency is "absolutely not stonewalling." While declining to answer questions about Joannides' actions in 1963 and 1978, Crispell said the CIA has made public "all known records" about Joannides that are relevant to the Kennedy assassination story.
The lawsuit, which Washington lawyer Jim Lesar filed on my behalf this week, calls for the agency to release all records on Joannides, who died in 1990. Joannides' story first came to light in a story I wrote about him for the Miami New Times in April 2001. Posner picked up on the story in a piece for Newsweek last month. Leading newspapers in Greece advanced the story with front-page coverage on the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's death, examining "the shadowy role of a Greek-American CIA agent," namely, Joannides.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, a group of 13 writers who have published both pro- and anti-conspiracy works about JFK's death -- including Posner, Mailer, DeLillo, Blakey and Summers, as well as Nixon White House speechwriter Richard Whalen -- signed an open letter calling on the CIA and the Defense Department to release all records on Joannides. The deceased spy's story is "highly relevant" to the assassination, according to Judge Tunheim.
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George Efthyron Joannides was a dapper, multilingual CIA man from New York City. The son of a prominent Greek-American journalist, he had dabbled in journalism and law before joining the CIA in 1951. After a decade of service in Athens, he came to the attention of then deputy CIA director Richard Helms. In 1962, Helms took over the agency's clandestine efforts to overthrow Castro. He sent Joannides, 41 at the time, to oversee a staff of 24 and a budget of $2.4 million (equivalent to $15 million today) dedicated to mounting covert operations designed to confuse and subvert the Cuban communists.
Chief among the spy's specific duties in mid-1963 was the handling of the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), one of the biggest and most active CIA-backed groups in Miami. Once upon a time the DRE was as well known to North American newspaper readers as the Iraqi National Congress is today. With 2,500 supporters and flattering coverage in Life magazine and the right-wing press, the young men of the directorate were at the forefront of the fight to eliminate Fidel Castro.
In August 1963, the DRE's large and effective network of chapters in North America first picked up on a leftist adventurer named Lee Harvey Oswald. According to a CIA memo found at the JFK Library, Joannides was giving $25,000 a month (about $147,000 in today's dollars) to the DRE at the time when the group's New Orleans delegation decided to collect intelligence on and publish propaganda about Oswald, a Castro supporter who had once lived in the Soviet Union.
The DRE acted after Oswald had seemingly attempted to infiltrate the group. On Aug. 5, 1963, he approached the DRE's delegation in New Orleans offering to train its anti-Castro fighters in military tactics. Then, a few days later, he inexplicably turned up handing out pro-Castro pamphlets on a street corner. DRE members accosted him, resulting in a confrontation that was broken up by the police. The DRE's local delegate, Carlos Bringuier, challenged Oswald to a debate on a local radio program, then sent a tape of the program to the DRE's Miami headquarters. The group also issued a press release calling for a congressional investigation of Oswald -- then still an entirely obscure figure.
Joannides' attitude toward all this activity is unknown, even though CIA officers working with Cuban exile groups were required to file monthly reports on their protégés. Joannides' action reports from 1963 are missing from CIA archives, the agency's Office of Historic Review has claimed.
Three months later, when Oswald was arrested in Dallas for the assassination, the DRE leaders in Miami immediately called Joannides. They then launched their second publicity offensive on Oswald in three months -- only now the former Marine was world famous.
The anti-communist activists called the New York Times and other news organizations, telling the story of Oswald's seemingly pro-Castro ways. Thus it was that the DRE, a CIA-funded organization, helped shape news coverage suggesting that Kennedy had been killed by a Castro supporter.
George Joannides, in short, was a spy working near the epicenter of world history. In Washington, there were suspicions of conspiracy, even fears of war with Cuba or the Soviet Union. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy initially suspected CIA-backed Cubans were behind his brother's murder.
In Dallas, Oswald denied the charges. "I'm just a patsy," he shouted to reporters at the Dallas City Jail.
The next day in Havana, Fidel Castro mobilized his armed forces and denounced the DRE's story as a CIA provocation designed to justify an invasion of Cuba. The revelation of Joannides' work with the DRE lends belated credence to Castro's charge.
Then the assassin was assassinated. On the morning of Nov. 24, 1963, as the national television audience watched Oswald being transferred to a more secure jail, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner connected to organized crime, whose best friend was a Havana casino operator embittered by Castro's rise to power, stepped out of the crowd and shot Oswald dead.
In Miami, Joannides continued to work with the DRE. He received a copy of the tape the group had made of Oswald's pro-Castro remarks. In the DRE's newspaper, paid for with CIA funds, the student leaders promoted the conspiratorial scenario that Oswald and Castro were "the presumed assassins." They instructed their chapters in South America to promote the Oswald-Castro connection in their local media.
Five days after the assassination the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), meeting in executive session, decided it wanted to take testimony from three DRE leaders. At the same time, Joannides was giving two of the anti-Castro activists CIA funds to get out of the country. They went to Central America. A week later, the DRE's HUAC appearance was canceled.
After Kennedy was killed, Joannides' patron, Helms, shielded the Joannides mission to Miami from review. He did not disclose to the Warren Commission that Joannides' exiled Cuban agents had had pre-assassination contact with Oswald.
The available record shows that Joannides received high praise from his superiors for his work in 1963. His job evaluation for that year made no mention of Oswald or the Kennedy assassination, but the CIA's Miami station chief Ted Shackley specifically cited Joannides' handling of the propaganda efforts of the Cuban Student Directorate in awarding him the highest possible grades. Shackley concluded that Joannides had proven he could "translate policy directives into meaningful action programs."
Joannides went on to serve in Athens, where according to recent Greek press reports, he played a role in the political machinations that led to the CIA-backed military coup in 1967. He also served in Saigon during the Vietnam War, then returned to Washington, where he retired to a modest home in Potomac, Md.
