Dr. Curtis, who attended JFK at Parkland Hospital (46:15-56:05)
Mr. Hardway, who worked for the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1977 (1:12:05-1:20:10)
Douglas Horne, who worked for the Assassination Record Review Board in 1994-1997 (1:33:25-1:43:55), (1:53:50-1:55:15) (2:33:40-2:46:45)
there’s nothing there for the conspiracy buffs. Actually, this hearing was bad news for the Warren Commission truthers. Dan Hardaway testified today that Lee Harvey Oswald had public and prominent encounters in New Orleans and Mexico City with Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”), an anti-Castro Cuban exile group run by David Atlee Phillips in the CIA, which operated in Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas in 1963. Oswald also applied for his Mexican visa with a known CIA agent, William Gaudet, standing next to him in line. Here is the full sworn testimony from Mr. Hardaway to the House Committee on Oversight:
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Hardway-Written-Testimony.pdf For the past 62 years the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) has actively and continuously obstructed the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with no consequences for their actions. Ten years ago, the CIA admitted it participated in a cover-up during the Warren Commission initial investigation. The CIA stonewalled the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the “Church Committee”) about the assassination. The CIA was not forthcoming with the Rockefeller Commission. The CIA misled and slow-walked the Assassinations Record Review Board (“ARRB”). And the CIA ran an illegal, domestic covert operation involving at least one undercover agent to subvert and obstruct the House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”).
I personally experienced the CIA’s obstruction of the HSCA investigation and can testify first-hand about what happened. In 1977 and 1978 I was employed as a researcher by the HSCA. As such, I was involved, among other areas, in the research and investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s (“OSWALD”) activities in Mexico City and the performance of the CIA in monitoring and reporting those activities as well as other issues related to the possibility of CIA knowledge of, or involvement in, the assassination of President Kennedy and cover-up of information relevant to the investigation of that assassination. In that capacity I had a top-secret security clearance and, during a major portion of my employment, had access to unredacted CIA records requested for review from the CIA by the HSCA. Implicit in the focus of my work was the issue of whether the evidence from Mexico indicated any operational connection between OSWALD and the CIA.
As a result of a Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by the CIA and HSCA General Counsel and Staff Director, G. Robert Blakey, in August of 1977, HSCA staff was provided with unexpurgated access to CIA documents. I spent many hours working with CIA files in a small office at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Initially, I was provided promptly with full access to every file that I asked to see. This continued until May 1978, at which point CIA began a process of slowing down our access to files, giving them time to review the files before we saw them, which resulted in increasing redaction of the files we saw. CIA also began to limit our access to files, trying to limit access to Blakey and other senior staff members while excluding staff members such as me and Lopez who had developed the most intimate familiarity with the details of the areas being investigated. The CIA curtailment of our investigation that began in May 1978, continued with increasing intensity through the end of our tenure with the HSCA in December 1978.
Beginning in May of 1978, the CIA assigned George Joannides (“Joannides”) to handle liaison with Lopez and me. Joannides began to change the way file access was handled. We no longer received prompt responses to our requests for files and what we did receive no longer seemed to provide the same complete files that we had been seeing. The obstruction of our efforts by Joannides escalated over the summer, finally resulting in a refusal to provide unexpurgated access to files in violation of the Memorandum of Understanding previously agreed to by the HSCA and the CIA. It was clear that CIA had begun to carefully review files before delivering them to us for review.
In the spring of 1978, I had been looking into several areas of research which were actively obstructed by Joannides after he began working with us. These included back channel communications methods used by the CIA’s Mexico City Station, William Harvey’s Office of Security files and his continuing relationship with Johnny Roselli, the use of an impulse camera to photograph the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, missing production from that impulse camera and one of the photographic installations that covered the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, and
David Atlee Phillips’s (“Phillips”) connections to stories about OSWALD that rapidly appeared after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Phillips, in 1963, was the head of CIA’s anti-Castro covert operations and worked out of their Mexico City Station. Phillips was known within the CIA as “the world’s greatest authority on Deception.”
In 1978, I did not do any research into Joannides, or his activities in 1963, because, while working for the HSCA in 1977-1978, I was not informed that he had had any involvement with any aspect of the Kennedy case, and I had no basis to even suspect that he had. In researching possible connections between post-assassination stories about OSWALD and David Atlee Phillips, I did little, if any, research that I recall into the
Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate “DRE”) because, among other reasons, the CIA had firmly represented to the HSCA that all ties between the DRE and the CIA had been terminated prior to 1963. I never saw Joannides’s name in any file that I reviewed. My research into what had happened to the photographs produced by an impulse camera aimed at the Cuban Consulate during the time OSWALD visited that institution in Mexico City led to a broader inquiry into back-channel communications available to the CIA officers in Mexico City in 1963. I was looking at possible back-channel communication methods between the CIA’s Mexico City Station and its JMWAVE station in Miami, Florida, and possible records that may have been generated by such methods. My research into this area, especially as it regarded any way that Phillips could have been in contact with JMWAVE on a regular basis, consistently met stone walls of denial of any information being available.
