CIA is accused of pouring cold water on legal efforts to force it to reveal the contact one of its spies had with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before JFK’s murder
- The CIA is being sued by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley
- He wants the agency to reveal more information about JFK's assassination
- Morley argues that he should be reimbursed for $500,000 legal fees
- He wants details of deceased CIA agent George Joannides to be made public
A former Washington Post Reporter who is suing the CIA to release data relating to the assassination of President Kennedy has taken court action to recover legal fees.
Lawyers for Jefferson Morley told the the appeals court in Washington that his bills have climbed to more than $500,000.
Morley is trying to force the government to pay his legal fees and to get the CIA to reveal files relating deceased CIA agent George Joannides. He has accused the agency of dragging its feet over the release.
Jefferson Morley (left) has fought a long running campaign to get the CIA to reveal details relating to deceased CIA agent George Joannides (right)
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in November 1963
Lee Harvey Oswald was a former Marine and Marxist who according to four federal investigations and one municipal investigation was responsible for assassinating the President
Morley believes Joannides may have had contact with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the shooting and later when he served as the CIA's liaison officer for a JFK assassination investigation in the 1970s.
President Trump in October ordered the remaining files on the assassination to released. Some 2,800 files were released at the time but the President announced 300 were being held back at the request of the FBI and CIA so they could be redacted further.
Mr Trump initially suggested the process would take six months but after talks with Chief of Staff John Kelly and the security services it was agreed the release should be sped up.
President Trump last October ordered the release of thousands of files relating to JFK's murder
However Morley argues that hardly any information relating to Joannides has been released - and that that until it is the full truth relating to the assassination will never be known.
In 1963, the year Kennedy was murdered, Joannides was the CIA case officer over students from Cuba eager to oust dictator Fidel Castro, who had seized power in 1959. In 1978, Joannides was named by the CIA as its contact with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The committee wanted to know more about the student group, which was called the DRE and code-named AMSPEL, usatoday.com reported.
It was part of the CIA efforts to undermine Castro. A separate CIA operation aimed to assassinate Castro, using the Mafia and assets within Cuba.
George Joannides, middle, being presented with an award in 1981 for 28 years of service, flanked by his wife and U.S. Navy Adm. B.R. Inman, director of the CIA
'Oswald had a bizarre interaction with a DRE member in New Orleans the summer leading up to Kennedy's Nov. 22 murder, in Dallas — to which Oswald moved from New Orleans. And just after the assassination, the DRE publicized that encounter with Oswald, and Oswald's avowed support of Castro,' usatoday reported.
'Committee staffers wanted to know more about Oswald and the DRE, but they were stymied by Joannides and the CIA, who did not tell the committee that the agent handled the DRE in 1963 was ... Joannides himself.
Morley's attorney, James Lesar said the CIA was trying 'to chill further efforts to open more records by making the plaintiffs pay for the litigation even when there's a public benefit'.
But so far U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has disagreed with his argument, ruling there is no public benefit in records relating to Joannides, who died in 1990. Other appeals court proceedings have sent the issue back to Leon to address finer legal points.
Monday's appeals court appearance is the fifth time Morley's case has been presented, Lesar said.
A ruling from the panel of three circuit judges could come anywhere from a month to one and a half years, Lesar said.
Most of the fees come from the years-long fight over who should pay, Lesar said.
Morley's lawsuit began nearly 15 years ago, after the CIA refused to produce any records it had on Joannides that the National Archives didn't already have.
Five years after that 2003 filing, Morley won a small vicotry. The CIA produced records showing among other things that Joannides had a residence available to him in New Orleans possibly around the time Oswald had a very public altercation there with a member of the student group.
Morley has emphasized that he believes that documents which remain unreleased will not reveal any big conspiracy, but it may prove that the CIA did know of Oswald before the shooting.
That would contradict the first investigation's findings that Kennedy's assassination was carried out by a lone-ranger, a completely random act that couldn't have been prevented.
Morley believes that Oswald may have been in contact with Joannides due to his noted involvement in the pro-Castro organization.
