Black Op Audio: Black Op Radio
Panel 1 - John Newman, Jeff Morley and Jim Lesar:
There is also a group of records, I don’t know if they are classified as NBR records – they were a segregated collection, part of earlier investigations – we reviewed them but required less evidence for protection of the records, so there is information protected in there.
Now I want to go through some of the examples of the redactions we did, as I think that will be an interesting part of the records to be released.
Panel 1 - John Newman, Jeff Morley and Jim Lesar:
CAPA Legal Committee Co-chair Larry Schnapf of Panel II:
Federal Judge John R. Tunheism – Former
Chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board – CAPA Press Conference –
National Press Club – March 16, 2017
Andrew Kreig: Please welcome our chairman
Dr. Cyril Wecht.
Dr. Cyril Wecht: Thank you Andrew. I want to start by
thanking Andrew Kreig for organizing this on behalf of CAPA, he has done this
essentially as a one man show and we are most grateful to him. I want to
welcome all of you here on behalf of CAPA and thank you for coming. This is an
important year, as you will hear from all of our speakers, but I want to move
along and introduce our guest of honor and principle speaker is Judge John
Tunheim, who I have learned grew up a half an hour from the Canadian border,
and he is subject to deportation at any time (laughter). After graduating from
Concordia College, he attended the University of Minnesota School of Law,
practiced privately and then became affiliated with the Minnesota court of law.
In 1994 Judge Tunheim was appointed chairman of the Assassination
Records Review Board (ARRB), and continued in that capacity until they finished
up in 1998.
The huge community of Warren Commission critic researchers,
and the huge majority 65 to 80 percent of Americans who reject the Warren Commission
conclusions, owe John Tunheim a gratitude of debt. My wife is from Norway and
we were discussing the correct pronunciation of Tunheim. We all owe Judge
Tunheim a tremendous debt, he as chairman of the ARRB led the way, opened the
door and broadened the horizons that had been perhaps opened earlier by outstanding
critics, some of whom are here today to speak, and others of our brethren are
regrettably have departed.
The work he did and the way in which they dealt with
this in an objective, firm and dynamic but extremely honorable fashion laid the
groundwork that that we continue to follow on that track since, and we are
delighted to have him here.
In 1995 he was appointed a federal judge by President
Clinton, a kind of birthday gift, and the past several years since 2010 he has
been the chief federal judge of the federal district court in Minneapolis, in Minnesota.
We thank you very much for coming here, and is waiting on a jury in a trial at
which he has just presided.
Judge Tunheim:
Thank you very much Cyril, it’s always great to be
back with so many familiar faces. I’m glad to be here with you today to talk
about the records that should be released this year according to the JFK Act.
As many of you probably know the story of the
Assassinations Records Review Board – really put together by an Act of Congress
– following up on Oliver Stone’s movie in 1991 and the public demand for Congress
to release the files, overcoming some steadfast opposition to the law at the
time by President Bush, eventual pass of the Records Collection Act of 1992 that
set up a process of review of classified information. I have suggestions for
improvements the next time this is done, but by and large it worked very well.
There were some problems with it. I was looking back this morning on dealing
with the identification documents being sent over at the time from the National
Archives that I was recalling were sent to us on five and a half inch floppy
discs, if you remember that, so it’s a look back in time to the technology we
had then.
We ran the Review Board for I’d say about four years.
When we were confirmed by the Senate after President Clinton nominated us in the
fall of 1993, we had to go through the Senate confirmation process and were
confirmed in the spring of 1994.
There were five of us who were part time, but we had
no appropriation and no staff. And we had stacks of documents that were piling
up from agencies who had been given deadlines much earlier preparing
assassination records for us even before we even had the opportunity to tell
them what an assassination was.
So fortunately I knew the White House chief of staff
at the time and he came up with a half a million dollars from what we all commonly
referred to as a slush fund for a rainy day or whatever came along.
We had three years to do the work with the possibility
of one additional year, if Congress approved. It seemed like that was enough
time. But we just did not anticipate just how many records on the Kennedy
assassination that had not released.
We contributed a little bit to the problem by
broadening the definition of an assassination record beyond the statuary record
by rulemaking, because we wanted to gather any record that conceivably could be
possibly related to the assassination in any way, rather than just what was strictly
defined as an assassination record. So we contributed to the problem but we
wanted to get our hands on everything.
I took the position early on that if someone suggested
to us that a particular group of records existed and may be relevant, we would
not pass judgement on that, and get the records in and find what could be
released.
The standards that was set up under the law was
terrific, being a statute that looked at a lot of records.
