Original subtitles

[march music playing]

[reporter] Shortly before the dawn of Saturday morning,

John Fitzgerald Kennedy comes home to the White House.

He had been the nation's 35th President

for a period of two years and ten months.

[Oliver Stone] I'm Oliver Stone

and this is Dealey Plaza,

the place where John Kennedy was assassinated

on November 22, 1963.

Back in 1991, I made a film called JFK.

That movie tried to explore the mysteries

that enshrouded this place and that day.

We also tried to explore the reasons

why President Kennedy was killed.

At the end of our film, we alerted the public

that almost 30 years after Kennedy's assassination,

tens of thousands of documents were still being kept secret

about his murder and his policies.

JFK created a yearlong sensation

in the media.

Some quarters praised the film.

Others attacked it.

But at the end of that unprecedented controversy,

a new agency of government was formed.

It was called the Assassination Records Review Board.

The board went to work

declassifying this immense amount of material.

Yet the public has not been made aware

of what, in fact, constitutes

a new factual record of who Kennedy was

and the real circumstances of his murder.

In this series, you will be informed for the first time

what was in many of the most important of these files.

We have to do this.

We have to keep doing this,

because democracy, and our freedom from fear,

dies when there is no longer trust

between the people and their government.

[theme music playing]

[inaudible dialogue]

[man over radio] A dark page in the annals of America

has been written to the crack of an assassin's bullet.

A nation mourns, the world grieves.

The man who became 35th President

less than three years ago is dead.

His rendezvous with grim destiny

begins a little after noontime

as his plane lands in Dallas.

At 1:25, the motorcade moves into the downtown area.

Death is six minutes away.

In a warehouse, a sniper with a rifle poised waits.

The cheers of the crowd almost muffled the three shots.

The assassin's aim is deadly.

The area is a swarm with police rangers

and secret servicemen.

The murderer slips the net, but a few blocks away,

a man is captured after he is

reported to have killed a policeman.

That man is a 24-year-old pro-Castro Texan

who once sought Soviet citizenship.

He is charged with murder.

Meanwhile, the President had been rushed

to a nearby hospital

where life lingered as a waiting world prayed.

A half hour later, he was dead,

his life crushed like his wife's abandoned bouquet.

[Whoopi Goldberg] After his brother's murder,

without hesitation,

Attorney General Robert Kennedy

began investigating a domestic conspiracy.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] My father's first phone call

was to the CIA desk officer at Langley

and he asked him...

"Did your people conduct this horror?"

[David Talbot] We know from how Bobby operated

that terrible day,

November 22nd, 1963,

at his home in McLean, Virginia,

that he immediately suspected there was not a lone gunman.

Why do we know this?

Because he was being told by his closest aides,

people like Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers,

who were in the limousine

immediately behind President Kennedy's limousine.

They were both World War II veterans.

They knew what gunfire sounded like.

[gunshots echoing]

They reported it to him

that gunfire had not just come from the rear,

it had come from different sides.

There was gunfire from the front as well.

It was a crossfire.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] I was in the East Room

with my dad and with Jackie and a couple of my siblings,

and Lyndon Johnson came in and told the adults in the room

that Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed

and that a man had shot him.

And I said to my dad and mom at that time,

"Why did he shoot him?

Did he... Did he love our family?"

And nobody really answered the question,

so I didn't know whether we were

supposed to be happy that he got shot.

And the way that they acted

was that this only compounded the tragedy,

and it was not a good thing, and...

But I didn't really understand it.

I did immediately have that question,

"Why would this man shoot in public,

"in a place where he knew he was gonna get caught,

"why would be make that sacrifice of his own life

"to kill Lee Harvey Oswald?

Did he love our family?"

And, you know, within a couple of years, right,

it was very clear to everybody,

he did not love our family.

He was a mobster.

[Talbot] When Bobby looked at the phone logs

of who Jack Ruby was talking to on the phone

before he went into the Dallas basement

of the police station,

he said it read like the witness list

of the Senate Rackets Committee.

