Cover-Up Continues After Newly Released JFK Files | Harry Berger & Aaron Good

## The New Release and the Rush to Closure The recent release of roughly 20,000 pages of long-withheld files about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has reopened a debate that refuses tidy endings. Rather than inviting patient, forensic sifting, the early mainstream response has been decisively premature: headlines and hearings proclaim the question settled, insisting that the newly available materials exonerate the United States intelligence community of any role. What emerges from the conversation about these documents is instead a far more ambiguous picture—one that accentuates long-standing patterns of secrecy, selective disclosure, and institutional self-protection. The key issue is not whether a single “smoking gun” memo exists; it is how the shape of the newly visible records, combined with the historical behavior of the agencies involved, complicates the official story and keeps alive deeper, unresolved questions. The exchange captured in the video stresses that haste and rhetorical closure are not the same as truth. Rapid declarations of exculpation from pundits and some politicians rely less on a methodical archival reckoning than on a politics of reassurance. The newly released pages do not contain a neat blueprint labeled “Operation Assassinate President.” Nor, however, do they provide the comprehensive, transparent chain of custody and explanation that a skeptical public would reasonably expect after six decades of partial secrecy, conflicting testimony, and procedural obfuscation. In other words, absence of a single explicit directive is not the same as conclusive exoneration. ## Patterns of Concealment: Files, Lies, and the Oswald Puzzle A theme recurring throughout the discussion is the distinction between direct, documentary proof of a conspiracy and the array of circumstantial and procedural indicators that point to organized deception. The newly released records intensify both sorts of questions. They confirm that the intelligence community had an extensive operational interest in Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination—surveillance of his movements and communications, files routed through particular offices, and an infrastructure of monitoring that was both deep and oddly selective. Far from being incidental, these patterns suggest management and manipulation of information about Oswald in ways that went beyond routine counterintelligence practice. Several procedural anomalies loom as especially telling. Surveillance on Oswald was extensive in certain moments and conspicuously absent in others, including critical windows when attention ought to have been heightened. Notices that would have triggered security follow-up were removed; file routing centralized sensitive materials in specific hands; and people who, by ordinary standards, should have been treated as witnesses instead became gatekeepers. These actions leave open at least two non-exclusive interpretations: either a catastrophic series of administrative failures protected by bureaucratic inertia, or deliberate steps taken to control what the public and investigators could know. The conversation leans toward the latter as the more plausible reading when combined with other documentary and testimonial oddities. ## Inside the Clandestine Network Beyond procedural quirks, the released documents and historical context illuminate a highly compartmentalized intelligence culture—what the discussion calls a “government within a government.” This clandestine network cultivated its own priorities and its own informal hierarchies, and it could reroute information streams in ways that insulated covert operations from democratic scrutiny. The conversation highlights how certain figures and offices functioned as chokepoints, concentrating knowledge about Oswald and related activities and thwarting outside review. Within this architecture, the logic of mole hunts, counterintelligence paranoia, and covert operations intersected in ways that could produce profoundly strange outcomes. A defector to the Soviet Union who subsequently engaged in provocative political theater in the United States—publicly denouncing or mimicking communist causes—could simultaneously be treated as an object of surveillance, a potential informant, and an exploited asset. When agencies route all reports about such a figure to a small circle, then claim ignorance or error later, the lapse reads less like accidental mismanagement than like purposeful opacity. The conversation underscores that the CIA’s institutional interests—protecting sources, denying embarrassing unauthorized programs, shielding clandestine tactics—offered powerful incentives for obfuscation after the assassination. ## Jack Ruby and the Silencing of a Voice One of the most combustible elements in the case is the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. The shooting removed the primary living person who could have testified about his own movements, contacts, and claims that he was a “patsy.” The conversation treats Ruby not as a peripheral caricature but as a central, revealing figure: someone whose social networks, legal defenses, and psychiatric examinations intersected with intelligence-adjacent programs and criminal circuits. Viewed in this light, Ruby’s act and its aftermath look less like a random outburst of grief-driven violence and more like a performance that conveniently prevented further inquiry. The handling of Ruby after the shooting—how his sanity was assessed, who represented him, who evaluated him medically—raises additional alarms. The use of psychiatric testimony to categorize Ruby as mentally unstable effectively neutralized the possibility that anything he might reveal would be credibly pursued. Moreover, the presence of lawyers and defenders with connections to organized crime or intelligence-linked programs complicates the narrative of a lone, impulsive killer. These intersections do not prove a state-directed assassination, but they do suggest a pattern in which institutional and extra-institutional forces functioned to contain and silence potential witnesses at crucial moments. ## What the Documents Reveal — and What They Conceal The newly opened papers provide valuable clarity about certain operational facts—finer details of surveillance logs, internal memoranda about contacts, and administrative correspondence that illuminate the bureaucratic choreography around Oswald. But the discussion underscores an essential epistemic point: transparency is not only the release of documents, but the complete and honest nesting of those documents in a