Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

116. Gary Underhill's JFK Assassination notes


Compare:
72  Clint Peoples manuscript 


Underhill was a CIA agent. His great-great-grandfather had been a
general in the Revolutionary War, and his family had afterwards been
active in military-political affairs. Underhill had been military affairs
editor of Life Magazine and a by-line columnist on military affairs for
several newspapers.

Gary Underhill was well known in the Pentagon, being on a first name
basis with the very top brass.

Underhill's troubles seemed to start with the assassination. He left
Washington for New York, according to informed sources soon after the
tragic events in Dallas. In New York he begged his friends to keep him
out of sight. Almost out of his mind, he told his friends that he knew who
killed President Kennedy, and he was sure "they" would soon get him.

After a few weeks in New York, Underhill returned to Washington. He died
on May 8, 1964, of gunshot wounds in the head. Ruled suicide. The suicide
ruling had to overcome a report that although Underhill was right-handed
he was shot through the head from left to right. But the ruling was made,
nevertheless.

According to friends, Underhill was not the suicidal type. However, other
reports are that he had been under psychiatric care for several months
after the assassination. Underhill stated that the CIA had Kennedy
killed. He further said that the most active group in the assassination was
the Far Eastern branch of the CIA which was unhappy with Kennedy's
looking into their activities.

(Penn Jones Jr, Forgive my grief II)




Underhill also shared his fears with Asher Brynes, a contributing editor for
The New Republic. He fled washington DC, and quietly investigated the
assassination. When Brynes visited Underhill in May 1964, she found him
in bed, dead from a shot behind his left ear. The coroner ruled the death a
suïcide but Brynes disagreed. Underhill's wife would not talk to anyone,
and refused to share his writings on the assassination.

(Mal Hyman, Burying the lead, p. 417)


At some point during this early evening, CIA agent Gary Underhill
drives out of Washington, DC and heads for New York-and the home
of Robert Fitzsimmons on Long Island. (Fitzsimmons and his wife
Charlene, are longtime friends whom Underhill feels he can trust. ) Bob
is sleeping; Charlene is awake. Underhill tells Charlene that he fears
for his life and plans on leaving the country. ''I've got to get out of the
country ... This country is too dangerous for me now. I've got to get on
a boat ... I'm really afraid for my life." Upon questing by Charlene,
Underhill goes on to explain that he has information about the
Kennedy assassination and that "Oswald is a patsy. They set him up.
It's too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They've
killed the President! I've been listening and hearing things. I couldn't
believe they'd get away with it, but they did!" Underhill, emotionally
distraught, continues to explain "They've gone mad! They're a bunch
of drug runners and gun runners-a real violence group. God, the CIA
is under enough pressure already without that bunch in Southeast Asia
.... I know who they are. That's the problem. They know I know. That's
why I'm here." Underhill begs Charlene to help hide him, and she
consents to let him stay a few hours until Bob awakens-then possibly
Bob will leave Gary a key while the couple vacations in Spain, a trip
they have previously planned on taking with departure, ironically,
taking place this very day. "No, that's all right," says Underhill. "Maybe
I shouldn't leave the country." Underhill turns toward the door. ''I'll be
back in a couple of hours." He does not come back. Underhill returns
quietly to Washington and begins investigating JFK's assassination
on his own.

(Ira David Wood III, 22 November 1963: A Chronology)

118  Oswald's fingerprints taken off the rifle, the paper bag, and cartons at the TSBD



No fingerprints were found on any of the three empty bullet shells found in the TSBD, or on the intact bullet.
Nor were any prints found on the rifle clip that held the intact bullet and into which the shells must have
been loaded by hand.

(Warren Commission Hearings, vol.4, pp.253, 258–60)


Oswald's fingerprint records shown to the press on 22-11-1963

Lieutenant J.C. Day of the Dallas police examined the rifle, and found faint traces of two fingerprints on the
metal housing by the trigger. He took photographs and applied a protective layer of cellophane to the area.

