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[wierd]

This is a period in time where confidence in the government's ability to handle things reasonably is at an all time low.

Should it actually be a real instance of the US Govt assassinating its own president to extend the vietnam war, as the conspiracy theories suggest, it would be pouring gasoline and lighting it on fire.

It would lend serious credibility to the noise that the Las Vegas shooting was a government action to stir up support for domestic 3 letter agencies, et al.

I am not saying that is what the classified documents indeed actually are-- but the ramifications of them maybe being interpreted that way is just the same as if they actually did. Fear is a powerful motivator.

[EnigmaticHat]

If its something embarrassing to the CIA, they're probably waiting till everyone who was alive at the time of the assassination is dead.  A lot of older Americans say things like "everyone my age can tell you exactly what they were doing when they heard about the assassination.  I still remember, I was _____."  Even if its something as mundane as the CIA grossly mishandling the investigation, they're going to face a lot more outrage now then they will in another 50 years.

Fake edit: That would... um.  I wonder if an intelligence agency has ever been replaced wholesale...

[Lord Shonus]

It is a fairly well-supported fact that a great many of the JFK conspiracy theories were created by the KGB as a distraction (this is also the origin of the "AIDS was a CIA bioweapon" theories, and there's some evidence to support that the KGB's successor agency was behind a lot of the 9/11 "truther" ideas). Exposing how the CIA learned this could quite easily expose who the US spies in the Soviet Union were in 1962, which could give clues as to who the US spies in Russia are now, as at least some of these agents will have been recruited by the earlier spies.

Very unlikely, but no intelligence agency is going to be sanguine about the possibility that their agents will be compromised.

[wierd]

That does not quite fit-- As I understand it, the rules concerning active classification require all information about active agents to remain secret, and redacted. They cannot become "unclassified" until after these agents stop being active.

Now, maybe there are "inactive" spies in Russia, who are now "improptu informants", who used to be active spies, then the soviet union collapsed, and they just kept living there, and they send useful intel every so often through unofficial channels.  I could see the 3 letter agencies wanting to protect these people, because they will be prosecuted as if they were still legit active spies, instead of just volunteer moles. (espionage law does not have a loophole for "I totes did it for free yo, so you have to let me go", and the reincarnation of the KGB is just as ruthless as its cold war incarnation.)

More than likely, I suspect that rather than protect agents, (which again, would not require extension to keep classified), it contains information that is unflattering to the 3 letter agencies involved. Unflattering could be anything from "shameless mishandling", to "Yup, we totally killed that fucker for wanting to stop that war." in this case.

[EnigmaticHat]

It is a fairly well-supported fact that a great many of the JFK conspiracy theories were created by the KGB as a distraction (this is also the origin of the "AIDS was a CIA bioweapon" theories, and there's some evidence to support that the KGB's successor agency was behind a lot of the 9/11 "truther" ideas). Exposing how the CIA learned this could quite easily expose who the US spies in the Soviet Union were in 1962, which could give clues as to who the US spies in Russia are now, as at least some of these agents will have been recruited by the earlier spies.

Very unlikely, but no intelligence agency is going to be sanguine about the possibility that their agents will be compromised.

That makes a lot of sense to me.  As I understand it little time passed between the CIA finding out about the election hacking and officially stating that it did happen.  That lines up with them having dealt with similar Russian misinformation campaigns for years.

I believe that conspiracies do happen, but they're usually simpler and less well hidden than "real" conspiracy theories.  The CIA actually having killed JFK... it just feels off.  It feels like this has been so examined that, maybe we wouldn't know, but we would have gotten a few tidbits implying the CIA actually did it.  What I've heard from the assassination conspiracy theorists sound a lot like they're grasping at straws.  Like I know the CIA is scary but what the hell was their internal culture like if they did that and no one leaked it?

[Lord Shonus]

You seem to have misunderstood me, wierd. I'm not saying that the CIA is trying to protect a list of active agents. I'm saying that information in the remaining classified documents might be enough to show who the agents were forty years ago, which could potentially give clues on who the agents were twenty years ago, which in turn could give leads to who the agents are today.