There was a presumption of disclosure for every
document that fit within the category of what an assassination record was, and if
an agency wanted to protect information that was in a record or that record had
to convince us by clear and convincing evidence, which is a relatively high
standard and we applied that standard carefully.
It was a balancing of need for postponement of release
of information verses the Public interest.
We took the position early on that that all records
had a strong public interest, so the standard had to be really high for postponement.
The areas that we were supposed to look at for possibly
postponing records were:
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Intelligence gathering activities
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Law enforcement documents,
- also methods of protecting the president,
but interesting not a single request came in on what would protect the
president.
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If it would affect the conduct of foreign
relations – which turned out to be a much more major topic than I thought it
would be.
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And also personal privacy which turned out
to be a very small category that only a handful of records were in.
So when we started out it took a while to build a
staff. In the fall of 1994 we were hiring a staff. We hired an executive
director David Marwell and went to work building a staff, so it took most of
that first year to gear up to get into the position to review records.
When we started the review process it was largely a
word by word review, and with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of
documents coming in, that just wasn’t feasible, and what was a thought to be a
three year time period[WK1] ,
it just wasn’t going to get it done.
I do think that in the end, my fellow board members and
I thought we could have gotten another year our appropriation was minimal each
year – our appropriation was I think about 12 million dollars a year, so it was
not a very expensive agency to run. I think in retrospect we could have used another
two or three years because we had to take a lot of short cuts.
Let me tell you how we looked the review process, as
it will give you some insight into the records that are coming up for review - which is a statuary deadline in the JFK
Records Collection Act of 1992 – it specified that any records that were not
released by us or any information that was redacted from a document would have
to be reviewed and released in 2017 and I understand the Archives is preparing
that material now for decisions, and I hope the agencies who have equity in
these documents – will be open to releasing these records.
We made one decision early on –we vowed that we would not
protect anything that was centrally involved in the assassination story no
matter who it implicated in the assassination - And I think that was a wise
decision.
Ultimately the board made voting decisions on
twenty-seven thousand documents and many
of those documents had issues of redacted information, so it was a fairly extensive
effort to get through everything.
The core documents which occupied most of our time as
a board - the documents that were more centrally related to the assassination -
had some kind of a close nexus to the assassination in our view, we worked on
those records word by word, we went through them very carefully, the vast majority
of them were released, unless there was some reason not to release certain
information. It really was a line by line review. The Oswald central file at
the CIA for example, was reviewed word by word all the way through so we could
release it– and we released almost all of that.
We were prohibited by law from releasing Oswald’s tax
records unfortunately, they were in those files, but by law we couldn’t release
them, we needed Marina Oswald’s permission that she refused to give, so those
records were not released.
But the other one I thought was interesting was the
Lopez report, it had been released earlier in heavily redacted form, so we
released that.
This centrally related nexus files took most of our time.
It became obvious after a while that we needed another
process –we expected in the four million records we expected to come to us. Not that many came. Ultimately close to 3
million actually passed over our desks and went through that process.
It became obvious after a while that we needed to
develop a faster process after we got past the records that were centrally
related. So we started to develop a faster track process after records became
less centrally related.
We eventually tried to convinced the agency to
something was called “consent releases,” when they asked for specific records
to be withheld - they saw the handwriting on the wall that we were going to
release that information I think there were 35,000 consent releases where the
agencies, for the lack of a better term, basically gave up and we weren’t going
to agree with their position and going to release it anyway.
So we worked that process through and we tried to
develop formats for the agencies to give us the information we needed to make a
decision.
Rather than have a two-hour meeting with 15 guys from
the CIA go over these records and have them making the arguments why we
shouldn’t release it – we started to focus on a document so we didn’t have to
meet ad nausea. So we tried to move from
meetings to a records based process.
There were a lot of files that were caught up in
Segregated files particularly at the CIA. The earlier investigations– this
includes the Church Committee records and WC – Warren Commission files where
the Agency segregated files that might be relevant, and there were huge rooms
of files, expecting them to be relevant, so we took control over them.
Once we realized that some of them were not actually
related to the assassination – they might be interesting, but if it wasn’t
related in any way to the assassination, we had no authority over it. Our authority
was over records that had some conceivable tie to the assassination. So if there was kind of overseas operation
that was put in the segregated file, but had nothing to do with the
assassination, we had no authority over it, so we developed this category of
documents we called Not Believed Relevant, or NBRs.