One way that I knew non-record communication could occur was by face-to-face meetings. I learned that contrary to his sworn testimony to the HSCA in his first Executive Session appearance on November 27, 1976, Phillips 3 had not been in Mexico City at the time OSWALD was there in 1963. He had been on a temporary duty assignment at CIA Headquarters and at the CIA JMWAVE station in Miami. While he was there, he was promoted to chief of all Cuban operations in Mexico City with general supervisory authority. Phillips arrived in Miami on 7 October for “two days consultation” with CIA officers working at the large base there. Prior to his promotion to Chief of Cuban Operations in Mexico City, Phillips had been the Chief of Covert Action in Mexico. In both positions he was responsible for anti-Castro propaganda operations. I wanted to research the question of coordination of propaganda and disinformation operations between the Mexico City and Miami stations but did not make progress in that area due to Joannides’s non-cooperation and obfuscation in the waning existence of the HSCA.
Before my access was delayed, curtailed, and then cut off, I had been able to review CIA 201 files on many of the individuals who had been sources for stories that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the assassination tying Oswald to Castro or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (“FPCC”).
I was able to establish that most of the sources of those stories appearing in the immediate aftermath of the assassination were agents or assets used at one time or another by Phillips. When I confronted Phillips with this in my last interview of him at our offices on August 24, 1978, he became extremely agitated, but could not explain, “why the misinformation that came from the Cuban groups and individuals that tended to point to Castro involvement were predominantly from assets that he had handled personally as opposed to ones that had been ran out of the Miami station.” Phillips also acknowledged that back-channel communication methods existed. Phillips was not questioned about any possible relationship, or work, with George Joannides because, at the time, we had no reason to think there could be any connection and had no information that they had ever worked together or in closely related areas of endeavor.
I also did not question Phillips about any connection with DRE which published the first Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory in their newspaper Trinchera on November 22, 1963, within hours of the assassination, a publication that I have since learned was being funded by CIA and overseen by Joannides. I did not know that in 1978. The CIA had repeatedly denied that any association with DRE existed in 1963. It also denied that any CIA officer was assigned to work with them in 1963. We now know that DRE was controlled by a CIA officer all through 1963 and that officer was George Joannides. In addition to being a primary source of stories about OSWALD in the days after the assassination,
the DRE also had a highly visible encounter with OSWALD in New Orleans in September 1963. In the summer of 1963 Joannides was reported as having “done an excellent job in the handling of a significant student exile group which hitherto had successfully resisted any important degree of control.” OSWALD’s encounter with DRE in New Orleans, in the context of OSWALD’s activities there, appear to bear the earmarks of a CIA disinformation operation, raising even more serious questions about Joannides and his role in anti-Castro and anti-Cuban disinformation and propaganda operations in 1963.
The resemblance between Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his activities in Mexico City are amazing.
The CIA was providing DRE, an organization started by Phillips as a CIA operation, with $25,000.00 per month, but the organization resisted Agency control. Richard Helms, the then-head of the Agency’s covert action arm, met with the leader of the DRE in 1962 after the missile crisis. Helms promised the DRE that he would appoint a case officer who would be personally responsible to him. Helms appointed George Joannides. Joannides’s work with DRE was commended as being very good and successful. He began working with the group in late 1962. In 5 July of 1963, his fitness report noted that Joannides “has done an excellent job in the handling of a significant student exile group which hitherto had successfully resisted any important degree of control.” CIA promoted him to run the Political Warfare branch of the Miami station – in other words, he became the manager of the propaganda operations and the only organization that we know of that he retained under his direct control was DRE.
In August 1963, OSWALD had an encounter with DRE representatives in New Orleans. That encounter resulted not only in widespread publicity in New Orleans at the time, including newspaper articles, television coverage and radio interviews, it also resulted in the first reports trying to tie OSWALD to Castro after the assassination of John Kennedy. DRE, under Joannides direct control, published the first conspiracy theory in their paper on the day of the assassination. The story was picked up by both the Miami Herald and the Washington Post the next day. The CIA never told the Warren Commission about their support of, and work with, the DRE in 1963. The CIA never told the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the “Church Committee”) about it.
CIA ran a covert operation to keep that secret when HSCA began to investigate it. The Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB) asked CIA about DRE. The CIA initially told the ARRB the same thing they told the HSCA: CIA had no employee in contact with DRE in 1963. The ARRB, however, in examination of Joannides’s CIA personnel file, at Jefferson Morley’s urging, discovered its clear indication that Joannides was the DRE case officer in 1963. Although the CIA has admitted to using Joannides in a covert operation in his capacity as a liaison with the HSCA in Jeff Morley’s Freedom of Information Act suit, they have yet to explain the nature of the operation, its objectives, or why they ran a covert operation aimed at a Congressional committee charged with examining its conduct in connection with the assassination of an American president.
From the evidence available, it appears that the purpose was to hide critical information from the investigation and to otherwise obstruct and impede that investigation into CIA activities. We now know that in the early 1960's, David Phillips was working at CIA Headquarters where he, along with Cord Meyer, developed the first disinformation operations aimed at the FPCC. He was still in position to supervise those operations in 1963. Joannides became the director of covert operations at JMWAVE sometime between the end of July and the beginning of October 1963. As director of covert action, Joannides only retained direct responsibility for one operation: the student project involving “distribution of printed propaganda, production of radio programs, and the development of political action programs.”
To summarize what we now know: In August, OSWALD and DRE had their encounter with its resultant publicity in New Orleans. On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the (FPCC) in foreign countries.
