Deep state or imperial presidency? The stakes in the CIA historical debate

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.

Frank Church holds a CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975. Church initially saw the CIA as a ‘rogue elephant’, but later concluded that many ‘improper’ operations had White House approval (photo by Henry Griffin, via Levin Center).

The US Government’s recent release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination has caused something of a furore among prominent intelligence writers on this platform.

A number of writers at SpyTalk have taken issue with Washington Post coverage which implicated the CIA in the assassination.

We at SpyTalk immediately recognized the distortions—well, let’s call them lies— generated by JFK researcher Jefferson Morley, a former Post reporter himself and author of a well received biography of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary Cold War-era CIA counterintelligence chief who went mad seeing Russian moles everywhere in the agency.

In a response at JFK Facts, Morley accuses his critics of under-playing the extent of the CIA’s pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Morley’s campaigning has played a large part in establishing that George Joannides, the subject of recent file releases, was the case officer for the DRE, a Cuban exile group which came into contact with Oswald. The dispute concerns the nature of that contact and the extent of CIA involvement.

The only evidence that the contact was anything other than hostile comes from Jose Antonio Lanuza, A DRE member who told Morley that Oswald offered to spy on the Fair Play For Cuba Committee.

There is no direct evidence that Joannides knew of the DRE’s interactions with Oswald before the assassination. It’s only natural to consider whether the group’s CIA case officer might nevertheless have exercised a hidden influence, but the reality of such relationships is often complicated. Joannides’ career reports from the early 1960s do not suggest that his charges were particularly malleable. According to Lanuza, Joannides directed the DRE to reveal Oswald’s pro-Castro links after the assassination. One wonders whether they would have needed much encouragement, or tolerated much discouragement.

Yet the CIA does have questions to answer. SpyTalk’s critique ends by noting that the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) fingered Oswald as Kennedy’s sole assassin. Yet it is precisely in relations to the HSCA that the new documents are most significant, proving that the CIA appointed Joannides as a liaison to the Committee while concealing his role in the period under investigation.

As Michael D. Sellers writes:

Setting aside the issue of whether CIA had any role in the assassination itself, the documents do remove any remaining doubt that the agency obstructed oversight and manipulated the historical record. That should matter to anyone who believes in democratic accountability — especially when it concerns the murder of a U.S. president. (Comment: And as a former CIA officer it pains me to make that acknowledgment.)

It is tempting to see the proof of the cover-up as proof of the crime, but there are a number of other possibilities. One such is offered by Frank Snepp, himself a significant agency whistle-blower in the aftermath of the Vietnam War:

Former JMWAVE station chief Shackley brought many of his old Miami crew with him to Saigon in 1969 when he became COS there. Among them: Joannides.

This was just six years after the Kennedy assassination, and there was much after-hours booze talk at the Duc Hotel and elsewhere about JMWAVE’s failure — I repeat, failure — to keep adequate tabs on Oswald through the Joannides surveillance op.

Shackley’s detractors mocked the op as typical of Ted’s penchant for creating the appearance of effective field operations just to cover himself with the numbers crunchers at Langley. He did this in Saigon to such an extent that he was eventually caught out.

The British researcher Robin Ramsay once observed that ‘in situations where the shit is flying bureaucracies go into cover-up mode automatically,’ and that no doubt goes double for secret intelligence agencies.

There is much in Joannides’ broader career that the CIA might have wanted concealed from the intense scrutiny of the 1970s. As a covert political action officer in Athens in 1965, he is alleged to have been close to the Greek parliamentarians who brought down the Papandreou Government. That is the kind of backroom politicking that more worldly observers might wink at, but for the fact that he was still in post during the military coup two years later.

Whether the CIA gave the Greek Colonels a green light is much disputed, but its clear that Greece was the target of covert action in the years leading up to their takeover. Exactly the same is true of the Chilean coup of 1973, which took place when Joannides was heading Shackley’s Covert Action Staff in the Latin American Division.

As controversial as these episodes were, they are fundamentally different from the JFK assassination allegations, in that they could have been expressions of presidential policy.

How far that was true was unclear to many in the 1970s. During the US Senate’s hearings on intelligence in 1975, Senator Frank Church famously suggested that the CIA ‘may have been behaving like a rogue elephant on a rampage’ attempting to assassinate foreign leaders without White House authorisation.

That judgement changed as the Church Committee’s deliberations went on. Its final report concluded that ‘the Central Intelligence Agency, in broad terms, is not “out of control.’”¹

Most of the significant covert operations have been approved by the appropriate NSC committee. At the same time, the Committee notes that approval outside the Agency does not solve all problems since the NSC committees have approved (and in some cases initiated) projects that involved highly improper practices or were inconsistent with declared foreign policies.²

On this view, the real issue was not the CIA working against the President but the executive branch as a whole undermining the rule of law. A CIA role in the Kennedy assassination would not fit that paradigm.

As welcome as recent disclosures are, it would be naïve not to consider this as a factor in the enthusiasm of the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans for releasing new JFK-related files.

The administration is after all in the midst of a campaign of document releases to discredit the 21st Century intelligence community’s investigations of Russian political interference in the US.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard charged that ‘President Obama directed the creation of Intelligence Community Assessment that knowingly promoted falsehoods claiming Russia helped President Trump get elected in 2016. In doing so, the Obama Administration sought to delegitimize the 2016 election and President Trump’s presidency, subverting the will of the American people and enacting essentially a years-long coup against President Trump and the American people.’

In an op-ed for the New York Times, former DNI James Clapper and former CIA Director James Brennan accused Gabbard of rewriting history.

While some external critiques have noted that parts of the Russia investigation could have been handled better, multiple thorough, yearslong reviews of the assessment have validated its findings and the rigor of its analysis. The most noteworthy was the unanimous, bipartisan, five-volume report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose Republican members at the time included Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state, and Senator Tom Cotton, now the committee chairman.

Among the key analysts on Russian interference in 2016 was then CIA counterintelligence chief Susan Miller. ‘This had to do with our sources and what they were finding,’ she told the Guardian last week. ‘It had nothing to do with Obama telling us to do this. We found it, and we’re like, what do we do with this?’

Miller gave a strikingly detailed account of her CIA career to her old college newspaper last month. It included this nugget:

Throughout her career, she crossed paths with numerous consequential politicians: she briefed the then-president George Bush during a NATO summit in Prague, corrected Bush’s defense secretary for perpetuating misinformation in the same meeting…

Miller seems to have been in Prague in the early 2000s, in which case there’s a fair bet that the defense secretary was Donald Rumsfeld and the subject was Iraq. One wonders whether Gabbard considers that rebuke an example of deep state subversion.

JFK is a convenient subject for an administration seeking to revive the rogue elephant theory in support of a contemporary narrative. Yet the Church Committee ultimately saw the real danger of the CIA in its potential as an instrument of arbitrary presidential power. That is not a threat that the Trump administration seems likely to address.

1. US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-76 (Church Committee), Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976), Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence, p.427.

2. US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-76 (Church Committee), Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976), Book I, Foreign and Military Intelligence, p.447.