Keep in mind that there's already been some pretty "embarrassing" information in the documents already declassified. For example, the last batch of documents strongly suggest that the CIA covered up Oswald's connections with the Soviet government - because they did not think the USSR actually had anything to do with the assassination, but Oswald's connections were enough to make it look like the USSR might have, and that would increase tension at a crucial time (remember that the two sides narrowly avoided a nuclear exchange just 13 months before the assassination), and thus felt that covering up what they knew was in the best interests of the country.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It is a fairly well-supported fact that a great many of the JFK conspiracy theories were created by the KGB as a distraction (this is also the origin of the "AIDS was a CIA bioweapon" theories, and there's some evidence to support that the KGB's successor agency was behind a lot of the 9/11 "truther" ideas). Exposing how the CIA learned this could quite easily expose who the US spies in the Soviet Union were in 1962, which could give clues as to who the US spies in Russia are now, as at least some of these agents will have been recruited by the earlier spies.

Very unlikely, but no intelligence agency is going to be sanguine about the possibility that their agents will be compromised.

That makes a lot of sense to me.  As I understand it little time passed between the CIA finding out about the election hacking and officially stating that it did happen.  That lines up with them having dealt with similar Russian misinformation campaigns for years.

I believe that conspiracies do happen, but they're usually simpler and less well hidden than "real" conspiracy theories.  The CIA actually having killed JFK... it just feels off.  It feels like this has been so examined that, maybe we wouldn't know, but we would have gotten a few tidbits implying the CIA actually did it.  What I've heard from the assassination conspiracy theorists sound a lot like they're grasping at straws.  Like I know the CIA is scary but what the hell was their internal culture like if they did that and no one leaked it?

I believe we know about most of the CIA's crimes for that reason. Only smaller things would be missed, like kidnapping homeless people and testing bioweapons on them.

[Reelya]

The most likely JFK conspiracy theory is that E. Howard Hunt was involved. He's one of Nixon's Watergate guys who went to prison. A couple of E. Howard Hunt's sons say that he confided some info about the JFK shooting, and that him and a guy called Cord Meyer did it. For personal reasons mind you.

So who's Cord Meyer? He was a CIA operative who hated JFK because JFK made him take the fall for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Plus JFK fucked his ex-wife. Also, Nixon is on tape talking about how E. Howard Hunt was dangerous to have around because "he knows too much ... about the Bay of Pigs thing".

Additionally, Cord's ex-wife was murdered in an unsolved shooting within a year of JFK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pinchot_Meyer

She was married to Central Intelligence Agency official Cord Meyer from 1945-1958, and she was linked romantically to the late President John F. Kennedy after her marriage to Meyer. Rumors and tabloid press reports of her affair with Kennedy were confirmed by her late brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life. A love letter Kennedy wrote to Pinchot Meyer one month before his assassination surfaced in June 2016 and was auctioned for just under $89,000. ... Meyer was shot to death on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath on October 12, 1964, three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report, whose conclusions Meyer allegedly challenged. Meyer’s long history of criticism of the CIA, the timing of her killing, the CIA’s wiretapping of her phone,[9] and the effort by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to retrieve Meyer’s diary immediately after her death have prompted investigation of possible CIA involvement in her murder.

According to Bradlee's 1995 account – one of at least four conflicting versions of the events surrounding the diary[44] – the search at Pinchot Meyer's art studio behind the Bradlee house began the day after the murder. Bradlee says he and his wife arrived at the studio with tools to obtain entry, since they had no key, and upon arriving they found Angleton in the process of picking the lock with special tools he had for that purpose. "The fact that the CIA's most controversial counterintelligence specialist had been caught in the act of breaking and entering, and looking for her diary," Bradlee said, was not something he considered appropriate for public disclosure.

So ... according to Nixon's own words there's something we still don't know about which was related to the Bay of Pigs that E. Howard Hunt knew too much about to be safe to keep around. And whatever it was, it was absolute political kryptonite to Nixon's administration. It's interesting to speculate that Cord Meyer did in JFK as revenge over the Bay of Pigs demotions / wife-fucking thing, and that anyone in the know just alluded to that as "bay of pigs" so they didn't need to refer to the incident itself.

[Maximum Spin]

I'd just like to add that, contrary to received wisdom, in my experience, conspiracies actually work really well and are pretty easy to pull off without anyone leaking the secrets, even for years.

[EnigmaticHat]

Feels kind of like Clinton or Obama might have declassified that if its the case.  That's not that damaging if it was a rogue/former agent.  It does sound like SOMETHING was going on there, but maybe something more related to Cuba.

