JFK files released

CIA and anti Castro Cubans feature heavily in newly published documents

Welcome to my new Substack. Late to the party, this is my first post. I hope to write here every few days – or every week at least – with a combination of personal takes on news, mainly about politics, sometimes about faith, with analysis, comment and the occasional exclusive news story of my own. Most articles will be shorter than this one, and more like around 800 words, roughly the length of a page lead or column in a newspaper. And though I’m writing unedited for the first time in my career, I’ll always try to keep the word count tighter than that of most posts by the rightwing strategist Dominic Cummings or, say, speeches by the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ever thoughtful and important though their many words are.

I’m a national journalist and author whose next book – Gordon Brown: The Inside Story – will be published in the coming months by Bloomsbury. I’m a former staffer at the Independent, New Statesman, Prospect and BBC One’s Question Time. I’ve written for the New York Times, Spectator, Guardian and Church Times. And I’m coauthor, with Mehdi Hasan, of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader.

As well as British politics – especially the Labour party – and the Anglican and Catholic churches, I’m interested in US politics, Islam, Judaism, the Middle East, the British and American cuts in overseas aid, Gordon Brown, ethics in public life, Scotland, movies, literature, the media, mental health and more.

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Tonight I’m writing about something a little different for me, but a hugely important and historical world story: The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Getty Images

A disclaimer first: Relatively speaking, I’m very much not an expert on the JFK shooting, and you can easily find a number of websites, podcasts and blogs out there run by those who are.

However, like many, I was gripped – from childhood – not just by the hope that Kennedy had represented, but also by the tale of his obscene and very public execution on 22 November, 1963. I come at it today with the curiosity of a layman, yes, but also that of a professional journalist.

I’ve devoured a range of books on the assassination, from those by the masterful Anthony Summers including The Kennedy Conspiracy and Not in Your Lifetime, which favour the inside plot theory, to those which claim Oswald was the lone gunman, including Case Closed by Gerald Posner, and Lee Harvey Oswald: A Biography by Mark Collins, as well as processing sections of the official 1964 Warren Commission whitewash and many articles, documentaries and films, including, of course, Oliver Stone’s JFK and JFK Revisited.

Recently, I was struck watching on YouTube the PBS documentary about the newsreader Walter Cronkite, JFK: One PM Central Standard Time, presented by the celebrated actor George Clooney and featuring the former (Democrat) president Bill Clinton, no less, which stated as a fact that Oswald acted alone.

I’ve argued over that point with many people over the decades, including family members. My fascination in the events of November 1963 wasn’t dimmed by my late mother, bless her, dismissing me as an insane conspiracy theorist on the topic and linking a spell of psychosis thirteen years ago to such apparent delusions, because of my conviction, held from when I was a boy, that there were at least two shooters targeting Kennedy ­from different locations (Anna Paulina Luna, the head of a new task force on the declassification of federal secrets, actually spoke of ‘two shooters’ in February).

Yet it seemed clear to any rational person that too many bizarre and murky incidents happened that day in Dallas for the theory about the so called single ‘magic bullet’ from the school book depository to stand up, from the movements of Oswald himself, to, say, the behaviour of the ‘umbrella man’ later identified as the late Louie Steven Witt, who, as the closest bystander to the shooting, flapped his black device up and down in the sunshine while Kennedy was brutally slain.

And that’s not to mention all the subsequent mysterious and premature deaths of those involved in the saga, from witnesses, to Oswald himself at the hands of Jack Ruby, the mobster with FBI links, let alone the motive of the CIA, which Jack Kennedy had allegedly threatened – with his brother Bobby Kennedy, his attorney general – to smash into ‘a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds’.

JFK, who had visited west Berlin only five months before his murder declaring to rapturous applause ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, had wanted to end the Cold War. He never lived to get the chance.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the current (Republican) President Donald Trump, for all his many faults, deserves credit for forcing the authorities – you could call them the ‘deep state’ – to release some 80,000 pages of the remaining files related to the case late on Tuesday.

But even on Tuesday afternoon and evening, commentators and supposed experts were claiming that nothing much new would be revealed and that the official line – that Oswald acted alone – would not be challenged.

Late last night the fresh files eventually dropped on the US national archives site. And while they are hard to filter without a pointer by a US official or administration insider, and occasionally redacted after all, and sometimes tricky to decipher, and apparently in a random order, an initial trawl shows there is much CIA chatter about anti Castro Cubans, both before and after the assassination, talk of aliases being created for CIA agents, and accounts of encounters years after the shooting, with E. Howard Hunt, a former intelligence official often associated with the assassination and who, the files show, tried (with seeming success) to persuade the agency of his ongoing loyalty.

This all matters because if there was more than one shooter, the world was lied to for 62 years by the official line at the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’. But for now, I’ll shut up and let the experts do their work over night and like you, await the no doubt imminent headlines. At the time of writing, the media consensus was that there would not be a bombshell that contradicted the Lee Harvey Oswald lone gunman theory. But as I hit the hay tonight, I’m not so sure. Either way, we’ll know soon enough.