(Warren Report, pp.122f)

Shortly before midnight on the day of the assassination, the rife was flown to Washington. Sebastian Latona,
a fingerprint expert at the FBI laboratory, examined the rifle and the photographs, but concluded that no
identifiable prints were present.The rifle was returned by the FBI to the Dallas police on 24 November.

(Warren Commission Hearings, vol.4, p.21)



:

July 7, 1978

Pursuant to your request for the undersigned to locate the fingerprint lifts
taken by the Dallas, Texas, P.D. from the rifle ( … ) as well as from the hand made
paper bag + cardboard carton, I have developed the following information to date:

Lt. Ken Johnson, DPD, advises he is in possession of the receipt fort this material
dated 11-26-63 as signed by SA V.E. Drain. The Lieutenant said he had occasion
to look up this file when a similar inquiry was made a short time ago by other members
of the JFK task force. He has now knowledge of any of this material having been
returned since.

Mr. George Foster, FBI, (…) checked with their latent fingerprint section. Although
he was unable to discover any pertinent information re the current location of these
lifts, he was informed of the long existing bureau policy which has always been to
return the originals to the source ( …)

I had conferred earlier with Marco Jackson (team one researcher) who indicated
Mr. Foster had informed him this material had been returned by the Bureau (no
agent's name mentioned) sometime around Oct/Nov of the following year (1964).

When I called this to his attention hoping to explicit more explicit details, (Foster)
stated Mr. Jackson apparently misunderstood him. He has no such information.

Mr. Paine, Section Chief of Latent Prints, reiterated Foster's information.

( … )

He indicated that the only sure way to accomplish my goal would be to
search the entire JFK file.

( … )

Sebastian F. Latona says he doesn't think this property was returned, Bureau
policy notwithstanding. This case was not routine, nor was it handled as such.

(From Jack Moriarty's 1978 handwritten HSCA report)

120.  330 CIA Joannides records


See also:
55   The PATHFINDER Files
238 Ten feet of 16 mm film

George Efythron Joannides (July 5, 1922 – March 9, 1990) was a Central Intelligence
Agency officer who in 1963 was the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the
agency's JMWAVE station in Miami, and in 1978 was the agency's liaison to the United
States House Select Committee on Assassinations.

(Wikipedia, retrieved 5-17-2019)



The redacted Joannides files illuminated two previously unknown aspects of the JFK story.

The first was Joannides’ role in an authorized and deniable CIA psychological warfare operation
that generated propaganda about Oswald. A job evaluation from 1963 revealed Joannides ran
a CIA-funded anti-Castro student group, the Cuban Student Directorate, known by the code
name AMSPELL. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Joannides’ agents published the first JFK
conspiracy theory, claiming Oswald and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, were “the presumed
assassins.”

The second story revealed by my lawsuit was Joannides’ obstruction of a congressional
investigation. In 1978, after the Watergate-era revelations about CIA abuses, Congress re-
opened the JFK probe by creating the House Select Committee on Assassination.  The agency
called Joannides out of retirement to serve as liaison with the Committee investigators. He shut
down their inquiries. Even under direct questioning, he did not disclose the Oswald-AMSPELL
activity. A 1979 job evaluation praised Joannides as “the perfect man” for dealing with the
Committee. In 1981 he received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal for “exceptional 
achievement.”
 

Intrigued, I sought to obtain another 330 records about Joannides that the agency withheld
on grounds of “national security.” In June 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected my
arguments and said the CIA had complied with the FOIA. The substantive part of the case was
over.

(...)

In his October 2017 White House directive, Trump stated he had “no choice” (curious phrase)
but to allow federal agencies to continue to withhold thousands of JFK assassination files from
public view– including the Joannides files. In April 2018, the National Archives reported that 
15,834 assassination records remain redacted, most of them by CIA and FBI. These files will
remain sealed until April 2021 at the earliest.

(...)

In 1998, the JFK review board asked the agency to provide relevant Joannides files. The agency
handed over exactly 11 pages of material. The CIA “fooled’ the board about the extent of the
Joannides files, Tunheim said. “We would release them in full today without a moment’s
hesitation,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer.”


