JFK files expose family secrets: Their relatives were CIA assets | Hacker News Reader

JFK files expose family secrets: Their relatives were CIA assets

washingtonpost.com

83 pointsnabla963 comments

Movies portray spies as some special operations people. However, most of the academics in humanities are potential spies: they gather intelligence by offering fellowships, scholarships and grants to people from abroad to stay at hosting institutions' "Depart of Government", "Center for Peace", "Department of Political Sciences", "Department of Asian studies", "Center for conflict resolution". The targets are usually other Ph.Ds and others who are connected to the elite in the target countries.

https://archive.is/2025.03.22-210207/https://www.washingtonp...

Article from March.

A recent Ask HN:

Did someone dig into the JFK files?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43803060

“The file also reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the U.S.S.R.” How is it possible for Oswald to become a sharp shooter, then?

Practice, but you may prefer the 'telekinesis' theory.

I don't believe in telepathy, telekinesis, etc. I think, Oswald was not the shooter.

Do you believe Oswald brought curtain rods to work that day? Also how come his rifle, that he had mail-ordered, was found in the building he worked in right after?

I won't dispute the veracity of the fact that he mail-ordered a rifle, and the fact that he kept his rifle there. What is it evidence for? Did he really shoot JFK? Was he really a sharp shooter? One can answer that Oswald got lucky with his target. This, I am not buying.

Why does that matter? Target moving away from you is an easy shot. If you go to the Plaza you will experience how small the place really is.

The difficulty of the shot has been exaggerated by conspiracy book and filmmakers.

That sure is a long list of people at the end of the article who "contributed." Yet, there are only a few first person anecdotes that make up the spine of the article. Odd.

> The Trump administration’s release of more than 77,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has thus far shed little new light on the killing

We never expected it to. It has shed much new light on the conspiracy to cover up the crime. It also highlighted how an intelligence agency with no oversight was allowed to continually and constantly break the law and ignore the constitution.

A great story, but sadly, one the main stream media is just not interested in. For some reason.

> Some families are learning for the first time how parents, grandfathers or spouses participated in American spycraft

The CIA actively looked for American businessmen who could be useful to their operations. They called the "Clandestine Contact Service." It's about the lowest level of "participation" you can have in "spycraft."

> “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB. From the description of Oswald in the files he doubted that anyone could control Oswald.”

They just wont give up the cover up. Here we are 60 years after the _murder_ of an elected President and we're still playing these games. Ridiculous. If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

> He was a patriot, Dorothy said, and probably saw his work for U.S. intelligence officials as a way to help his country.

...and then:

> As a child during the early 1960s, his dad would leave for Vietnam and the family wouldn’t hear from him for a month or two.

There was nothing patriotic about the war in Vietnam. This whole article is revisionist deep state jingoist propaganda.

> If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

Stopping ‘a single “lone nut”’ is by far the hardest thing to do. They aren’t actively seeking co-conspirators so you typically have no idea what they’re planning until they take action if they aren’t blatantly stupid in their planning like trying to steal firearms or buying truckloads of fertilizer for non-ag use.

Oswald was in the FBI subversive file. The FBI was actively investigating him and trying to interview Marina. There was a field agent assigned to him.

He was removed from the subversive file ONE day before the USSS searched it before the parade route. They always search the file before a parade.

Had this system worked as intended than USSS would have shut down the Book Depository and would have held Oswald in custody for the day. Even Hoover himself remarked how unconscionable this all was and he punished several agents for it.

This _particular_ lone nut should have been EASY to stop.

> would have held Oswald in custody for the day

Preemptive detainment? That doesn't sound very constitutional, to be honest. Is it actually a thing?

In USA you can be held 24 hours without being accused of a crime. People have absolutely been picked up by cops and released the next day without apology, most recently the George Floyd protests in Portland, unmarked cops in minivans picked up protestors without any intent to prosecute, just done to break up the protest

> In USA you can be held 24 hours without being accused of a crime

Doesn’t there need to be probable cause to trigger the arrest? Thar be sketchy isn’t probable cause.