In other words, all mob guys.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] My father at that time

was not aware

of the level of involvement between the CIA and the Mafia,

that they essentially were a seamless organization.

[Goldberg] In 1961, the FBI had discovered

secret CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro.

And when Attorney General Robert Kennedy

was told about them,

he requested a full briefing from the CIA.

They admitted to the plots,

but they claimed they had stopped,

when in fact they were still ongoing,

run by CIA officer William Harvey

and Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli.

[Talbot] And who was the third party

that he suspected

in the assassination of his brother?

The CIA, the Mafia, anti-Castro exiles.

In fact, he calls up somebody

who's involved with the Cuban exile community

and says bluntly,

one of your guys did it.

That's Harry Ruiz Williams.

He doesn't accuse him of doing it,

but he says one of your guys did it.

Did Robert Kennedy ever stop inquiring

into his brother's assassination?

The day that his brother died

he lost virtually all the investigative capacity

at the Justice Department.

He had 30,000 employees at the Justice Department,

and half of them were FBI employees

who ostensibly worked for him.

Traditionally, however,

and in reality, they worked for J. Edgar Hoover.

He couldn't investigate it.

And-and so, his posture, first of all, he was shattered,

so the first year, he wanted, nothing could bring Jack back.

He didn't wanna hear about it.

He told Nick Katzenbach,

"I'm not gonna testify before the Warren Commission,

I'm not gonna have anything to do with it,"

and he tried as little as possible to comment on it.

When he did comment on it privately,

he would say they did a shoddy job.

But publicly he would never say anything.

But he knew what it was. It was a commission.

And commissions in this country have a tradition

of essentially anointing orthodoxies.

He knew whatever investigation

was under the control of the White House,

of Lyndon Johnson's White House and the FBI,

was going to be a bogus investigation.

I have talked to many of Bobby Kennedy's close aides,

Dick Goodwin, Frank Mankiewicz, Adam Walinsky,

all of them have told me that Bobby Kennedy

did not believe the Warren Commission,

believed that it was a fairy tale,

a convenient cover-up.

And Bobby Kennedy was determined to get the truth

and to bring a new official inquiry

to look into his brother's murder

as soon as he was back in the White House.

[man over radio] To the White House in Washington

comes the final verdict on the fateful tragedy

which engulfed the nation ten months ago.

US Chief Justice Earl Warren

is the bearer of the sad epilogue.

The report on the assassination

of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,

compiled by the commission created by President Johnson,

which was headed by the Chief Justice himself.

[Goldberg] The Warren Commission

was not Lyndon Johnson's idea.

Johnson had been in favor of a Texas state investigation

into Kennedy's murder.

The concept of an independent panel

was strongly suggested to the White House,

first by Eugene Rostow, dean of the Yale Law School,

and brother of Walter Rostow.

On Sunday, November 24th,

Rostow told Johnson's assistant Bill Moyers

that they had to appoint a blue ribbon panel

because America and world opinion

had been so shaken by the murder of Oswald

and the performance of the Dallas Police

that the public was not believing anything.

The Washington Post was also in favor of the idea.

Publisher Kay Graham and editor Al Friendly

were going to run an editorial

endorsing the concept on November 25th,

the day of JFK's funeral.

And powerful columnist Joseph Alsop

used all his techniques of persuasion.

[Joseph Alsop over phone]

[Goldberg] Johnson began moving forward,

appointing an extraordinary federal panel.

In regard to the Warren Commission,

who do you think was the most

puzzling appointment to this Commission?

Allen Dulles' appointment to the Warren Commission,

I think is one of the great frauds

of American history.

Have you ever committed

any act of violence in your life?

No.

Lyndon Johnson went around telling people

that Bobby Kennedy, of all people,

lobbied to have Dulles put on the Commission.

I don't think that even if you had ten more Commissions,

you'd never get away from the idea

that maybe there was a plot.

