Why Are The George Joannides Personel Files So Important?

On January 18, 2024, another lawsuit was filed by the Marry Ferrell Foundation. This happened because the CIA continued to violate the JFK Records Act. It was an attempt, among other things, to get the full story on the CIA’s George Joannides.

It didn’t go well.

As mentioned, the big ticket item is the George Joannides personnel file. Here is a recap of why:

In 1963, Joannides was chief of the psychological warfare section of the CIA’s JMWAVE operation in Miami. Most documents related to his operations are classified. Additionally, his CIA cryptonyms "Howard", "Mr. Howard", and "Walter Newby" make following what we have of his released paper trail difficult.

Joannides controlled an organization in New Orleans (from December 1962 until April 1964) called the DRE or Student Revolutionary Directorate (crypto AMSPELL). This was a group of Cuban exiles whose members, led by Carlos Bringuier, had contact with Oswald months before the assassination. It's important to note that Joannides retired in 1976.

That is because in 1978 the CIA brought Joannides out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. If you remember I did a McCuistion show with Jeff Morley. He was the one who discovered in 2001 that Joannides “withheld information about his actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting.” The fox was in the hen house :)

Also at that time we discovered the CIA, through Joannides, was financially supporting the DRE. A few years back, investigators discovered the extent of the funding. It was $25,000 monthly or about $255,173 in 2024 dollars. Bringuier and other members of the DRE monitored Oswald’s activities while he was in New Orleans (April 25, 1963, to September 24, 1963) and eventually got into a fistfight with him. Immediately after the assassination, the DRE notified the media (Radio and TV station WDSU) that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union. Since the DRE was the first to report on Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, we believe they got the information directly from Joannides and passed it along at his behest. 

Joannides retired permanently from the CIA in November 1978. In July 1981, he was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. He died on March 9, 1990, at age 67.

As shown in the Vaughn list, although we have a photograph of Joannides receiving the Career Intelligence Medal, the text of the award is classified!

In 2013, John Tunheim head of the JFK Records Review Board indicated that:

There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s,* the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the Kennedy assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.

* From the "Oswald and the DRE" attachment they were covering it up well before the 1990s.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to release Joannides files in violation of United States Public law 102-526 Oct 26,1992.

Federal Register Publication (B) All postponed assassination records determined to require continued postponement shall require an unclassified written description of the reason for such continued postponement. Such description shall be provided to the Archivist and published in the Federal Register upon determination.

Everything was to be released by October 26, 2017 (25 years after October 26, 1992). Obama, Trump, and Biden have all shelved the issue.

In late 2022, the Biden administration released more documents and essentially washed their hands of the whole thing. Curiously, Biden is violating the very act he signed when he was in Congress. And so the lawsuits continue in an attempt to get the Joannides files.