If you were watching that hearing yesterday, taking a look at the newly released documents concerning the JFK assassination, you may have noticed Jefferson Morley as part of the panel.
He is the author of the JFK Fact Substack newsletter.
I came to the JFK story actually through reporting on the CIA, not through the literature of JFK's assassination.
When I first came to Washington in the 80s, when I first appeared on C-SPAN, I was covering the civil wars in Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua.
And to understand those conflicts and the U.S. role in it, you had to understand the role of the CIA, which is difficult, especially for a guy like me, a young reporter.
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I didn't have sources, didn't have a security clearance, never worked at the CIA.
So I had to educate myself by just talking to a lot of people, reading a lot, reading a lot of original documentation, understanding how the CIA worked, and what was the history of the CIA in the Western Hemisphere.
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That inevitably leads back to the conflict between the United States and Cuba.
And if you go into the deep history of that, that takes you into the conflicts of the early 1960s, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy.
But what Wynn Scott thought about the assassination, a CIA insider who had a front row seat and whose role in the whole thing was pretty shadowy for the next 20, 30 years.
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That was an interesting story.
And then my next book was The Ghost, which was a book about James Angleton.
Again, I was doing a biography of Angleton from his beginning of his career to the end of his career at CIA and looked at what did the Kennedy assassination look like him.
And same with my third book, Scorpion's Dance, Richard Helms and Richard Nixon, was the story in that book, the director of the CIA and the president.
That was really about Watergate, but the JFK story is kind of in the background between these two Machiavellian men.
So my three books kind of give you a view of Kennedy's assassination in the eyes of the CIA.
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And that's how I came to it.
That's how I came to the story.
And that's how I understand it as a national security event of deep interest to senior CIA officials.
You wrote about the recent release of information that if you look at it and search for fact patterns, you find things related to the CIA things you've talked about.
Well, you know, it's a familiar experience for me when the government puts out tens of thousands of pages of documents and I get a call like 30 minutes later saying, Jeff, is there a smoking gun?
And I'm like, well, I'm reading my third of 2,300 documents, so I'm not quite ready to pronounce judgment.
What it tells us is the official story that one guy shot the president for no reason and another guy came along and shot that guy because he felt like it.