We just didn't find any traces of it.

What really happened with Allen Dulles

was the CIA lobbied to have him put on the Commission

'cause they needed to have one of their own on the Commission

to make sure that certain doors remain closed.

He also names Gerry Ford,

the young congressman

from Michigan to the Commission.

Ford is very close to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

[Goldberg] Not everyone was as eager

to serve on the Commission as Dulles was.

Johnson conjured up images of atomic annihilation

to intimidate Earl Warren into chairing the Commission.

Johnson did the same with Senator Richard Russell.

[President Johnson over phone] We gotta take this

out of the arena

where they're testifying

it's Khrushchev and Castro did this

and did that and kicking us into a war

that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.

[Goldberg] Even before Oswald was killed,

Cliff Carter of Johnson's White House

had called the Dallas Police

and told them not to indict Oswald

as part of a communist conspiracy.

Why?

For fear of a confrontation with the USSR.

Johnson's nuclear warning was based upon CIA reports

that Oswald had been to Mexico

seven weeks before the assassination

and visited the Cuban and Soviet consulates.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover

understood this information was not accurate.

Hoover also added that the case, as it stood,

was not strong enough to obtain a conviction of Oswald.

The FBI would do approximately 80 percent of the investigation

for the Warren Commission,

and Hoover would keep his doubts

about the Oswald case concealed.

With that and much more kept secret,

stories were leaked to the press

that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald

would be found guilty by the Commission.

The Commission worked in almost complete secrecy.

There were only a handful of investigatory articles published

about the JFK case while they were in session.

Yet, even though almost no one knew

what the Commission was doing,

on the day the 888-page Warren Report was released,

the press accepted it without reservations.

In fact, the night it was issued to the public,

both NBC and CBS aired specials propagating its conclusions,

but not asking questions

about how these conclusions were arrived at.

[reporter] In 300,000 words of lean and orderly language,

the Warren Commission makes these major findings.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald was himself killed by Jack Ruby

in full view of millions of Americans.

[Goldberg] It was later revealed

that NBC approached the FBI

and told them they would reveal nothing

in their reporting on the Kennedy case

that would contradict their findings.

It was also discovered that some members of the press

cooperated in supporting the Commission's findings

in return for access to witnesses.

In 1978, producer Bernie Birnbaum of CBS

admitted that sources on the Commission

leaked its contents,

and his program was in production

for months in advance.

The New York Times got its version

out of the Warren Report within 48 hours

and in an introductory essay,

you have Anthony Lewis saying,

right there with the release of the Warren Report,

he said the Warren Commission released all the documents

and all the evidence it had acquired,

except for the names of a few sensitive people

and withheld nothing else,

all the documents were released.

The irony of this is the Commission,

Warren Commission documents were not released

for two or three months later.

They finally came out in November.

So here you have The New York Times

assuring the public

that all the documents have been released

and that no question remains unresolved,

in the absence of having seen any of the 26 volumes

of supplementary evidence.

If you read the Warren Report,

you get a very convincing picture

that Oswald did it and he did it alone.

And that report, as you know,

was sent worldwide with a lot of publicity.

What wasn't sent worldwide with a lot of publicity

was the 26 volumes of evidence.

And that is where you begin to see

that the evidence they use in the Warren Report

does not always match up with the evidence

that was given to them during the Commission's investigation.

[Goldberg] The Commission published those volumes

at Allen Dulles' suggestion.

Here's the Commission Report.

I keep it here, by my right hand here.

And here are the various volumes,

twenty-six of 'em.

[Goldberg] In a private conference,

Dulles said, "No one reads anymore.

"They'll be a few professors who will read the record,

but the public will read very little."

But still, the Commission classified

tens of thousands of pages of documents.

These included FBI reports, Secret Service reports

and hundreds of their own internal memoranda.

In 1967, the Warren Report was under attack

from several books and magazine articles.