My big problem with the JFK conspiracy theories is simple: why does it need to be a conspiracy?  He was driving an open limo through a crowded street.  He wanted to be exposed to as many people as possible.  Even if there was a conspiracy in real life, there didn't need to be.  Its shocking and tragic that someone decided to kill him but its not a stretch that someone could have killed him even acting alone.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'd just like to add that, contrary to received wisdom, in my experience, conspiracies actually work really well and are pretty easy to pull off without anyone leaking the secrets, even for years.

Maximum Spin confirmed shitposting CIA agent?

[Lord Shonus]

The most likely JFK conspiracy theory is that E. Howard Hunt was involved. He's one of Nixon's Watergate guys who went to prison. A couple of E. Howard Hunt's sons say that he confided some info about the JFK shooting, and that him and a guy called Cord Meyer did it. For personal reasons mind you.

So who's Cord Meyer? He was a CIA operative who hated JFK because JFK made him take the fall for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Plus JFK fucked his ex-wife. Also, Nixon is on tape talking about how E. Howard Hunt was dangerous to have around because "he knows too much ... about the Bay of Pigs thing".

Additionally, Cord's ex-wife was murdered in an unsolved shooting within a year of JFK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pinchot_Meyer

She was married to Central Intelligence Agency official Cord Meyer from 1945-1958, and she was linked romantically to the late President John F. Kennedy after her marriage to Meyer. Rumors and tabloid press reports of her affair with Kennedy were confirmed by her late brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life. A love letter Kennedy wrote to Pinchot Meyer one month before his assassination surfaced in June 2016 and was auctioned for just under $89,000. ... Meyer was shot to death on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath on October 12, 1964, three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report, whose conclusions Meyer allegedly challenged. Meyer’s long history of criticism of the CIA, the timing of her killing, the CIA’s wiretapping of her phone,[9] and the effort by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to retrieve Meyer’s diary immediately after her death have prompted investigation of possible CIA involvement in her murder.

According to Bradlee's 1995 account – one of at least four conflicting versions of the events surrounding the diary[44] – the search at Pinchot Meyer's art studio behind the Bradlee house began the day after the murder. Bradlee says he and his wife arrived at the studio with tools to obtain entry, since they had no key, and upon arriving they found Angleton in the process of picking the lock with special tools he had for that purpose. "The fact that the CIA's most controversial counterintelligence specialist had been caught in the act of breaking and entering, and looking for her diary," Bradlee said, was not something he considered appropriate for public disclosure.

So ... according to Nixon's own words there's something we still don't know about which was related to the Bay of Pigs that E. Howard Hunt knew too much about to be safe to keep around. And whatever it was, it was absolute political kryptonite to Nixon's administration. It's interesting to speculate that Cord Meyer did in JFK as revenge over the Bay of Pigs demotions / wife-fucking thing, and that anyone in the know just alluded to that as "bay of pigs" so they didn't need to refer to the incident itself.

This in particular is one of the theories we know to be fraudulent. Among the treasure trove of information provided by KBG archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992 was explicit proof that the Hunt story was one of the false claims manufactured and distributed by the KGB. The alleged "deathbed confession" provided when Hunt died in 2007 was rejected by the media due to not being convincing, and pretty much everybody agrees that it was a cash grab attempt by the family members that survived him.

[redwallzyl]

I'd just like to add that, contrary to received wisdom, in my experience, conspiracies actually work really well and are pretty easy to pull off without anyone leaking the secrets, even for years.

Depends who is doing it.

[smjjames]

This is a period in time where confidence in the government's ability to handle things reasonably is at an all time low.

Should it actually be a real instance of the US Govt assassinating its own president to extend the vietnam war, as the conspiracy theories suggest, it would be pouring gasoline and lighting it on fire.

Add "exploding it to smithereens" to that analogy since it seems insufficient. Though yeah, it's only going to fuel accusations of "What the heck is the government hiding?".

Also, WH Chief of Staff Kelly initially told Trump not to call the families and that the only calls that really matter are from the service members buddies (I can easily imagine where Trump drew the wrong conclusion here), probably in an attempt to protect Trump from himself, which worked out well didn't it.... (last part was sarcasm, if not obvious).

[Starver]

He probably wanted to forestall his boss the workload, once the 38th Parallel becomes just a smudge between two wastelands.