coherent account. The released files reveal the form of concealment: selective routing, redactions that repeatedly excise key names and methods, and after-the-fact rationalizations that often fail to square with physical evidence or contemporaneous testimony. Equally important is the way the documents reveal institutional behavior across decades: repeated patterns of denial, the strategic use of classification, and active obstruction in the form of misdirection or withholding of witnesses in congressional inquiries. When agencies mislead investigators about the existence, authorship, or interpretation of files, the resulting vacuum is filled by reasonable inference and skepticism. That skepticism is not, as some insist, merely conspiratorial reflex; it is an evidentiary response to patterns of concealment. The conversation makes the case that accountability requires not only more papers but comprehensive access to witnesses, unredacted records, and an honest accounting of why prior disclosures were incomplete. ## Toward Accountability and Historical Truth If there is a normative throughline to the exchange, it is the demand that democratic societies treat their most consequential historical traumas with rigorous openness. Closure offered by spin and institutional reassurance is cheaper and easier than the slow, often politically costly work of rec

Cover-Up Continues After Newly Released JFK Files | Harry Berger & Aaron Good Trump released 20,000 previously classified files related to the assasination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. For more than 60 years, the CIA has concealed all sorts of evidence - which our guest today Aaron Good shows - points to a conspiracy involving the CIA to have the President killed. Why were these files classified and what do they reveal? Aaron Good joins independent journalist Harrison Berger to unpack the latest JFK files release. #M3 Congress held hearings this week over recently declassified JFK assassination files, 20,000 pages of material that the CIA had withheld from the American public for more than 60 years. Predictably, corporate media, as well as Democrats in Congress, rallied to declare definitively that these new documents absolve the CIA of any wrongdoing in the plot to kill the president. To help us understand what really happened, we speak with Aaron Good, a political scientist and historian known for his critical examinations of U.S. foreign policy. He joins me today to break down the latest file releases as well as the reactions to them. So, Aaron, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. #M2 Thanks, great to be here. #M3 I want to start with the New York Times' Julian Barnes, because he's apparently set a world record for speed reading, having read 20,000 newly released JFK files in a matter of days. He must have, because he's determined definitively that the CIA did not kill JFK. #M3 Thousands and thousands of pages of these super-secret documents related to the JFK assassination. So, given that history, what was your first impression when you finally had a chance to really make sense of them? Well, not to spoil the episode, but the CIA did not kill JFK. #M3 -- 1 of 16 -- Case closed. And if you watched the congressional hearings on Tuesday, you'd hear similar refrains from congressional Democrats. #M3 But you have said, I think, just to correct what you said, you have said, though, that there is no direct evidence as of today that the CIA committed the assassination. Is that correct? I would say that the fact pattern that has emerged in the last month shows culpability or complicity in the president's death. But no direct evidence, is that correct, sir? We have very direct evidence of the CIA's surveillance of Oswald. No, I'm not asking about that. I agree with you, sir. I mean, direct evidence that the CIA is connected to the assassination. All of these events connect the CIA to the assassination. I understand that, sir. I'm just telling you my interpretation of what's been presented is that I have not seen direct evidence. #F1 Previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy. So instead of giving a platform to conspiracy theories—and let me be clear, there are holes. I don't want y'all to think that I don't think there are holes. But when we're looking back, we need to look back so that we can look forward and hopefully do better. #M3 And ABC News echoed congressional Democrats, reporting that the hearings were an attempt to revive unfounded conspiracy theories. Now, there's no way that any of them have read the 20,000 new files released only a couple of weeks ago. So, Aaron, what do you make of both establishment media and Democrats in Congress reflexively dismissing the notion of a CIA plot to kill President Kennedy? #M2 Well, they are remaining true to form because since the assassination, in the decades since the assassination in 1963, the main elements in the U.S. which did not believe there was a plot behind the assassination were the media, the establishment media, the mainstream media, and the public pronouncements of politicians. But once you get beyond that, the politicians privately believed that there was a plot behind the assassination. I'm referring to LBJ himself, who came to suspect the CIA, and Richard Nixon, who believed that the people behind Watergate were essentially the same people that got rid of John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy himself sent a messenger to Moscow a week after the assassination to tell the Soviets, "We know you didn't kill John Kennedy, the President. It was a domestic right-wing -- 2 of 16 -- conspiracy." But JFK's policies, you know, ending the Cold War, moving for peace, these were going to have to wait because LBJ was too close to big business. So they were going to have to wait until RFK got to the White House to resume these plans. But of course, RFK gets killed before he can get to the White House under very dubious circumstances. Even Gerald Ford himself told a French president or prime minister, I can't remember which, a guy named Debré, I think, I'm probably mangling his name, but he told him that they believed there was a plot, but that they just couldn't figure out who did it. And of course, he was one of the people on the Warren Commission, and he helped to cover up the location of one of the wounds of the magic bullet, supposedly one of the seven wounds caused by this one bullet. He moved the entrance wound from the back to the neck, which didn't make any sense at all according to the death certificate or if you look at the clothes. Charles de Gaulle didn't believe that. Indira Gandhi didn't believe this. Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno, pretty much no one who was around the circles of power then believed it, but they all said that publicly. Even Earl Warren—it's pretty easy to surmise that he knew there was a conspiracy, but that his job, as he understood it, was to keep this from being exposed because he was told by LBJ, essentially, that it would lead to nuclear war because there was a Soviet hand in it. And when you consider that he was told this, and he was reduced to tears by the President, the Chief Justice of the United States, you can kind of understand why, even if he believed that Jack Ruby must have been some kind of underworld figure who killed Oswald, he could have believed that he was put up to it by national security people who were trying to avoid nuclear war by silencing Oswald. Who knows what he really believed he was doing there, but it seems that he thought he was stopping a nuclear war. Even the Warren Commission members themselves were not really unanimous. There were three dissenters: Richard Russell, Hale Boggs, and John Cooper. They spoke about this and even tried to get it included in the proceedings, in the report. Senator Russell was basically tricked into giving a whole presentation about how he didn't believe the magic bullet theory and had some other questions. There was a stenographer there apparently taking notes, but it was, I think, a fake stenographer or something because there's no record of it. He was basically tricked into going along with this. So really, nobody believed it at the time. Many people didn't believe it at the time, and more and more evidence has mounted over the years. So the New York Times is just doing what the New York Times does, which is acting as the publicity arm for the U.S. empire. #M3 Now, you and others have talked about a small faction within the CIA, almost like a government within the CIA, which is its own clique that could have perpetrated this assassination. Can you explain that theory and how these new files shed light on those connections? #M3 -- 3 of 16 -- Well, in particular, James Angleton emerges as a very sinister figure in the assassination. #M2 And if you watched the hearings yesterday, Jeff Morley focused a lot on the handling of the Oswald file. Richard Helms, who was eventually the director, but at the time was the director of plans under Kennedy, which is like the head of the clandestine service, was in charge of the dirty tricks. There are three officials that Morley has identified as lying about Oswald. One is George Joannides, who handled one of these Cuban exile groups during the Kennedy administration. Later, he was used as the liaison for Congress's investigation into the assassination, and he stonewalled them at every turn. It wasn't known until many years later that he was someone who really should have been a witness. He was a material witness that they should have been deposing about the CIA's potential involvement in the assassination. Instead, he was the liaison there to supposedly help them get documents. But in reality, he was there to keep them from getting documents. So this is very scandalous. So this guy, Joannides, had deceived U.S. officials about his role. And so had Richard Helms and James Angleton, who lied about how much they had been surveilling Oswald and what the agency knew about Oswald. As Jeff Morley documents, they had a big file on Oswald, and they had been reading his mail for a long time. So there's that aspect of it. They had him under surveillance. They were using him in different ways. It appears, Peter Dale Scott argues, and Jeff Morley does as well, that Oswald was being used by Angleton. They didn't emphasize this much yesterday, by the way, but they've written about this in the past, that there's much evidence to suggest that Oswald was being used by Angleton, ostensibly as part of a mole hunt. You say, oh, there's so much penetration that we need to have these kinds of, I think they call it a barium meal or something like you eat before you get imaging if you have cancer, and it's supposed to show the path through your body, and it might show vascular damage or it might show this or that, right? Well, that Oswald himself, because he was a defector to the Soviet Union, was a person of interest, and Angleton had all the files that would come up on him routed to him. Some of the information out there would have different names, spellings, and different errors, and if you looked at those, Angleton might somehow figure out who the mole was. If they were reporting this information that was erroneous in a particular way, they could figure out who was the mole. But in reality, what I would suggest they were doing was making sure that they would have a monopoly on what the government knew about Oswald in this way. So Angleton's a very deceptive individual, and I believe that this is part of what he was doing. They were reading his mail, they were keeping tabs on him. And on the surface, it seems, well, he defected to the Soviet Union. -- 4 of 16 -- He might be a communist. But in reality, his background is so strange, and his activities make no sense at all until you think, is he an intelligence operative? And then suddenly they make perfect sense. For example, he's in this public dust-up in New Orleans, where he eventually goes on the radio and debates these guys about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And he gets exposed as a former defector to the Soviet Union, and it kind of discredits the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which we know now the CIA was doing illegally, running operations trying to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. And when Oswald was in New Orleans doing these things, passing out these flyers, he was working out of the office of an ex-FBI right-winger who also used that office to work with Cuban exile groups to plan Operation Mongoose—kind of guerrilla operations, paramilitary operations, and so on. At one point, an outfit associated with this person, Guy Bannister, tried to purchase trucks in the name of Lee Oswald when Lee Oswald was in the Soviet Union. So somebody was impersonating him there. So Oswald seems pretty clearly to have been an agent provocateur of some kind working for the government. And that's never been explained in any way. So there's so much. And evidence, people say, direct evidence and indirect, you know, prove or don't prove. These are different. There are different standards of legal proof and so on. So, you know, what really constitutes—there is no file that says "Operation Kill JFK" and explains it in a one-page memo. There never would be something like that for an operati