From the Vatican to Latin America: Here's what the released JFK assassination files expose

The U.S. government this week released thousands more records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, long a source of fascination and intrigue. This is the final batch of JFK files after the federal government began declassifying documents in the early 1990s. While these latest files contain no major revelations about the assassination, they do include many previously redacted details about “the CIA global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments,” says Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, a government transparency organization and research institution. “Now at least we know what was being done in our name but without our knowledge.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show looking at the federal government’s release of around 80,000 pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While the documents have revealed few new revelations on the assassination, the unredacted files are filled with details about covert CIA operations around the world, from the Vatican to Latin America.

One document revealed 47% of political officers working in overseas U.S. embassies in 1961 were actually intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover. At the U.S. Embassy in France, the CIA had 123 undercover agents acting as diplomats. The documents also shed new light on CIA activity across Latin America, including in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Bolivia.

Those are just some of the revelations highlighted by the National Security Archive, an independent organization that’s been reviewing the documents.

We’re joined now by 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. His books include 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’s joining us from Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Peter, welcome back to Democracy Now! What’s in these tens of thousands of pages of documents that you’re continuing to plow through?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, we don’t have enough time to talk about all the details of the early 1960s history of the CIA kind of global effort to influence elections, sabotage economies, overthrow governments. But we’ve learned a lot more of the minutiae, the granular kind of side of these covert operations — names, places, shell companies, expenditures — so many little details that really complete, I think, in many ways, our sense of the universe of covert operations and what they targeted, how they happened, how they, you know, were organized. I mean, it’s fascinating from a historical point of view.

You know, the U.S. taxpayer, Amy, has shelled out a lot of money, for decades now, to have these documents kept secure and clean in the vaults of the national security agencies of the U.S. government. And now, finally, we are accessing this history that we paid for, that we’ve paid to — we’ve paid for it to happen. We financed the CIA with our money way back when. And now at least we know what was being done in our name but without our knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you write that on the day, President Kennedy’s inauguration in January '61, nearly half of the political officers serving in the U.S. embassies were CAS, C-A-S, intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover known as “controlled American sources.” What's the significance of this, Peter?

PETER KORNBLUH: Simply, the significance is that, whereas most people thought these were actually State Department officials in U.S. embassies around the world, almost half of them, almost half the people in these embassies, particularly using the office that was called political officer, were CIA undercover agents. It’s pretty incredible. As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out in this extraordinary memo, that’s been completely declassified now, to John F. Kennedy on June 10th, 1961, 3,700 officers around the world were CIA officials under diplomatic cover, in comparison to 3,900 of actual diplomats around the world. So it was almost 50%. And that’s quite an extraordinary number. And I think a number of countries will be surprised at the kind of level to which the U.S. embassies were being used as cover for the CIA.

Again, this is all in the past. It’s old history. We’ve known for many years that political officers were often used to kind of disguise CIA operations. And there were other parts of the embassies, too — the labor attachés, commercial attachés, etc. And then there were the CIA officers that were operating in countries like Chile and Bolivia and Brazil and elsewhere who weren’t in the embassies at all. But it’s a tidbit of covert operations history that certainly is dramatic and reminds us of what the United States was doing around the world and is capable of doing in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: In light of the U.S. cracking down even more on Cuba right now, especially young people may not know how many assassination attempts there were against Fidel Castro. Is it in the range of 600? And then I want to follow that up with a question about one of the JFK assassination documents being released about the inspector general’s report of the ’61 successful, if you call it that, assassination of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot. Can you talk about this?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the 600 or so figure about assassination attempts on Fidel Castro comes more from Cuban intelligence than from U.S. intelligence. Every attempt by any exile group that Cuban intelligence intercepted or learned about was added up, and those were quite a few. The CIA itself counts about 16 earnest CIA-sponsored attempts, which now have become folklore of covert operations history — exploding sea shells, poison cigars, sniper rifles, etc. So, you know, we’ve known about those assassination plots for a long time.

