Craig Iffland, an expert on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, says the files released Tuesday evening show the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to hide embarrassing details about its operations in the 1960s.
It is Iffland’s expert opinion that “[m]ost of the major documents long sought by researchers can be found in this release, including the identities of a CIA-directed infiltration team of anti-Castro Cuban exiles tasked with the assassination of Fidel Castro; a list of CIA assets operating in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 who may have interacted with [Lee Harvey] Oswald during his stay there; a series of reports on the technical capabilities of the Mexico City CIA station that monitored Oswald during his visit to the Cuban and Soviet [embassies] in late September 1963; as well as previously redacted testimony of CIA officials who were involved in monitoring Oswald from the time of his defection in October 1959 until the assassination.”
It is expected to take weeks for researchers such as Iffland to comb through the approximately 64,000 pages of material that were released Tuesday evening. So far, however, the 1960s-era CIA has not come away looking particularly ethical.
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According to Iffland, “the vast majority of the redactions reveal information that would prove particularly embarrassing to the CIA: either because the details of CIA operations are highly salacious or because it details the extraordinary presence—some might call it penetration—of the CIA in the State Department, highlighting the undue influence of the agency on American foreign policy.”
Iffland also told The Daily Signal that an example of the CIA’s work was testimony from agency operatives James O’Connell and Robert Maheu that revealed the attempt to create an illicit film of then-Indonesian President Sukarno with a Russian woman. Stills from the film would then be distributed around Indonesia to promote the idea that Sukarno was under Soviet influence.
“More incredibly, those testimonies reveal that the CIA took pains, with two separate foreign leaders under their influence and control, to secure ‘female companions’ for them during their trips to the United States. In one case, the foreign leader was so taken with the CIA’s handpicked paramour that he went home ‘lovesick’ and mused about giving up the throne to be with the woman,” Iffland said.
“The CIA monitored the situation, reading any and all correspondence between the leader and the woman. Eventually, the leader cooled off, and the woman married,” he said.
Another file Iffland reviewed shows that in some cases there were more CIA personnel operating out of American embassies abroad than State Department officials.
Iffland stressed that there are still some documents related to the Kennedy assassination that have not been released yet.
Still, he was optimistic that what President Donald Trump ordered released was all the material in the National Archives related to the assassination.
“Given what has been released thus far, I believe that this release will comprise all the material previously held in redacted form at the National Archives. In other words, it looks like a completely unredacted release [emphasis his] of all the records that had been stored in the National Archives pursuant to the JFK Records Act of 1992,” Iffland told The Daily Signal.
Iffland previously wrote for The Daily Signal about the distinction between articles in the National Archives and other documents related to the assassination. In the executive order that Trump signed about the JFK assassination, he also ordered a plan to be submitted by the director of national intelligence to release the classified files pertaining to the assassinations of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Jr., both in 1968.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has said she is looking for the CIA inspector general’s report that examines how the agency misled Congress when the House Select Committee on Assassinations re-investigated the Kennedy assassination from 1976 to 1979. Iffland recommends that Luna make a formal request to the president to direct the CIA to release the inspector general’s report. That report is not a part of the Kennedy files in the National Archives that Trump had ordered released.
After reviewing just a portion of the thousands of files, Iffland concluded that what the president had done was historic.
“President Trump has done what no president has been willing to do for over 60 years—to overturn the extraordinary privilege of secrecy granted to our nation’s intelligence services in favor of complete transparency to the American public,” he said.
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