What The Hell America!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with Part 2, a web exclusive, talking to Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive about the federal government releasing around 80,000 pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some say the documents have revealed few new revelations on the assassination, but these unredacted files are filled with details about covert CIA operations around the world, from the Vatican to Latin America.

So we continue now with Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst for Latin America at the National Security Archive. He’s researched CIA operations for decades, with a focus on Latin America. We’ve interviewed him on his books, like Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana and Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba. He is joining us from Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Peter, thank you so much for staying with us. Let’s start off by you responding to President Trump releasing these tens of thousands of pages on the JFK assassination, an attempt to show that the administration is, quote, “the most transparent administration in history.” Your thoughts on this and how this all came about?

PETER KORNBLUH: Yeah, there’s really three parts to the whole discussion of the JFK papers that have come out this week. One is the content that has been revealed in these long-held secret documents. We are getting to the final secrets that for all these years the CIA and the FBI and others have resisted releasing since the JFK law was passed back in 1992, so many years ago.

And that’s the second part of the discussion, the law itself, a precedent-setting law forcing the declassification of information, documentation, secrets, that probably would have stayed classified for eternity, had not this law been passed and forced them into the public domain.

And the final part of the discussion about these papers is Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize and weaponize his decision to finally fully implement the law. He is now casting himself as the transparency president. And, of course, if you look at what he’s done during the first two months he’s been back in the White House, he’s been anything but transparent, and he is systematically shutting down the American public’s right to know what is being done in its name, but really without its knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does Tulsi Gabbard fit into this picture?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, she is now the unqualified head of national intelligence. She is director of national intelligence. She’s the highest intelligence officer in the country, even overseeing CIA, FBI, NSA, all the intelligence services. She’s a coordinator of intelligence.

And she came out this week and said that Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency. I mean, this is really one of those alternative facts that we got used to during the first Trump administration, because in these first two months, you know, President Trump has started to simply erase websites that the U.S. government had on various issues, from climate change to education to, you know, to civil rights. He is basically firing the staffs of major information facilities, including the National Archives itself, reducing the ability for us to access historical documents. And, of course, there’s much that’s going on in secret, and the Freedom of Information Act offices are being reduced, and all the agencies, as well. So, overall, the public’s access to information is being gutted, frankly, being challenged by this administration. And, you know, the release of the JFK documents has proved beneficial for him to spin the idea that he’s all about openness and transparency.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you can talk about who DCI John McCone is and his involvement in everything from the Vatican to “the Agency’s covert financial support to political parties in the fight against communism,” unquote.

PETER KORNBLUH: John McCone was a very famous, accomplished businessman. He was on the board of ITT, one of the biggest corporations in the world in the early ’60s. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy fired the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, basically pushed him to retire, and Kennedy appointed John McCone in his place to be director of central intelligence. So, McCone shows up in a lot of these documents that have been declassified, because he was director of central intelligence at the time of the Kennedy assassination, and many of the documents are from that era, 1961 through 1963, ’64, ’65. So, a number of the documents are there.

And one of the great documents that my organization, the National Security Archive, posted this week is a document from what was called the “Family Jewels,” reports from inside the CIA on the CIA’s own misconduct and criminality from the early 1970s. And one of McCone’s top aides, Walter Elder, wrote a document, a report to Director William Colby in 1973, that kind of recounted all the questionable misconduct that he was aware of. And among that, the revelations in that document that came out this week, was that John McCone was involved in various communications with the Vatican that, according to Elder, would raise eyebrows, could and would raise eyebrows, according to the document, and that he was in touch with two popes during those years. This opens the door to kind of a whole history that is unknown of CIA connections to the Vatican and to what degree the Vatican was assisting CIA covert operations around the world. And that is a history that really is unknown and begs for revelation.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you learned about Cuba in the Kennedy assassination files that have been released? I mean, you who knows so much about it. What really shocked you and surprised you in these tens of thousands of pages, if you’ve gotten through all of them or most of them?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, nothing shocked me or surprised me, because we already have an extraordinarily infamous history that we know about, deriving mostly from the Church Committee investigations of the mid-1970s. And many of those documents that the Church Committee saw on Cuba, on efforts to assassinate Castro, on covert operations against Cuba, you know, many of those are included in this Kennedy collection, because Cuba was, you know, identified by the right-wingers as part of the conspiracy against Kennedy. And then, on the left, you know, the idea was that the CIA killed Kennedy because he abandoned them at the Bay of Pigs. But all the conspiracy theories have Cuba in the middle of them, one way or another, so a lot of the Cuba documents were included in the JFK collection.