In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, OSWALD applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa. The person in line in front of OSWALD to apply for a visa was William Gaudet, a known CIA agent. Gaudet claimed that this was merely a coincidence. On September 27, OSWALD arrived in Mexico City. On that day, and the following day, OSWALD, or someone impersonating him, may have visited the Cuban Consulate. On those same days, the Mexico City CIA Station was testing an impulse camera in their photo surveillance operation aimed at the door of the Cuban Consulate.
Sometime in late September, Phillips left Mexico City on a temporary duty assignment at CIA Headquarters. It is at this time that Phillips was promoted to chief of Cuban operations in Mexico City. OSWALD, or someone impersonating him, visited, or at least appears in the CIA telephone tap records as visiting, the Cuban Consulate on September 27 and 28. Those days are the days that the CIA Mexico City Station tested an impulse camera to photograph people using the door of the Cuban Consulate that OSWALD would have had to have used. The impulse camera generated over ten feet of 16-millimeter film that has “disappeared.” On October 1, three days after Oswald’s initial visits to the Cuban Consulate, the Mexico City Station sent “bulk materials” to Headquarters by an untraceable transmittal manifest in a diplomatic pouch “to be held in registry until picked up by [Phillips] presently TDY HQS.” The HSCA was not able to find out what was in the pouch, a back-channel communication method. CIA claimed it was untraceable.
On October 8, 1963, HQ sent a cable to JMWAVE advising them that Phillips would arrive in Miami the following day for a two-day visit. At about the same time Joannides was promoted in Miami, his supervisor was promoted to a Headquarters assignment and Phillips was promoted to the Cuban desk in Mexico City; all of them still working in anti-Castro operations. From HQ Phillips arrived on October 9 in Miami’s JMWAVE station where Joannides was then turning DRE into a successful propaganda operation. Phillips spent two days TDY at JMWAVE. In 1978, CIA brought Joannides out of retirement to work in a covert operation directed against a Congressional Select Committee where his role was to be the liaison with the two researchers working for the HSCA who were investigating the very area of his experience.
In 1978 Joannides successfully kept his involvement, and the details of the CIA’s propaganda operations at the time, hidden from the HSCA and the American public. The CIA resisted and undermined the work that I was doing on the activities that directly addressed CIA propaganda activities where they intersected with OSWALD’s visit to Mexico City, the activities of David Phillips and his propaganda machine and the photo-surveillance of the Cuban embassy. That resistance continued right up to the end of the time allotted to the HSCA. When they could not recruit me, they tried to curtail and frustrate our investigation. When I kept pushing and Blakey backed me up, they tried to limit their exposure by impugning and 8 undercutting our work with the Chairman of the HSCA. When Chairman Stokes backed his staff, the CIA simply waited us out. They knew we were running out of time. The issues that could have been resolved then are still open and the CIA is still stonewalling.
G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel to the HSCA, has previously testified on penalties of perjury about the details of the covert operation run against HSCA: “The credibility of the CIA is in doubt every time it speaks in whatever forum it does…. I was introduced to George Joannides (“Joannides”) by S.D. Breckinridge at CIA in the spring of 1978. I was told that he would be a senior person in liaison between HSCA and CIA; he was expected to be the “answer” to many “problems” -- on both sides. In fact, CIA falsely represented to me that Joannides had no connection with any area of inquiry being undertaken by the HSCA. (Otherwise, he could not play the role CIA proposed for him.) I accepted these assurances at face value. At the time, I believed the CIA was in good faith about wanting to cooperate with the Committee’s investigation by putting behind it the increasingly old concerns about the assassination “Once Joannides began his assignment, he was specifically tasked to work with (or on) Hardway and Lopez, two of my most important investigators working on anti-Castro groups, possible CIA contacts or connections to Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA propaganda activities.
In 1977 and 1978, I was repeatedly (and falsely) assured by CIA as an organization, and Joannides personally, that CIA had no operational interest in or connection to the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”), an anti-Castro Cuban exile group operating in Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas in 1963 with whom Lee Harvey Oswald had public and prominent encounters. I was also assured that there was no CIA case officer assigned to work with DRE in 1963. That assurance was also made organizationally and personally by CIA and Joannides. At one point I gave Joannides information about the alias, Mr. Howard, that members of DRE said their CIA contact used in 1963 to aid his search for information in regard to CIA contacts with DRE. Joannides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE, but that he would keep looking. “Joannides lied to me about who he was and what he knew about the DRE and his role with it. CIA lied to me about knowing who Joannides was and what he knew about the DRE and his role in it. That, too, must be a part of this record. CIA and DRE did, in fact, have a CIA officer assigned to it who was financing them extensively in 1963; the officer was George Joannides. Had I known that at the time, he would have been under oath and in our hearings, not obstructing them for his special position in the CIA. The Agency knowingly and corruptly obstructed our investigation.