Jefferson Morley

Of course, the fact that the CIA is sitting on thousands of JFK files in 2019 does not necessarily
mean the U.S. government is hiding evidence of a conspiracy in 1963. As President Obama said in 
a 2009 memorandum, “the problem of overclassification” is endemic in the federal government. I’m
pretty sure that 95 percent of the still-secret JFK files are historically irrelevant. It’s the remaining
five percent, however, that interests historians, researchers, journalists and students.

The files I sought in my lawsuit are a case in point. They do not contain evidence that Joannides
plotted against JFK’s life. They contain plenty of evidence that he abetted those who did, after
Kennedy was dead. He wasn’t in Dallas when JFK was killed. He helped run the coverup in Miami
and Langley afterwards. He died in March 1990.

(Jefferson Morley, JFK Records Suit Tests CIA Secrecy on Assassination, JustSecurity.org, April 30, 2019)

122  More than half of the records of the Garrison inquiry



Harry Connick Sr., who was the New Orleans district attorney at the time the movie was made, told me
that before Stone started filming in New Orleans, he and Kevin Costner paid him a courtesy visit. Near the
end of the visit, Stone asked him, "What about the Clay Shaw case? How do you feel about it?" Connick
replied, "I think it stinks, a terrible abuse of prosecutorial power." Stone, he says, became agitated by this, and
fired back, "How do you explain someone being able to fire three rounds within .. . ?" Connick forgets the
number of seconds Stone mentioned, or the degree of accuracy Stone said Oswald supposedly had. Connick
retorted, "I don't know what that has to do with Mr. Garrison bringing charges against Mr. Shaw." Connick
said the conversation became heated (Costner, he recalls, said very little throughout and did not join in the
dispute), and he tried to explain to Stone the role of a public prosecutor to be fair and seek justice, which, he
Stone, Garrison did not do. When I asked Connick if Stone was interested enough in the true facts of the
Shaw case to ask if he and his people could look at whatever files the DA's office had on it, he said, "No, he
never asked me. It was clear he had his agenda, and his mind was already made up." (Telephone interview of
Harry Connick Sr. by author on March 13, 2000)

(Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, p. 1358/9)


Bugliosi writes that Connick told him that Stone never asked about these Garrison files left in his office
when the famous director met with him before he started filming his 1991 movie JFK. Question: How could
Stone know about them without the HSCA document, which had not been declassified?

(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 172)


Sometimes an effort is made to destroy historical records, but someone steps up and saves the day. Like Gary Raymond.
A tale of 'missing' material that survived against the odds:

In 1974, District Attorney Harry Connick gave orders to destroy records of his predecessor Jim Garisson's JFK-probe.

In 1996, when Connick testified before the ARRB, he claimed the records, containing confidential grand jury transcripts,
had been lost when Garisson left office, insinuating Garisson or his people made them disappear.


Connick told the committee only a small portion of the records remain. Most of them, he said, had been stolen.

Then the records turned up. It appeared that Gary Raymond, the person ordered by Connick to destroy the records,
had kept them for 21 years. After Connick's fraudulent testimony, he turned them over to reporter Richard Angelico.


Richard Angelico and the records.

Angelico turned the records over to the ARRB, but also mailed copies to Connick-ally and CIA media asset
Hugh Aynesworth.

According to Raymond, Connick himself had leaked confidential files to two reporters for 1995 articles
attacking Garisson, who passed away in 1992. Connick denied that the files he shared were confidential.

Raymond was eventually sentenced to six months for violating secrecy laws. He was released shortly
afterwards on $10,000 property bond.

(Jim DiEugenio, Connick vs. Garrison: Round Three)

In New Orleans, the public hearing ferreted out a treasure trove of assassination
records, including long-lost grand jury transcripts from New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiring to murder President Kennedy.

Prior to the public hearing, the man who possessed the grand jury transcripts, Gary Raymond,
a former investigator on Connick’s staff, maintained the records in his home. As
a direct result of the Review Board’s hearing, Mr. Raymond decided that he had a duty to
turn the records over to the custody of the government.

(ARRB Final report, p.24)

I would estimate that what we have today is probably less than half of the records
of the actual Garrison inquiry.

(DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 173)