And we’ve learned, you know, new details. We’ve learned how the CIA goes about contaminating a boatload, a cargoload of sugar exports from Cuba to the USSR, how they managed to get into a warehouse where the sugar was stored before it was being loaded on the boat, contaminated 800 bags, and wrote about in its reports on its successes against Cuba, you know, how this entire expensive load of sugar would get to the USSR, and when it was all put together, it would be completely ruined. And everybody who drank sugar or used it in their coffee or put it in their meals would hate it. And this would, you know, basically destroy Cuba’s ability to send sugar to the USSR. I mean, those are incredibly interesting details.

We’ve learned that many countries, that we didn’t know about, were supporting secretly CIA covert operations against Cuba. And that’s going to be very important —

AMY GOODMAN: Which countries, Peter?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the countries ranged from Canada to Mexico to Greece and Spain and England and a number of others. You know, again, this is old history from the early ’60s, but it certainly will be interesting for, you know, the citizens of those countries to know that history and perhaps push to learn more about it from their own governments.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter, can you talk about how Oliver Stone’s movie blockbuster JFK led to Congress passing the 1992 JFK Act, and how your organization, the National Security Archive, played a role in sorting through the millions of documents that have been released since then about JFK’s assassination?

PETER KORNBLUH: You know, the JFK Act, Records Act, is so important, and I can’t stress this enough. It should be a precedent, should be a model for other major declassifications of collections of documents. And the entire law and the whole ability of us to access these documents today derives from a conspiracy-laden movie that Oliver Stone made in the early 1990s simply called JFK. Many of your audience, many in your audience, I’m sure, saw the movie.

The movie was about a district attorney in New Orleans, James Garrison, and his efforts to prosecute a local businessman there for killing JFK, and then his expansion of his conspiracy theories to include the CIA and the FBI. His efforts to prosecute people there led to, I think, the suicide of one of the defendants and the acquittal, in like less than an hour, of another defendant.

And so, it was all bogus. It was just a malicious, cruel and baseless prosecution. But conspiracy theorists kind of, you know, found it compelling, and Oliver Stone thought it was good enough to cast Kevin Costner as James Garrison and make a whole movie about it.

At the very end of the movie, a scroll comes up on the dark screen saying that none of the documents relating to the investigation of Kennedy and the Kennedy assassination have been declassified and that there were an estimated 5 million pages that were still secret after 30 years. And this outraged the American public. I mean, I think the movie captured the conspiracy-minded sense that, you know, secrecy was bad, and something was being hidden about who really killed John Kennedy.

AMY GOODMAN: Because at the time, it was 30 years after the assassination.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yes, it was just short of 30 years after the assassination when the movie came out. That’s right. And, you know, it was incomprehensible that the secrecy was still there. In fact, the secrecy itself was contaminating the American public, society, our institutions. There was no confidence in government, very similar to what we have now that’s being stoked by President Trump.

And so, to try and rebuild the confidence, the Congress realized that it had to be transparent and pass a law that really forced the declassification, the full declassification, of these documents, millions of pages, creating an independent board to oversee them, defining a Kennedy assassination-related record in very broad terms, that has led to including all these CIA and FBI records that we might not otherwise have seen. And, you know, this is extremely important. It has yielded so much incredible information. It literally has lifted the shroud of secrecy over CIA covert operations around the world in a way that we never would have learned about without this particular law.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Peter Kornbluh, if you could give Trump a list of government documents that you want to see declassified, what would be some of the top documents you want out?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, we’d like to see declassified, at least in part, all the documents that he took when he left office after his first term, that he took to Mar-a-Lago and that he attempted to keep, even after the U.S. government, the National Archives, had asked him to return them. We would like to see the — 

AMY GOODMAN: And he apparently, by the way — you heard that he apparently took those documents back now and sent them back to Mar-a-Lago.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yes, they’ve been returned to him, and which, in itself, raises a lot of issues, legal issues, about highly classified records being not secure at his estate in Florida.

We would like to know about what his conversations with Vladimir Putin were about. You’ll remember an incident where he had a private conversation in Europe with Putin, and the interpreter was there, and he took the interpreter’s notes afterwards and walked off with them. We would like those notes. We would like any memcons, memoranda of conversation, of all the conversations he’s had with Vladimir Putin.

We would certainly like to see many of the discussions that he had in the Oval Office about January 6th, both before, during and after. There’s quite a record.

In my case, I would like to see the documents that he used to put Cuba on the terrorism list, which — where it doesn’t belong. I think those were politicized. And someday we’ll get those declassified, I hope.

And, of course, we’d like to know about his, you know, covert policies, and we’d like to know what’s going on today vis-à-vis covert operations against Cuba and Venezuela and many other countries.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, I want to thank you so much for spending this time, senior analyst for Latin America at the National Security Archive, co-editor of the recent report, ”CIA Covert Ops: Kennedy Assassination Records Lift Veil of Secrecy.” We will link to your piece coming out in The Nation magazine today. And if you want to see Part 1 of our discussion with Peter, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.