In my professional opinion, Joannides and CIA were both guilty of obstructing proceedings before a Congressional committee that was properly exercising the power of inquiry in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1505, a crime punishable by fine and up to 5 years imprisonment. The truth about Joannides came to light 9 largely only as a result of a lawsuit a journalist brought under the FOIA: Morley v. CIA, 508 F.3d 1108 (D.C. Cir. 2007). In connection with that case on remand, CIA filed the declaration of Delores M. Nelson. I am familiar with the Nelson Declaration. In the Nelson Declaration, made under penalties of perjury as a person “authorized to sign declarations on behalf of CIA” Ms. Nelson averred that CIA acknowledged Joannides had only worked on covert projects during his career with CIA on two occasions. Those two occasions admitted were when he was working “during the years 1962 through 1964 and 1978 through 1979 – time periods for which the CIA previously acknowledged Joannides’ participation in covert projects, operations, and assignments.” Id. Joannides assignment in 1978 through 1979 was as liaison with the HSCA. This simply means that Joannides’s work as liaison with the HSCA was a covert operation of the CIA. His office seems to have been to cover up evidence, not facilitate its production. CIA has already admitted as much. …. [Emphasis in original].
The CIA covered up this operation as best they could from the Assassination Records and Review Board. The ARRB asked for the operational files related to the DRE. In response, the CIA, on 20 January 1998, told them that operational files for the critical time period from December 1962 through April 1964 “appear to be ‘missing’”. They explained this by telling the ARRB: “It should be noted that during the period in question, major policy difference between the Agency and DRE would not take directions or instructions about a number of operational matters, insisting on engaging in activities the Agency did not sanction. These differences caused the Agency to reduce the level of funding for the DRE. It also replaced the officer designated to deal with the DRE. Then, about the same time, the monthly operational reports trailed off. It seems the probable cause of these events are linked and that reporting in the form of such monthly reports simply stopped. The CIA’s own released documentation shows the above statement to be, at best, full of half-truths, but likely just outright lies.
George Joannides took over as the case officer for the DRE in December 1962 after a meeting between Richard Helms, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans (DDP), and the leaders of DRE. The meeting was occasioned by the policy differences between DRE and its independent streak. As a result of that meeting, the DDP informed the DRE leaders that “he was changing the Agency contact for the DRE in Miami.” He went on to tell them that “the new contact would be able to come to [him] for any clarification needed…. He also stated that this contact would be responsible to him for the relationship [between CIA and DRE].” That new contact, in December 1962, was George Joannides. How did Joannides do in his new assignment?
Fortunately, the Miami Station’s Fitness Reports for Joannides are not missing as are the operational reports. In February 1963 Joannides was the Deputy Chief of Branch responsible for “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare.” His primary specific duty is listed as “Case Officer for student project involving political action, propaganda, intelligence collection and hemisphere-wide apparatus.” That student project was DRE. Joannides was commended for being “successful in resolving complicated problems involving control of an unruly group.” He was further commended for his “firm adherence to valid reporting techniques.” Joannides’s Fitness Report for the period covering 1 April 1963 to 31 March 1964 shows that he served throughout the time as the “senior case officer” for the “student group.” In this period, Joannides had an operational budget of $2,400,000.00. “These funds were judiciously spent on printed propaganda, white and black radio programs, and on political action operations which were implemented via labor, student and professional groups.” Remember, it was in this period that the confrontation between Oswald and DRE occurred in New Orleans resulting in the radio interview (white or black?) that was a major blow to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. It was also in this period that DRE’s printed propaganda newspaper, Trinchera, issued the first conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. A Fitness Report dated in July 1963 reported that Joannides continued to do “an excellent job in the handling of a significant student exile group which hitherto had successfully resisted any important degree of control.”
So, it is apparent that the CIA’s “explanation” to the ARRB about the missing operational reports isn’t just nonsense. It was a lie that had to be obvious to anyone with any familiarity with the DRE files or Joannides personnel file. But, yet the CIA did not hesitate to foist such a story on the ARRB and that story again bought them more time. Would you like me to go on and tell you about how the CIA covered up this operation even as late as 2017 by lying in a Federal District Court?
In 2017 G. Robert Blakey, Ed Lopez, and I sought documents from the CIA regarding the obstruction operation that it ran against the HSCA. In that suit the CIA attempted to dismiss that operation by arguing that we mischaracterize the CIA’s sworn admission in the Morley case that Joannides was undercover when assigned to work as liaison to the HSCA. They tried to explain that admission by having their counsel say, “The fact that Mr. Joannides was described as ‘undercover’ shows only that his affiliation with the CIA was not publicly acknowledged.” The CIA was very careful to let their counsel make this assertion and did not try to put that into any statement that was made under penalty of perjury. And with good reason. It was a flat out lie to the Court, a blatant prevarication. The CIA officer who made the statement under penalties of perjury not only characterized Joannides’s work as being undercover, she also asserted that it was part of a covert operation: “the CIA previously acknowledged Joannides' participation in two specific covert projects, operations, or assignments: JM/WAVE or JMWAVE from 1962 through 1964 and Joannides' service as a CIA representative to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations from 1978 through 1979.”