That is the bulk of the information that are coming
forward in 2017 for potential release. I think it may be somewhere around 40,000
– I haven’t talked to the National Archives people in a long time. That’s the
big bulk of records they are Segregated – part of the record, but not released
in whole – because we a made the determination that near the end of our time we
believed they were NBR – Now there may be some interesting stuff in there. There
may be stuff in there that in 2017 we realize that it is related to the
assassination but we didn’t realize it at the time. This is the only group of
records we agreed to postpone in full. The rest are redacted. There may be
records in there that you find relevant in 2017, but we didn’t realize it in
the 1990s.
Before you believe that this stuff isn’t relevant, It’s
interesting stuff, we made a determination – that we didn’t have time to review
them word by word – and go through that detailed process.
But I think, if I remember correctly this is the only
group of records we agreed to postpone in whole, everything else were
redactions of particular parts of records.
There is also a group of records, I don’t know if they are classified as NBR records – they were a segregated collection, part of earlier investigations – we reviewed them but required less evidence for protection of the records, so there is information protected in there.
Now I want to go through some of the examples of the redactions we did, as I think that will be an interesting part of the records to be released.
I also want to point out some of the obstacles we
faced long the way.
The FBI appealed the first five hundred and seventy decisions
– it was an appeal to the president. –this was not a process that was going to
court – it was an appeal to the President, and they began to appeal everything.
It was drowning us because we had to write a legal brief to the White House for
every one of the appeals. It took a lot of time until they eventually stopped
when they realized the president did not overturn us once, but it still took a
lot of work.
We also looked for additional records in private hands
or state or local governments. We held hearings around the country looking for
additional records, and a lot of additional records that caught up in the
sweep. Although there were some organizations that fought us for records, that
contested us for records over whether they should get it or we should get
I always said – “In 200 years from now what agencies will
still be around? I think probably the National Archives will be around rather
than some local institution.” But it was sometimes difficult.
One example is The Sixth Floor in Dallas, which has a
wonderful museum, but they were a tough competitor for documents. It’s a
wonderful place and I like it, but they were tough competitors for documents.
I think there was some unlawful withholding of records
by agencies. I don’t know that for a fact.
The agency people we worked with worked in good faith –
The CIA people were mainly retired CIA people,
contractors. They realized that it was good to get some of these records
released.
The CIA always has trouble releasing records because
they might set a precedent for something they don’t want to release.
So since we were actually doing the declassification
was actually a help to them.
They eventually realized –it was better for us to
release them.
It was to their advantage to let us do the
declassification. It was helpful to them.
I will say we found their filing system to be less
than organized. The FBI was the opposite, they were very organized, they just
never thought anyone would be looking around their card files in the basement,
but they were very difficult to work with.
Actually the Secret Service was probably the most
difficult agency – they were the only agency that tried to reclassify material
after we took office in an effort to keep the information away from us. And it
wasn’t information that was all that important.
They fought us on the Threat Sheets, and they would be
important since the president was assassinated that fall, so the Threat Sheets
would be relevant, but they fought us on that. I’m not sure as to what actually happened
there because it was after we left office.
There’s always the possibility and still the
likelihood that records were destroyed – thirty years had passed since the
assassination and when we were working. The 1960s was an era that was notorious
for people bringing home government files after they left office.
When the son of the staff director to the Warren
Commission called us and said that dad was dead and he had 18 boxes of WC
documents in the basement, do we want them? Well, yes we do. They should have
been government records but they weren’t because he took them home. They were
all obstacles.
I want to run through the categories for redacting
information. We did a lot of redactions, I don’t know how many in the end.
There were a lot of redactions we put a release date on it.
We were engaged in the awkward task of trying to determine
when a person would die.
Whether it was an intelligence document or law
enforcement record, if we felt there was some possibility danger would come to
them if their name was released.
This had to be proven us. If an FBI informant didn’t
want his name released -
We needed to get in contact with these people and if
the person was dead we released their name.
We decided that if the person was dead there was no
reason to protect them, although we heard plenty of arguments. They said, if
our little town knows that our dad was an FBI informant our reputation will be
ruined forever. But too bad, if the person was dead they didn’t need to be
protected, so we released it.
What day they would be released.
That part has gone by after all these years.
Some examples of the categories for redactions.
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The names of intelligence agents that appear
everywhere in these documents everywhere
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The CIA asked us for a blanket removal of the
names of agents that appear in these records. They asked us to redact all of
the names of all the agents who appear in these documents, and we felt there is
an interest in who worked on these documents. Unless there was a real danger of
disclosure that was pointed out to us.
-
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We added some dates but by and large we
released all of those names unless there was a danger and it was pointed out to
us,…
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There were a lot of names of NSA staff- we
did not find any names in there that was particularly relevant so we postponed
most of that.