Probable cause is a joke. It's incredibly easy to come up with a suspicion that someone is violating a law. That said, they don't need probable cause to arrest you, just to do so without potential liability. 99+% of people don't have the money, time, or connections to sue the police for probable cause violations, and even those that do likely won't win anything substantial unless there are several incidents.

Even in legal theory, probable cause is not so well defined. In practice, a judge can be found that will agree with cops on whatever they say.

The legal system in the US rarely favors the little guy. Even if you have an ironclad case, the expense to sue isn't worth it.

Heard of "probable cause on four legs"? That's what sniffing dogs are meant for. They can use a dog to find a probable cause, and they don't need a warrant either. That's a carve out from the fourth amendment.

Reasonable suspicion is indeed the standard, but it's quite easy to fabricate if you're literally just trying to detain someone and have no intent of seeking a warrant or pressing charges. I can't imagine they'd need to fabricate much for Oswald, whom they knew quite a bit about.

Certainly, the FBI to this day regularly engages in much legally sketchier behavior with much lower stakes.

Edit: cf their weird habit of actively encouraging children to become terrorists

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/10/fbi-sting-isis-autistic-...

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/15/fbi-undercover-isis-teen...

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/31/fbi-isis-sting-mentally-...

Is this in the files they released now or prior, sauce please.

The secret service was amazingly incompetent for letting JFK ride in an open limo driving between so many perfect places for a sniper to hide. They made is so easy for Oswald. Why didn't they have agents in the buildings along the route?

>Why didn't they have agents in the buildings along the route?

Lol, I get it, but I'm pretty sure we've all settled on "just one shooter", or maybe "just one shooter, but secret service fumbled the AR getting into the car".

If you weren't making the reference I thought: some people believe that there were agents in the buildings around the route working together to shoot JFK - some with suppressed weapons and some without, so we wouldn't be able to easily localize where the shots came from by sound.

I think Oswald acted alone. I just don't understand why the SS made it so easy for him. JFK was served up to any sniper along the route on a silver platter.

It was a different time. Security arrangements were just a lot more casual then.

And even today the Secret Service occasionally screws up. The recent assassination attempt against Donald Trump made that obvious but there are likely a lot of similar errors which never get exposed.

Security for a ex-president and presidential candidate is a LOT more lax than for the current President because the vast majority of resources is always going to be used to protect the current president. The situation where someone could get a sniper shot at the current President would never be allowed to happen.

The smart ones move to a farm, orders truckloads of fertilizers but don't fertilize the land.

And if this were EU, they apply for grants to pay for the fertilizer. That's how good the oversight is.

> We never expected it to.

Good grief. Many, many people expected it to contain confirmation of any of probably a thousand mutually incompatible conspiracies.

Then the data shows up, doesn't provide the expected endorphin rush, and now it's all "as expected" and what is really important is some bland point about cold war intelligence overreach? That's a bit much.

> If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

It literally just happened last year w/ Trump. And this is in an era w/ a trove of online data to monitor for such possibilities.

Trump wasn't a sitting president last year.

He wasn't, but he had a full Secret Service detail as both a former president and major candidate, and the lapse was noted as an egregious error.

> It literally just happened last year w/ Trump.

Twice!

> If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

It is almost impossible to stop a person who really wants to kill someone, and is ready to die to do it, and is a bit lucky.

> They just wont give up the cover up. Here we are 60 years after the _murder_ of an elected President and we're still playing these games. Ridiculous. If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

I didn't realize this was up for debate.

Which 3 letter agency did Thomas Crooks [1] work for?

Our security theater apparatus largely works because nobody is trying to kill a president.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Don...

The lone nut is the hard thing to stop because even when they're not focused on super strict operational security, it's unlikely they're telling a ton of people about their plan. The more training they have, the more secluded they are, the less likely you are to have any chance of catching them ahead of time.

> Our security theater apparatus largely works because nobody is trying to kill a president

Eh, it’s halfway decent at thwarting schemes. Where it fails—where most law enforcement and counterterrorism fails—is in the lone-wolf case. (I’ll call it the Wallace’s dilemma.)

It worked for Ford, it sort of worked for Reagan--he was gravely wounded, but hit with only one bullet rather than several.

> If you accept this as true then you have to accept the United States Secret Service was criminally incompetent in failing to stop a single "lone nut."