The CIA’s unsworn explanation offered to the Court by its counsel was untrue as shown by the fact that Joannides’ relationship with CIA had been publicly acknowledged in 1978 while he was subverting the HSCA, long before the Nelson affidavit. William P. Kampiles was arrested in Munster, Indiana, and charged with espionage in August 1978. George Joannides was involved in that very public case from the beginning. He testified on behalf of CIA at the trial in November 1978. The Associated Press (“AP”) reported that Joannides, a “28-year employee of the Central Intelligence Agency” had testified against Kampiles. The AP’s report of CIA’s public acknowledgment of Joannides’s employment was widely reported. The employment was also reported by United Press International and the Washington Post. CIA’s explanation of the Nelson Declaration’s labeling Joannides’s work as undercover is not offered under penalties of perjury simply because it is not true. In 2008 Nelson, on behalf of CIA, swore that Joannides was not just undercover but involved in a covert operation in his work as a CIA representative to the HSCA. The CIA publicly acknowledged its relationship with Joannides in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Kampiles while the HSCA was still at work. CIA’s unsworn excuse in Hardway v. CIA that the Nelson admission meant only that there was no CIA acknowledged relationship was specious. But it carried the day with the District Court.
As detailed above, in 1978 the CIA again committed felony obstruction of Justice in its dealing with the HSCA.
As G. Robert Blakey stated under oath, in 2014: “I no longer trust anything that the Agency has told us in regard to the assassination. It lied to the Warren Commission. It lied to the ARRB. It lied to the HSCA. In admitting that Joannides was employed in a covert capacity as liaison with the HSCA, it has admitted that it violated its charter and ran a domestic covert operation aimed at subverting the HSCA and its investigation…. That the Agency would put a material witness in a covert capacity as a filter between the committee staff and the Agency was an outrageous breach of our understanding with the Agency, the Agency’s charter and the laws of this country. As a result, I now believe that we were not able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the CIA. What the Agency did not give us, none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all his testimony. The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation.
It is time that either Congress, or the Justice Department, conduct a real investigation of the CIA. Indeed, in my opinion, it is long past time.” Where do we go from here? Regarding the JFK case, let’s consider this: fifty years after the fact, CIA admitted a cover-up in giving information to the Warren Commission. In 2014 they released, with redactions, an article from their in-house magazine written in 2013 by David Robarge, the official in-house historian. In this article, although admitting participation in covering up information during the Warren Commission investigation, they labelled it a “benign” cover-up. According to Mr. Robarge, the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, had been “complicit in keeping incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission’s agenda and focusing it on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ that Lee Harvey Oswald … acted alone.” He called this “a ‘benign cover-up’ or what also has been termed ‘a process designed more to control information than to elicit and expose it.’”
The concept of a “best truth” is an intriguing one, as is the statement that contains it. It implies, at the very least, that there could be a “good truth”, a “better truth” and ultimately, a “best truth”. Nothing is said though about the honest truth. Robarge says the Agency made the determination that blaming Oswald alone at the time was the best truth. So, best truths are also time sensitive. The formulation also raises another question: is this the best truth for the Agency or for some other principal interested in this particular truth? Who ultimately gets to determine what truth is the best? For Robarge and the CIA it clearly is the CIA. That, in and of itself, is an admission not just of a benign cover-up, but a subversion of the governmental institutions of this country. The Executive Order creating the Warren Commission makes it clear that the Commission is the one that is to determine the truth. But the CIA has admitted now that they subverted the very purpose and process created and sanctioned by law for the determination of the truth at the time: the Warren Commission. At a minimum, that was obstruction of Justice. That obstruction continued thereafter.
As with any CIA limited hang-out you must look carefully at the language used. Robarge works hard to create the impression that what they were trying to hide was the Castro murder plots. You must read Mr. Robarge’s article carefully. It is always wise to carefully parse CIA pronouncements. Mr. Robarge never specifically states that the CIA was mainly concerned with preventing information about their attempts to murder Castro getting out. Here’s his actual language about the motivation for the cover-up: “Moreover, the DCI shared the [Johnson] administration’s interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy theories and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response against the perpetrators of the assassination. If the commission did not know to ask about covert operations against Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions where to look.” [Emphasis added.] Taken as a whole, the statement might draw you to infer that the Castro assassination plots were what was being covered up. But if that is the case, why has the resistance to disclosure remained so fierce even after those plots were disclosed in 1975? And earlier in the article, Robarge clearly states that electronic intercepts had, within a few days, convinced the administration and the Agency that neither the USSR nor Cuba had any complicity in the assassination. Since they already knew that neither Soviet Russia nor Cuba were complicit who did the Agency fear might be the objects of calls for a tough response?
Notice the specific structure of Mr. Robarge’s statement: “avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy theories.” I submit that this is the same motivation that existed in 1967 as stated by the CIA Chief of Covert Action in a dispatch to all CIA stations: “Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.” The CIA has told us what they were trying to hide. Not that disclosure of what they were hiding would implicate Cubans or Russians in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories but rather covert operations against Cuba that could “circumstantially implicate CIA” in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. They have been trying to hide information that could implicate them as an organization participating in a conspiracy because Oswald was not only under aggressive surveillance but was also being utilized in some capacity by them in active intelligence operations shortly before the assassination. Those operations were directed at Cuba. The ones they didn’t want to be asked about, as Mr. Robarge states, were “covert operations against Cuba,” not covert Castro assassination plans.
Please note in his article that Robarge is careful to specify the Castro assassination plots when he is talking about them. He is equally careful here to not reference them but, rather, more general “covert operations against Cuba.” Why were Phillips, Joannides and his supervisor promoted in the fall of 1963? Was it a reward for a successful domestic operation in New Orleans that was being exported to Mexico? We should be looking for information on Oswald’s involvement in those operations in any records that may remain, although I think George Joannides probably destroyed most of them.