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Foreign government sources who could have
been prosecuted for treason for having cooperated with the US government by
providing information, those names will come up this year.
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The pseudo names that the CIA uses – I
think we released all of them, and they gave the argument that if you release
it here they can track the name through all of the documents – and my response
to that is, “well that’s the point isn’t it?” If you want to track the names of
those people doing these things.
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We had a big fight with the CIA over
Crypts – a little device they use in their documents to protect names and
places -
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The location issue was particularly
sensitive, we released the locations within a certain window of time, so that’s
coming up.
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Some of the locations diagraphs we
postponed at their request – we did not postpone any headquarters or Mexico
City location diagraphs for the crypts.
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Surveillance methods, we agreed early on to
postpone the method of identifying a manner of intelligence only if they could
prove it was related to current operations - and there were some of those and they will
come up in the redactions this year.
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Station Locations was a fight,…. it was
the first time the CIA had stations released, even though everyone knows they
have them all over the world.
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I mentioned the Secret Service Threat Sheets
– I don’t really know what happened to those, no one was able to tell me if
that was still protected, if it was still protected, it will come out this
year. If they were protected they will come up
this year.
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Personal privacy issues remain so I don’t
know what will happen there.
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Two of the most cumbersome things was that
many of the FBI and some CIA documents had foreign government cooperation – and
the agencies insisted we had the approval of the foreign governments in order
to release the information – and that took an enormous amount of time. There is
probably more redactions in this part than there should be but it was hard to
get the right official in the foreign government to give his approval.
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An example is the J E Hover document on
Lee Harvey Oswald– and the subject was Internal security, from early 1960 when
they were following his trek to the Soviet Union. Part of it had been released
in the past in a FOIA law suit, but still a lot of it was protected.
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In the end we could not get the Swiss
official to approve the report on Oswald’s college where he said he was at, but
that’s an example of the kinds of things that was difficult for us. Some of it
was because we just ran out of time.
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So what’s out there besides all of these
redactions? And I think the redactions will be interesting to people –you will
be able to follow the course of these documents better without having the
redactions in them, and I hope they are all released.
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I don’t know if the agencies will start a
campaign to not release information. It’s a little bit different now. We don’t
have a board like us sitting there saying no, we are going to declassify it ,
and the Archives had decided they don’t have the authority we formally had.
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There are some documents I want to see out
- the KGB file. I was there – I came
very close to getting a copy of that file. It stands about five feet high when
piled on top of each other – they are fascinating –and detail what Oswald did when
he was in the Soviet Union. They are all in Russian but I had some read to me.
Norman Mailer was there earlier than me and had some released to him, he bought
some of them, and I offered to pay to make copies, but our relationship with Belarus
got worse and worse and I couldn’t get them out of there. I would like to get
them out. There is a full copy in the Kremlin as well. The original was sent to
Belarus – when the Soviet Union broke up the KGB files were sent to the primary
area of origin rather than kept in Moscow,
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Speaking of KGB files, there is a huge cache
of KFB records in Moscow dealing the assassination of President Kennedy. Back
at the time the Russians were concerned, everyone agrees there are a lot of files
because there was strong suspicions that they were involved, so they had what
everyone agrees was a pretty extensive investigation. I didn’t get any help
from the State Department despite they were required to by law, they didn’t
assist us.
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We had some help from Vice Pesident Gore
got some records from the Prime Minister.
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My attempts over there didn’t work – I had
the US Ambassador with me, but there was no indication that the government
supported me, so I didn’t get the support I needed, and they knew my government
didn’t support me so they weren’t going to give me anything.
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I often got questions in return to my
question - “What is your time frame on the records” and they would say, “What makes
you think we have records in the files?” I’d got a question back from them.
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I’d like to see that, that will probably
come out, so researchers have access to that, we paid someone to keep
negotiating that, but nothing really happened with that, though I thought they
would be very helpful.
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We have the Jack Ruby files from the HSCA,
Warren Commission and FBI – but not much beyond that. The prosecution files
were recently discovered in a closet in the last year or two, after they told
us they had no files remaining down there whatsoever. So I mean, there are
files in places that we just don’t know about because no one bothered to
check. Ruby’s lawyers files – I have
never seen them but something I think is something interesting as well.
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And there is this category of individuals who
we just simply now know more about today – and George Joannedes, is a good
example. Our staff was told that he was just a liaison with the HSCA, a kind of
a flunky – so they tossed it in the Not Believed Relevant category, but today
obviously we know different, so we messed up on that, but we were clearly
misled on him, and I think there may be others as well.