There is one document, an internal CIA inspector general’s report, on the assassination in late May of 1961 of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. And it’s quite detailed. It names the names of all the CIA officers involved, including their code names that they used in their discussions with coup plotters and the assassination team in the Dominican Republic. It names all the names of the coup plotters, as well, that the CIA was working with. The name of the actual covert operation, which was called EMDEED, and the actual assassination plot, which was called EMSLEW. There are a lot of details on that history. And, you know, you get to learn not only how the CIA works with foreigners to assassinate a head of state — in this case, the dictator Rafael Trujillo — but you also learn how the CIA goes about investigating its own wrongdoing of the past, the files that it keeps, how they are reviewed, what they yield, etc.. So, it’s quite fascinating from a historical point of view.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve done a lot on USAID and Trump’s getting — essentially shuttering the agency. You’ve covered foreign policy in Latin America for decades. Can you talk about the story of the USAID’s Office of Public Safety?

PETER KORNBLUH: You know, that’s, again, part of the folklore of covert operations. There was a famous movie made about Dan Mitrione, who was an officer in the Office of Public Safety. It was never completely proven that he was a CIA official. He was kidnapped and executed in Uruguay by the Tupamaros, became a very famous case. There is evidence in these declassified documents that the CIA did use AID as cover.

But, you know, that was a long time ago, and even if it was doing that, there’s still quite a bit more to USAID than CIA covert operations. And so, when we talk about AID being shuttered today, we’re talking about programs that were literally saving lives every day, providing food, food bought from U.S. farmers, by the way, by the federal government, and food, medicine, vaccines — quite a bit of support to many of the causes that we actually care about. So, it’s easy to look back on the older history of USAID when it was first started as a tool of the Cold War. The Cold War has been over for a long time now. So, closing it down now is simply a crime against humanity, frankly, in my opinion, because so many people will die and suffer and become ill and impoverished by this cruel act of simply closing the doors of the USAID programs.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, The New York Timesreports a senior official at the main USAID agency, which is being dismantled by Trump, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff. The significance of this, you as an archivist who deeply wants to understand what is happening and has happened in the past?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, there is a Federal Records Protection Act, a law that prevents documents from just being wantonly destroyed, erased, shredded, burned, as this email that you refer to indicated. And so, that was very alarming when that news broke and that email was shared with the kind of legal community. It also spoke to the issue of whether these documents might have been relevant in the ongoing lawsuits, the legal pushback by AID employees to save their jobs and save their institution, legal efforts that are underway right now. And those documents might have actually been relevant to those legal efforts.

You know, my organization joined in protesting that action. It was the subject of court discussion. We don’t know — we don’t have an index of what documents were actually shredded that day and burned that day, but, hopefully, at some point we will.

But that speaks to a different issue, Amy, that I hope we want to raise before we go, which is, you know, part of what’s important about the declassification of the John F. Kennedy documents is not just what’s in the documents. It is the law that mandated that declassification, which is known as the JFK Act and passed in 1992. And it was a law that’s probably the strongest law on declassification that’s ever been written. It created an independent panel outside of the national security agencies to oversee the declassification of the documents. It mandated that, with very few exceptions, the documents be released without censorship, without redactions. And this is a law that really is very important. Now that it’s been fully implemented, by, ironically, Donald Trump, you know, it’s a law that creates a new standard and a new precedence for openness and transparency. And it’s very important that, now that we have that standard, we apply that standard to the very administration that is in power today.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s interesting that while he’s released the JFK files, the Shabazz family is asking for the release of the Malcolm X files, which he has yet to do. Peter Kornbluh, in the last 30 seconds, I wanted to get your response to President Trump basically also shuttering Voice of America and Radio Martí, particularly the news, if you could call it that, agency that was broadcasting into Cuba U.S. propaganda.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, he has shuttered the Cuba programs. USAID had Cuba democracy programs, which were very objectionable to the Cubans. Those are gone now. Radio Martí, TV Martí gone now. That does not mean that Trump is not going to be pressuring Cuba in other ways, but at least the Cuba programs are gone.

People who look closely at the Voice of America will know that they’ve used our documents in many stories that they’ve done. They, too, are not the Cold War product that they once were, and had some value around the world for quite a bit of people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’ll continue in a post-show at democracynow.org. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst for Latin America at National Security Archive.