Walter Cronkite interviewed

Warren Commissioner John McCloy

during a four-night special co-hosted by Dan Rather.

Are you satisfied that as much effort

was put into challenging that case

as into establishing it?

In other words, did-did the accused man

get a fair trial?

I'll answer that in just a moment.

If I may just say one thing, I, which I'd like to say

in the first place I had some questions

as to the propriety of my appearing here

as a former member of the Commission

to comment on the evidence of the Commission.

There seems to be some question,

and I think there is some question

about, uh, the advisability of doing that...

[Goldberg] McCloy never answered Cronkite's question.

But even worse, CBS employee Roger Feinman

later discovered internal documents

showing the network had violated

its own journalistic code of ethics.

McCloy consulted extensively

on the series through his daughter Ellen,

an administrative assistant

to CBS President Richard Salant.

In 1992, reporter Jerry Policoff

confronted Salant and Ellen McCloy

with the documents revealing John McCloy's instructions

for the content of the show.

Only then did CBS admit to their concealment.

CBS, NBC, and The New York Times

continued to support the Commission's finding

for decades afterwards

and never publicly reviewed

the 26 volumes of supplemental evidence.

By the time the Assassination Records Review Board

came along in the mid-1990s,

there were still 3,000

Warren Commission documents withheld.

[Ed Herlihy] Revolution is over,

order has returned to Havana,

but enthusiasm and fervor still fill the air

following the final assumption to power

of the revolutionary regime,

now the legally recognized provisional government.

Havana's ovation for Fidel Castro himself

hadn't been long deferred.

These scenes show his triumphal march

across the island to the capital

following the victory.

In every town and hamlet,

a cheering welcome greeted the rebel leader.

[Donald Sutherland] In 1959,

Fidel Castro had come to power

by overthrowing the corrupt and brutal despot

Fulgencio Batista.

During Batista's 25-year hold on power,

he was closely allied

with American big business and organized crime,

allowing him to accumulate a personal fortune

reportedly worth $300 million.

When he fled the country, it took three cargo planes

to transport his holdings to Portugal.

In June of 1959,

Castro's systematic land reform,

which limited the size of property holdings,

went into effect in Cuba.

The law caused many American businessmen

to petition the White House for action to be taken.

And so, in 1960 under Eisenhower,

the CIA created the Cuban Project

in their effort to oust Castro.

Kennedy, who had campaigned as a strong anti-communist,

signed off on the Bay of Pigs invasion plan

in April of 1961.

Kennedy's approval of the plan

contained two distinct limitations,

America would supply arms and equipment,

but there would be no Americans in the landing force.

Second, after preliminary air strikes

by Cuban exile pilots,

there would only be further strikes

after the invasion secured an airfield.

Dulles believed that Kennedy would,

like Eisenhower, support the operation

with direct US military intervention if needed,

all the while assuring him it would not be necessary.

Well, first, I wanna say that there

will not be under any conditions,

be an intervention in Cuba by United States Armed Forces.

[Sutherland] The invasion was a disaster

and became the first stain on his administration.

Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.

Further statements, uh,

detailed discussions

are not to, uh, conceal responsibility

because I'm the responsible officer of the government.

[Sutherland] In public, Kennedy accepted the blame.

In private, he and his brother suspected

they had been lied to by the CIA.

Allen Dulles confessed

that the mission was bound to fail

as it was planned by the CIA without US military support.

He confessed this while, uh, preparing an article

for Harper's Magazine

with young editor Willie Morris

that he couldn't have done this with his small group of exiles,

his Cuban brigade.

He needed the Marines and the Air Force to go in.

And he thought Kennedy was going to be

young and pliable,

and that at the eleventh hour,

Kennedy will be forced to send in

the full might of the US military.

[Sutherland] While drafting the article in 1965,

Dulles told his editor,

"That Kennedy, he thought he was a god."

[Talbot] Jack Kennedy did stand firm.

He did not send in the military.

He did not make it an even bigger global crisis

than it already was.

Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs debacle,

is just furious.

He knows he's been lied to, deceived

by his senior military and intelligence advisers.

He announces that the agency is going to be downsized.

And he vows famously,

he tells friends he's going to shatter the CIA

into a thousand pieces

and scatter it to the winds.

And actually, he does move

to decapitate the top of the CIA.

He lets it be known that Allen Dulles,

as well as his two top advisers, Richard Bissell,

who is also very involved

with the Bay of Pigs, and General Cabell,

who was the right-hand man to Allen Dulles.

So the top three people in the CIA

immediately know their days are numbered.

And he forces them out before the end of the year.

It wasn't just the Bay of Pigs that angered President Kennedy

when it came to the CIA.

In that same month in April of 1961,

he was also being lied to about a coup in France,

a military coup that was aimed

at overthrowing President Charles de Gaulle,

one of our strongest allies.

[Sutherland] Allen Dulles, who had a long history

of antagonism with de Gaulle,

falsely reported to Kennedy

that the vast majority of the French military

was staunchly opposed to de Gaulle's support

of Algerian self-determination.

What he didn't tell him was that as far back as 1959,

the CIA had discussed his overthrow.

This coup attempt,

orchestrated by four French Generals,

was quickly put down

and several news reports pointed to Allen Dulles' hand

in supporting the episode.

JFK assures the French ambassador,

"I have nothing to do with this,

I stand in full support of President de Gaulle."

But he says something very, very alarming.

He tells the French ambassador,

President Kennedy, that "I'm not in full control though

"of in my entire government.

"I'm not in control of the CIA.

And I can't speak for what's happening there."

That's a stunning admission for a US President to make.

[Sutherland] Beyond a coup, in fact,

there were at least six attempts

to assassinate de Gaulle by the OAS

and others that continued even after he agreed

to grant Algeria its independence.

In one of these plots, there is evidence

that French dissidents and the CIA

conspired to poison de Gaulle.

[Goldberg] Allen Dulles was the only commissioner

who did not have a regular job.

Therefore, he became

the single most active member of the Commission.

He asked the most questions,

a remarkable 31% of the total,

and he attended the most hearings

even more than chairman Earl Warren.

Yet, in spite of this,

he never revealed to the Commission

the CIA plots to kill Castro

or why Kennedy had fired him over the Bay of Pigs.

Behind the scenes, he tipped off the CIA

about certain questions

the Commission would ask regarding Oswald

and he rehearsed with them

the precise wording of their denials

of any contact with the alleged assassin.

Contrary to media reports, the Warren Commission

was not unanimous in its beliefs.

Senator Richard Russell of Georgia

did not want to serve on the Commission.

After he attended the first meeting,

he quickly became disenchanted with the proceedings,

particularly the roles of J. Edgar Hoover

and acting attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

His personal papers

at the University of Georgia Library

contain a memo written after the initial

December 5th, 1963 executive session.

"Something strange is happening.

"Warren and Katzenbach know all about the FBI

"and are apparently planning to show Oswald

"as the only one considered.

This to me is an untenable position."

His papers reveal that he wrote a dissenting opinion

for the presentation at the final Commission meeting

of September 18th.

On that day, he shared his concerns

with President Johnson.

[Governor Richard Russell Jr. speaking]

[President Lyndon B. Johnson speaking]

[Goldberg] He also thought that Oswald did not act alone.

Russell was strongly influenced by the Zapruder film

and by the testimony of John Connally,

who himself did not believe

the first shot that hit Kennedy also went through him.

I did not hear the second shot,

the one that hit me.

I understand there's some, uh,

some question in the minds of the experts

about, uh, whether or not

we could both have been hit by the same bullet

and that was the first bullet.

Uh, I just don't happen to believe that.

I won't believe it, never will believe.

[Goldberg] This forced the other commissioners

to include Connally's dissent in the report,

and as a result,

they could not absolutely deny

the possibility of a conspiracy.