Why wouldn’t I accept that? They’ve since failed to stop two more lone nuts. Unless you think those were conspiracies too?

More than two. Gerald Ford was shot at by two different women less than three weeks apart. Reagan was shot by a man convinced that Jodie Foster will fall in love with him over it. Most recently, there was the case of Trump's magically healing ear.

Somehow I never knew about Ford.

It's easy to forget him, given that the sum total of his contributions to the world was giving his criminal predecessor a full pardon.

The neat part about conspiracy theories is they're always unfalsifiable.

They are completely falsifiable. You would just need to have the intelligence agencies actually cooperate with the investigation and release all their information on it.

We know for a fact they didn't do that. They intentionally obstructed several investigations. They knowingly lied to congress. They destroyed records they were ordered to preserve. These facts are all part of the released documents and they're all plain as day. They tried to keep this all locked up until 2060 for a reason.

At the very least we can retrospectively look at the actions of CIA, FBI and USSS and see their corruption. That they've never been held responsible is unconscionable. I'm glad you're somehow capable of defending them with this lazy nonsense.

Every piece of evidence an intelligence agency produces you can always claim to be manufactured or altered, so no, it's unfalsifiable

I don't think anyone is claiming the CIA documents that were released recently were fake so I don't think that's the case. In fact, a lot of people, even the conspiracy types, give documents from intelligence agencies a lot of weight. They just don't trust random press releases or official public statements.

The intelligence agencies have said Oswald acted alone. Multiple times. Across nearly 5 decades now.

Conspiracy theorists give weight to anything which confirms their worldview, and dismiss anything that does not.

It is an unfalsifiable belief system.

As I said, there's a big difference between them saying something, and them actually publishing internal documents about the case. I mean they can always lie about the documents themselves or modify them, but there's a very long history of intelligence agencies outright lying, even in front of Congress.

There's less of a history of them modifying or altering documents that they are forced to release.

Fwiw, I believe that Oswald did it, and that there's almost no evidence for any other shooter.

There are Kennedy theorists who believe the CIA altered the Zapruder film.

> The intelligence agencies have said

Lol. Please take yourself seriously. You don’t have to be anywhere near a conspiracy nut to laugh at this phrase.

The point isn't "I believe what intelligence agencies have said". The point is "it does not matter what intelligence agencies say or release. Conspiracy theorists will not trust it."

Their beliefs are unfalsifiable.

It’s called critically analyzing your sources. It’s done by tons of people including scientists and journalists. It does matter what intelligence agencies say and release, you need to know how to critically analyze what they say and release in order to intelligently distinguish between the truth and the lies.

Saying “their beliefs are unfalsifiable” is just a boring accusation. Like looking at the worst scientists and accusing all scientists that their research is bs.

The nature of a conspiracy theory is that it is a belief not-backed by facts in evidence, but one requiring the theorist to assume alternative information based on their own intuition and a distrust of official data.

Saying their beliefs are unfalsifiable is not a "accusation". It is a statement of fact.

If you arrive at your conclusion despite the evidence, then you are already relying on a process by which new evidence can be discounted.

The goal post can always be (and generally will always be) moved.

I would describe it as filling in the blanks when there is a lack of evidence. Some people do it badly, others do it well. Some people move goalposts, others don’t. You’re clearly just randomly accusing without thinking it through. I hope you see the fallacy in your thought process here.

What would you consider sufficient evidence to prove that Oswald acted alone?

I don’t care about the particulars here. I am just pointing out the general flaws in your thinking.

I didn't defend them.

Anyone have a gift URL or similar?

To create your own, go to the URL, and prepend archive.is/

Thus for this one, use:

    archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/03/22/family-secrets-jfk-files-cia-assets/

Then post the short form here: https://archive.is/uXmDZ

If you put unbloq.us/ before the URL it will redirect you to the latest archive or generate one for you

any who has worked in DC would find this to be not that interesting

"Hey by the way your 2nd cousin worked for the CIA" like, and?

Americans were CIA assets. Yawn.

So there was good reason why the files weren’t released earlier and much of the released content had redacted sections ?

Can we move on now ?

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