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We also worked with all the other agencies
– that they had a continuing responsibility by contract moving forward – we
were afraid the impetus would stop.
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None of the agencies have really followed
those requirements they agreed to after we finished our work, but I don’t think
that’s much of a surprise.
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So I – a lot of it depends on whether the
people in charge of these agencies that are looking at these records are going
to be cooperative in this or not.
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This is all stuff from fifty years now folks,
it’s not that important to keep protecting it, I think there will be stuff
interesting to researchers., it may be like looking for a needle in a haystack,
and interesting information once it gets out, and I hope we don’t follow the
latest line – which is to protect everything these days.
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Our recommendations on secrecy have
obviously not been followed.
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We were lucky to operate in the 1990s which
fell between the end of the Cold War and 9/11
After 9/11 that all changed. And if that
kind of attitude doesn’t change it will be a shame since its time to release
them after so many years.
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One more example I thought of is there’s a
bunch of stuff related to Mexico City, largely related to our relationship with the Mexican
government, and we received a full court press – not only from the State Department
but the CIA and other agencies as well, not to release because it was thought be
detrimental to our relationship with the Mexican government at the time. I
guess we don’t have much of relationship with the Mexican government today (laugh)
– It doesn’t matter anymore – but the political party in charge then is no longer the controlling party in Mexico today.
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So our Cooperation with Mexican Government
during that time, and intelligence activities in the 1960s – there’s no real
reason to protect that anymore, so that is a good example of a larger group of
material that should come out.
Questions:
Dr. Wecht: Please keep your questions as succinct and
focused as possible and I’d like to give the news media people here and give
them first crack. Yes, Mam?
Question – from women – from WWW –I just wanted to ask
the judge if there’s been any discussion directly with the White House – or if
you have any idea what Mr. Trump or senior officials thought about this release date or whether they want to block
it or not?
Tunheim: To my knowledge there has been no
communication what so ever. And I’m not sure if they are even aware. Maybe they
are aware by now, The White House Counsel
should be aware that this date is upon us, but I’ve heard nothing and I’m not
aware of anything that’s been said yet from the White House.
Alan Dale: The ARRB did a good job. Thank you for your
service. What was your personal reaction when a federal agent said: “I’m
sorry I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
Tunheim: Yes we had that situation, perhaps not
precisely those words, but similar at the beginning when we had meetings with the operations
people and some of the declassifiers, especially at the CIA – we said we wanted specific facts that
support the idea as to why information should be postponed – and they would say “we
can’t tell you that,” and my reaction to that was, “Well okay, ten days
from now this will be released." and I could see him looking at the lawyer asking if we could do that. Our reaction to any stonewalling,told the that
it’s your obligation to provide specific evidence and facts that would warrant
postponement. And We did. If we didn't get specific facts that the document was released.
We asked for specific facts that warranted
postponement, and when they did, when they presented specific information that warranted
postponement, we did.
Russian – White House Correspondent and editor of RT –
(Russia Today) – I have a simple question – you said ‘needle in a haystack’
- what does that mean? What are you looking for?
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Tunheim: It’s something that’s hard to
find. When you have 40,000 documents for the lack of time we felt weren’t
relevant to the assassination – there might be something in there that might be
relevant, something that we missed, –so I think it close look at the records we
didn’t think relevant – remember the time pressures we had – to review what in
the end is a collection of well over 5 million pages right not at the National Archives. We made 20,000 plus
decisions, we were working part time with a full time staff, but it was a temporary
agency – in the last year we began losing the staff – and I don’t blame them. We should have said keep going until the job is done,
-
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I don’t know if there is anything
particular but if you look closely at that haystack you might find that needle
you are looking for.
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Karl
Gloven – Did the ARRB see the Operational Files – for instance of Harvey,
Rosselli, E. Howard Hunt, etc. Did you
look at the operational files?
Tunheim
: “We had access to a lot of operational files –There were operational files
and we had staff member dedicate parts of those files – as related – if the
agency agreed they were released – if not it was decided by the board – some
operational details were released. There were some parts of operational files
that were released.
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Paul Kuntsler: Robert Groden’s latest book
– has a 3page letter from John McCone – that discussed Oswald’s work for CIA….– Have you
seen it?
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Tunheim: No I have not seen it so I can’t comment on it.
Tunheim: No I have not seen it so I can’t comment on it.
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Dr. Wecht: Thank you
for your time and dedication and your comments that lay a foundation for what
we in CAPA are seeking as an organization – that is full disclosure.
