Investigative reporter raises new questions about Kennedy assassination

Jefferson Morley, former investigative reporter for The Washington Post, published a report on Tuesday morning, detailing new information about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and subsequent actions by the CIA that he alleges were part of efforts to mislead Congress.

From interviews with a confidential source, Morley contends the CIA had video documentation of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin who fatally shot Kennedy, taken in Mexico City prior to the attack. The source allegedly saw a film container at a CIA facility in Herndon, Virginia, labeled either “Oswald in Mexico” or “Oswald in Mexico City,” and dated September 1963. The facility housed other files related to the assassination, according to the source.

The source also claims to have reviewed a 40-50-page document put together by the CIA’s inspector general in the 1970’s at a separate off-site facility. The source believed the document provided a playbook to deter renewed investigation efforts in the House of Representatives on the JFK assassination.

No such document is part of the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations’ review, contained in the JFK files, or held by the National Archives.

When asked by WORLD about the credibility of his source, Morley insisted he has no doubts the account is true.

“The source is highly credible,” Morley said. “There’s no question that he had the security clearances, had the expertise in document retrieval, had the expertise in analysis.”

Morley believes his story is corroborated by a separate on-the-record interview with Andres Goyenechea, a former CIA employee who lives in Washington state. Goyenechea said his mother, Greta Goyenechea, also took photos of Oswald from Mexico City prior to the assassination while serving as base chief for the agency in Mexico City. She had been assigned to surveillance over the Soviet Embassy there.

Her codename, as documented in the Kennedy files, was LIEMPTY-14.

Is the video of Oswald important?

The testimony of Morley’s source contradicts the official record maintained by the intelligence agencies. The CIA has contended that it did not have any photo evidence or knowledge of Oswald’s whereabouts prior to his assassination of Kennedy.

Morley believes the possibility of the video’s existence, along with the other 50-page review, would clearly run counter to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collections Act of 1992. The law mandated that all documents directly relevant to the assassination be made public by October 2017.

Morley believes the current political climate and general skepticism towards many of the country’s institutions may prove useful to pressure the CIA into releasing files related to the JFK assassination which remain unavailable to the public.

Who is Jefferson Morley?

Morley has investigated the JFK assassination for much of his career. In 2003, he famously sued the CIA to force the release of files belonging to an undercover officer involved in the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination. Although he won several victories in lower courts, the case was ultimately dismissed in the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.

He has taught at the University of California on the history of the CIA, has published several books, mostly on national security issues, and worked as an editor and reporter for The Washington Post from 1992 to 2007. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale.

This is the first time he has used an anonymous source in his reporting about the Kennedy assassination.

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