But one thing I am confident about is that this Subcommittee may be certain that the CIA will lie to them. They have no respect for the law or this Congress. Please let me note at this point that even if CIA has been trying to cover up its operational use of Oswald in covert operations, that does not necessarily implicate them in the actual assassination. David Phillips and George Joannides may have been two of the most surprised people on the planet on November 22, 1963.
On a wider basis, I think that this case, along with many others, illustrates that government secrecy is a cancer eating at the foundations of our republic. It may be too late, but I think that unless we radically and completely reform the secrecy system, and the ease with which it is invoked and maintained, that it will ultimately destroy us. Maybe a simple golden rule of classification should be applied: If something requires that a government action be kept secret for more than a few years, then it is something that should not be done.
While we are at it, the Freedom of Information Act must be totally restructured so that the Courts can no longer just rubber stamp Agency determinations of what they want to keep secret. That system, as well, must be reformed. I was young when this all started. I was in 3rd grade at Cowen Elementary School in rural West Virginia when they gunned my hero down in the middle of the street at high noon in Dallas. I was a young, still idealistic, law student when I started working for HSCA. I am now old and battered, but still, somewhere in my heart, I hope, I believe, that this country may still be able to recover from this, to open itself up again to truth, to once again be an honest light shining upon the hill. May this Committee be that starting point. May God bless your efforts and this Country once again.
Can you provide us with an executive summary or an overview, please?Below is full sworn testimony from Douglas Horne to the House Committee. My highlights are in bold.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Horne-Written-Testimony.pdf 1. Chairwoman Luna, Ranking Member Garcia, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to appear and testify today.
2. I served on the staff of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board for the final 3 years of its 4-year lifespan, from August of 1995 through September of 1998. I was hired as a Senior Analyst on the Military Records Team, and was promoted early in 1997 to head the Military Records Team, serving as “Chief Analyst for Military Records” until the ARRB shut down on September 30, 1998.
3. During my time on the staff, in addition to securing the declassification and public release of military records related to Cuba and Vietnam policy, I was privileged to work extensively in the medical evidence arena, and to serve as the ARRB’s point man on issues related to the Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination.
4. Although the ARRB was not empowered to reinvestigate the assassination or generate conclusions, or findings of fact, the Board did choose to attempt to “clarify the record” of certain aspects of the assassination by taking the depositions of 10 persons who participated in, or were present at, the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy, and by later taking one additional joint deposition of 5 of the Dallas treating physicians. I served as the principal research assistant to the ARRB’s General Counsel, Jeremy Gunn, in preparing for, and conducting, our 10 depositions of the participants and witnesses to JFK’s autopsy, and was present at all 10 of those depositions. The sworn testimony of our 10 deponents, as well as numerous written interview reports of additional “unsworn” medical witnesses, were all deposited in the National Archives, in the JFK Records Collection, without comment or endorsement.
5. In subsequent years, I wrote a five volume memoir about my own personal conclusions regarding the medical evidence, and explained the substantial ways in which the work of the ARRB staff significantly enhanced the totality of the medical evidence and our understanding of how President Kennedy was killed. Some outstanding questions were resolved, but many other questions were raised by the information we gathered---questions that remain unresolved today.
6. Many Americans remain troubled today by the many conflicts within the JFK medical evidence, and what they might mean, and remain unsatisfied with the official conclusions offered up by both the Warren Commission in 1964, and the HSCA in 1979. Based on my work as an analyst at the ARRB and as an independent researcher, I have concluded that there are ample reasons for the disquiet of so many of the American people, to wit:
a.
Eight different sets of photographs known with confidence to have been taken during the autopsy on JFK are not in the official collection today, and never have been. b.
Some autopsy photos in the official collection at the National Archives are in gross disagreement with the head and neck wounds universally observed on November 22, 1963 by the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, and recorded in precise detail in their treatment notes that day, and in their subsequent 1964 testimony.
c.
At least two, and possibly three , JFK skull x-rays exposed at Bethesda Naval Hospital are missing today, and have never been in the official collection.
d.
The science of optical densitometry reveals that all three surviving skull x-rays are not originals, but rather, are altered copy films .
e. Two highly qualified and respected M.D.s who were granted repeated access by the Kennedy family to the autopsy photographs and x-rays in the deed-of-gift collection at the Archives
BOTH AGREE that the extant JFK skull x-rays reveal unambiguous and clear evidence of two head shots fired FROM IN FRONT of the President , contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission and the HSCA. The JFK skull x-rays actually reveal a total of three head shots: one from behind, and two from the front.
f.
The so-called “Harper Fragment” of skull bone, a crucial item of evidence signed for by the Presidents’ Military Physician, and photographed by the FBI, has been missing since late in 1963.
g.
Bullet fragments known to have been removed from President Kennedy’s body at Bethesda Naval Hospital were never placed into the official record, and are missing today.
h. The remains of President Kennedy’s brain following its examination were placed in a stainless steel container in 1963, but
the brain is missing today. That stainless steel container, and an original, signed autopsy report, were among materials transferred from the Secret Service to Senator Robert F. Kennedy in April of 1965; those materials, and others, were not among the materials returned to the U.S. government by RFK on October 31, 1966, via a deed-of-gift to the National Archives. The Kennedy family attorney, Burke Marshall, told the HSCA that Robert F. Kennedy had made those materials permanently inaccessible, without providing details.
i.