Researchers demand sealed files about JFK assassination be made public on eve of fiftieth anniversary
- Researchers are most interested in the file on George Joannides, a CIA agent who may have had a connection to Lee Harvey Oswald and acted as a liaison on a later assassination investigation
- All documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination are set to be released by 2017
Fifty years after the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, researchers are still investigating his mysterious murder.
Thousands of pages pertaining to the assassination are still sealed, and researchers are calling for a complete public release.
Jefferson Morley, former Washington Post Reporter currently suing the CIA to release the data, is most interested in a file containing about 300 pages on the now-deceased CIA agent George Joannides.
Call for transparency: Even fifty years after JFK's assassination, thousands of documents relating to the killing remained sealed
Joannides, Morley believes, may have had contact with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the shooting and later served as Langley's liaison for a JFK assassination investigation in the 1970s.
Who is George Joannides? Researchers believe that files on the CIA agent may reveal the suspected JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had a connection at Langley
The first official investigation found that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone, after failing to get a visa to Cuba and his wife Marina rejected his attempts at reconciliation.
Another investigation in the mid-1970s said that the assassination was probably a conspiracy, after discovering audio files suggesting a second shooter.
These contradicting opinions have led many to come up with conspiracy theories behind the president's death replacing the initial conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
Morley doesn't believe that the documents will reveal any big conspiracy, but it may prove that the CIA did know of Oswald before the shooting.
That would contradict the first investigation's findings that Kennedy's assassination was carried out by a lone-ranger, a completely random act that couldn't have been prevented.
Morley believes that Oswald may have been in contact with Joannides due to his noted involvement in an pro-Castro organization.
Oswald's membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was confirmed when he was captured by a local television station in an altercation with anti-Castro demonstrators.
But investigators later found that Oswald had pamphlets in his possession with an address of a local anti-Castro operation connected to a former FBI agent.
Researchers believe those pamphlets mean that Oswald was working with counterintelligence to discredit his pro-Castro group.
If that's the case he would have been in contact with George Joannides the CIA case officer for the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate - the same group Oswald got in a brawl with.
Counter intelligence: Evidence of Oswald's connection to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Researchers believe he may have been working from within to undermine the pro-Castro group
If Oswald was in contact with Joannides, it means that the CIA concealed the fact that Oswald was on their radar.
But Joannides connection to the assassination doesn't end there.
A second investigation into the assassination convened in the mid-1970s and this time weighing audio evidence of a possible second shooter.
In the end the committee reported that the president was 'probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.'
The committee sifted through thousands of CIA records, and their liaison to Langley at the time was none other than George Joannides,
G Robert Blakey, the committee's chief counsel, recalled how the CIA brought in Joannides to act as a middleman to help fill requests for documents made by committee researchers.
House Assassinations Committee chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, second left, meets with committee chairman Louis Stokes, left, before a closed session investigating the death of JFK
'He was put in a position to edit everything we were given before it was given to us,' Blakey said.
But Blakey didn't learn about Joannides' past until Morley unearthed it in files declassified years later.
George Joannides, middle, being presented with an award in 1981 for 28 years of service, flanked by his wife and U.S. Navy Adm. B.R. Inman, director of the CIA
'If I'd known Joannides was the case officer for the DRE, he couldn't have been liaison; he would have been a witness,' Blakey told The Associated Press.
Morley does not suggest the Joannides files point to agency involvement in the assassination itself, but more likely that their release would show the CIA trying to keep secret its own flawed performance before the assassination.
'The idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was some unknown quantity to CIA officers was false,' Morley said. 'There was this incredible high-level attention to Oswald on the eve of the assassination.'
Assuming that Oswald fired the fatal shot, he said, 'These top CIA case officers are guilty of negligence.'
Blakey isn't optimistic about getting all of the documents from the intelligence agency, citing the agencies lack of cooperation with three previous investigations.
'That's three agencies that they were supposed to be fully candid with,' he said. 'And now they're taking the position that some of these documents can't be released even today.'
'Why are they continuing to fight tooth and nail to avoid doing something they'd promised to do?'
According to the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all documents pertaining to the assassination must be released by 2017.
The act does offer a little wiggle room to agencies who can petition records withheld if disclosure would compromise 'military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations'.
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