Last week, I did my part to hold the CIA accountable.

I filed my sixth (!) declaration in connection with Morley v. CIA, my ongoing lawsuit against the agency seeking records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

My case is far removed from the House Intelligence Committee's investigation of the mysterious assassination program recently canceled by CIA director Leon Panetta. It has nothing to do with Attorney Eric Holder's controversial consideration of  whether to prosecute CIA officers for illegal interrogation methods. It is irrelevant to what Rep Rush Holt (D.-NJ) has proposed: a congressional investigation of the CIA as "intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago -- in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat." (Hat tip to Spencer.)

But my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, now in its sixth year, is a microcosm of the same basic question facing the White House, Congress and the American public: can the CIA be made to obey the law?


In my experience, the answer is: not easily. In this latest submission to the court, I did not bother offer a JFK conspiracy theory because I don't have one. Rather, my bone-dry 28-page declaration refutes a number of CIA claims made in a sworn affidavit submitted last year to Judge Richard J. Leon last November.

Who was George Joannides and why does his story matter? At the time of Kennedy's murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Joannides, using the aliases of 'Howard' and 'Walter Newby,' served as the chief of the CIA's psychological warfare programs in Miami. His assignment was to mount covert operations to confuse and confound the government of Fidel Castro so as to hasten its overthrow.

Joannides's duties, according my declaration and declassified CIA records, included guiding and monitoring an anti-Castro student exile group which was harshly critical of JFK's Cuba policy. The group made headlines within hours of JFK's murder by denouncing accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as a Castro supporter. The Warren Commission was not told of Joannides' involvement with the group. Fifteen years later,  Joannides served as the agency's liaison to the congressional committee re-investigating JFK's assassination. Congress was not told of Joannides' actions in 1963. Joannides died in 1990, having never been questioned by investigators about his knowledge of Oswald's contacts with the group he handled.

(If you want to know the Joannides story in detail, read here, here and here, then watch this video where I explain how the CIA at first tried to disavow any knowledge of Joannides' actions in 1963 and then had to backtrack.)

The Joannides file, say a diverse group of JFK authors, are part of the assassination story and should be made public. For six years, the CIA has refused, alleging their release would harm "national security."

In the sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, the agency's chief information officer,  downplayed the CIA's and Joannides' connection to Oswald's anti-Castro antagonists in 1963. Nelson stated that Joannides did not file the standard monthly reports on the group, known as the Cuban Student Directorate, in 1963 because of funding reductions and "policy differences." In fact, I showed that senior CIA officials preserved funding for the group up until one week before Kennedy was killed and that Joannides' boss credited him having it under control at the time that the group used CIA funds to link Oswald to Castro.

Nelson's affidavit, I noted, had relied on two error-filled CIA memoranda written in 1998. Those memos served to conceal from a civilian review panel the full extent of Joannides' contacts with anti-Castro Cubans in the weeks and days before Kennedy was killed, according to Judge John Tunheim who chaired a civilian review panel that declassified thousands of JFK records in the 1990s. "We were lied to about Joannides for a long time," said Tunheim, former head of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

The agency has 30 days to file a response to my declaration with Judge Leon. That response will be a useful measure of whether the CIA is responding to the spirit and letter of President Obama's executive order on the Freedom of Information Act.