The fourteen (14) brain photographs in the National Archives today cannot be, and are not, photos of John F. Kennedy’s brain. They have been impugned by the official photographer at the brain examination, and by one of the FBI agents present at JFK’s autopsy.
j. The chain-of-custody of President Kennedy’s body prior to the start of the autopsy shortly after 8:00 PM on November 22, 1963 clearly appears to have been broken, casting even more doubt upon the reliability of the official autopsy report.
k. Navy pathologists arrived at four (4) sets of differing conclusions about President Kennedy’s wounds and how he died within the two weeks after his death.
The official autopsy report that is now in the National Archives represents only the fourth, and final, set of conclusions . This fact, perhaps more than any of the others above, is patently unacceptable in the nation that prides itself as the world’s greatest democracy.
7. The existing “deed-of-gift” dated October 29, 1966 that set severe restrictions upon who can view the JFK autopsy materials, and how they can be used, needs to be re-examined, and lifted. It has resulted in de facto suppression of these materials. Only by having free and unlimited access to the autopsy photographs and skull x-rays can troubling and persistent questions about their authenticity be definitively and finally resolved by qualified experts.
8. Finally, I wish to make a short statement about the Zapruder film of the assassination. Studies in Hollywood of the individual film frames---that is, state of-the-art digital scans of extremely high resolution---appear to show the use of visual effects---that is, animation, or artwork---to crudely and blatantly alter the image content in key frames. To state the problem simply,
the digitized Zapruder film studied by professionals in Hollywood does not show the massive exit wound in the rear of the head seen at Parkland Hospital, and by many witnesses at Bethesda during the autopsy, because it has been “blacked out;” and yet it does appear to show head wounds NOT SEEN at Parkland Hospital. We now know that rather than spending the entire weekend following the assassination in Chicago at the LIFE printing plant, as was originally claimed, the Zapruder film actually spent most of the weekend in the custody of the CIA in Washington D.C. and at Kodak’s main research and development laboratory in Rochester, N.Y. The attitude of one National Archives official, expressed in writing circa 2009, was that they “do not ever intend to take the film out of the freezer again.” This decision should be overturned, and the so-called, purported “original film” should be made available for appropriate inspection by qualified film professionals from the motion picture industry and academia (i.e., film schools), so that questions of authenticity can be definitively resolved.
END OF ORAL STATEMENT. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
1. My five-volume memoir, self-published in 2009, is titled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, and is primarily about the conflicts in the JFK medical evidence, and the ARRB’s attempts to resolve some of these issues with its depositions and interviews of witnesses. The fifth and final volume is about Dallas motorcade planning and the cold war politics of JFK’s administration---namely, his serious conflicts with his own national security establishment.
2. The eight sets of autopsy photos known to be missing are:
a. An overhead, wide-shot of JFK’s body taken from a stepladder;
b. Large bruise atop the right lung, taken inside the interior of the chest, after the lungs were removed;
c. Entrance wound in the lower right of the skull, with scalp reflected, taken from the outside of the skull;
d. Entrance wound in the lower right of the skull, taken from inside the cranium, after the brain was removed;
e. Condition of the back of the head, after embalming and reconstruction was completed, still showing an exit defect that could not be closed;
f. Negatives from a B&W film pack showing metal probes in JFK’s body;
g. B&W prints showing a large exit defect in the rear of JFK’s head;
h. B&W prints (and at least one color positive transparency) showing a small entry wound high in the forehead above the corner of JFK’s right eye.
3. My YouTube channel, titled “Douglas Horne With More on the JFK Assassination,” [@DouglasHorneJFKAssassination], contains several detailed presentations about many of the conclusions I have come to regarding the JFK medical evidence, and how President Kennedy was killed, and why. The most important presentations on my YouTube channel are:
a. The JFK Skull X-Rays, 1963 and 1979: A Trail of Deceit
b. The Two Brain Exams Following the Autopsy on JFK’s Body
c. The Evolving JFK Autopsy Report
4. The two highly qualified doctors who both agree that the JFK skull x-rays clearly show evidence of two shots from the front are David W. Mantik, M.D., PhD; and Michael Chesser, M.D. Dr. Chesser actually located the two frontal entry wounds on the lateral skull x-rays in the Archives. Dr. Mantik, in his 9 visits to the National Archives, uncovered clear evidence of alteration of the extant skull x-rays, using an optical densitometer. The principal alteration consists of hiding the blowout in the right rear of the skull seen at Parkland Hospital with a “white patch” on the lateral x-rays, which was a photographic alteration of the original lateral x-rays, made on the copy films, in a darkroom. He discovered a second alteration that consisted of an apparent (but “fake”) bullet fragment photographically imposed upon the copy film of the anterior-posterior (A-P) skull x-ray; this so-called “bullet fragment” on the A-P skull film is not only impossibly dense, and does not appear on the lateral skull x-rays, but it was not seen on the original skull x rays in the morgue, at the autopsy by two of the three autopsy pathologists; and furthermore, no fragment of that size (6.5 mm in diameter) was removed from anywhere on JFK’s skull, according to all three autopsy pathologists in their sworn testimony before the ARRB.
5. A timeline analysis performed by me while at the ARRB---requested by my supervisor, General Counsel T. Jeremy Gunn---revealed that rather than just one supplementary brain exam following the autopsy on JFK’s body (as is normally the case), there were actually two brain exams , of different brains, one week apart: JFK’s brain was examined on Monday morning, Nov 25, 1963; and a substitute “medical school” brain one week later, on December 2, 1963. Both exams were supervised by Drs. Humes and Boswell, the two Navy pathologists in charge of JFK’s autopsy. The photographs of JFK’s brain from Nov 25th never made it into the official record; and the photographs of “a brain” in the JFK medical evidence file today are clearly of the substitute brain examined on Dec 2nd. They have been disowned by the official photographer at the Monday, Nov 25th event, and by FBI agent Francis X. O’Neill---based on their sworn testimony before the ARRB. The photos of the substitute brain exhibit too much mass, according to FBI agent O’Neill, and are on the wrong type of film, according to photographer John Stringer. Furthermore, the extreme damage seen to the right cerebellum at Parkland Hospital is not present in the brain photographs in the Archives; the Archives photos show no damage whatsoever to the right or left cerebellum.
6. According to Navy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer, the two skull x-rays known to be missing were purportedly “oblique views” of the back of the head shot at an angle, so that the large exit defect in the right-rear of the head (seen at Parkland and recalled by most Bethesda witnesses) would have been clearly imaged in those skull x-rays. Dr. Ebersole, the radiologist at JFK’s autopsy, confirmed to Dr. David Mantik in a tape-recorded interview that there were actually six (6) skull x-rays taken. In most interviews, Navy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer said he took five (5); in one early interview with researchers Custer said he took six (6). Only 3 skull x-rays are in the Archives today.
7. The Hollywood research I referenced into the probable alteration of the Zapruder film has been conducted by Thom Whitehead and his spouse, Sydney Wilkinson, of Los Angeles. Of approximately 75 film industry professionals who have viewed their high resolution digital scans of the Zapruder film since the year 2008, 72 of them have expressed the opinion that the film has been altered. If true, then the 8 mm film in the freezer at the National Archives, stored at 25 degrees F for its preservation, is not the true out-of-camera original. For decades the Zapruder film---suppressed as a motion picture for 12 years by Time-LIFE---was viewed by JFK researchers as the closest thing to “ground truth” in the Kennedy assassination. Instead, it now appears that the altered Zapruder film may be the final, indisputable proof of a cover-up.
8. The re-examined chain of custody of the Zapruder film the weekend of JFK’s assassination now reveals that after the film was viewed by Dick Stolley of LIFE magazine and purchased on Saturday morning, November 23, 1963, that it was flown from Dallas to Chicago that afternoon by courier, destined for the LIFE printing plant. It was then re-routed by air to Washington, D.C. Saturday night, Nov 23rd, and the CIA’s NPIC (National Photographic Interpretation Center) made two sets of briefing boards of the film Saturday night and well into Sunday morning, finishing the briefing boards by 8:00 AM. Prior to the completion of the Saturday night briefing boards, Secret Service agents left with the film about 3:00 AM on Sunday and took it to Hawkeyeworks, the R&D facility at Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., where it remained on Sunday, Nov 24th throughout the daylight hours. Late at night on Sunday, Nov 24th the film was returned to the CIA’s NPIC in the Navy Yard in Washington, and a new set of briefing boards was made, by an entirely different work crew (Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter) than on Saturday night (when Dino Brugioni supervised entirely different personnel that did not include any of the Sunday night technicians). The Zapruder film delivered Sunday night to NPIC was a sanitized, altered film masquerading as an out-of-camera original. The two sets of original briefing boards made beginning on Saturday night by Dino Brugioni of NPIC were constructed from blowup frames of the unaltered, camera-original film ; they have now disappeared. Only one of the three sets of briefing boards made Sunday night at NPIC (of the sanitized film ) survives today, and is now in the National Archives, thanks to the JFK Records Act. In the film he worked on Saturday night and early Sunday at NPIC, Mr. Brugioni saw a head explosion very different from the head explosion seen in the Zapruder film today: it was much higher in the air , and was white, not red or orange in color. Furthermore, the film we know today only shows the “head explosion” in one frame (frame 313), whereas Mr. Brugioni told me in a recorded video interview in 2011 that there have to be frames missing from today’s Zapruder film---because he remembered seeing and studying multiple frames of the so called “headshot,” and that the duration of the headshot lasted longer in the film he worked with beginning Saturday night. A film documentary titled “The Zapruder Film Mystery” can be seen on YouTube, in which I study the film’s true chain-of-custody the weekend of the assassination, and interview Dino Brugioni of the CIA’s NPIC extensively about the briefing boards he made Saturday night, and ask him to compare the memory of what he made Saturday, with the Sunday briefing boards that survive today in the Archives. He definitively states in the video interview that the briefing boards that survive today are NOT the briefing boards he made Saturday night. The other comments Dino made to me about how the film he worked with looked different from today’s Zapruder film can be seen on YouTube in the French documentary titled: “L’Image 313” [or “Image 313” in English].