Is there a transcript of that final meeting

of the Warren Commission?

At that meeting,

he was gonna probably voice his opinion

and his dissent against the single bullet

striking both men and coming out as pristine as it was.

Richard Russell probably thought

the only female in the room was a stenographer

because apparently she was over there

doodling or writing or whatever,

but there's no record of...

no official record of that session.

[Goldberg] In 1968,

Harold Weisberg told Senator Russell

that the National Archives

had no transcript of the final meeting.

Russell was beside himself

and had his assistant confirm what had happened.

Russell became the first commissioner

to criticize the Warren Report in public.

He was followed by Commission members

John Sherman Cooper and Hale Boggs.

[Ed Herlihy] A record number of Americans,

upwards of 67 million,

go to the polls to elect

the 35th President of the United States.

So now my wife and I prepare for a new administration

and, uh, for a new baby. Thank you.

[Sutherland] The years of dissent are over,

and Kennedy must now shape his own policy as President,

sometimes in conflict

with what his predecessors have done,

especially in foreign policy.

To those new states whom we welcome

to the ranks of the free,

we pledge our word

that one form of colonial control

shall not have passed away

merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny.

[Sutherland] The Congo is the second largest country

in Africa.

In 1960,

it had been granted its independence

from Belgian colonial rule

and carried out a democratic election.

In the disorder of the transition,

the Belgians, backed by England and France,

sought to eliminate its charismatic prime minister,

Patrice Lumumba.

Once again, Eisenhower and CIA Director Allen Dulles

favored the European nation in this colonial conflict.

And Lumumba, in order to stop that,

had invited Russian advisers

into the Congo to secure the country.

At that point, Eisenhower gave the go-ahead

to have him assassinated.

[Major John M. Newman] Eisenhower got very impatient

with Allen Dulles.

He had told him to get rid of Lumumba

and it wasn't happening.

And so he got very frustrated in the middle of an NSC meeting

and just blurted out,

you know, an order to kill,

not to anybody in particular,

but blurted out to the everybody assembled there

to kill Lumumba.

Kennedy never knew this.

He gets elected the following November of 1960,

and he heads in the opposite direction.

[Sutherland] But events are already in motion.

With the backing of British and US intelligence and arms,

Colonel Joseph Mobutu's forces captured President Lumumba

at the beginning of December 1960.

[Richard Mahoney] Dag Hammarskjold,

the UN Secretary General calls JFK,

who's the President-elect at this point,

and asks him to intercede

to get Lumumba released from prison.

When Kennedy intervenes to save Lumumba,

that's a signal directly

to the CIA and the Belgian secret police

that they have to dispatch this guy immediately.

And so 48 hours

before Kennedy takes the oath of office,

Lumumba is delivered into the hands of his enemies.

He's taken out and shot in the head.

Kennedy doesn't know this until a month later.

Who finally tells him?

The CIA? No.

They still keep it a secret.

He's informed by his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson.

His face crumbles. He's holding his hand.

He's grimacing in anguish

hearing about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

Kennedy would say in meetings about the Congo,

"The one way to keep the US out of the Congo

is to keep the UN in the Congo."

And Kennedy backed Hammarskjold

in terms of, um,

getting a government of national unity in Leopoldville.

[Sutherland] Hammarskjold died in a mysterious plane crash

in September of 1961

as he was working on a peace treaty

between the breakaway state of Katanga and the Congo.

[Mahoney] The reason why Katanga seceded

was because it was an extremely rich province

in a wide range of very valuable minerals.

And the Belgian company,

a colonial company called Union Minière

convinced the Belgian government

to use Belgian military and paramilitary forces

to encourage the province to secede.

So the province secedes from the Congo

and announces itself as an independent country

supported by British

and Belgian imperial interests.

Dag Hammarskjold is dead,

but the United Nations lives.

His tragedy is deep in our hearts.

But the task for which he died are at the top of our agenda.

The US ambassador

and close friend of President Kennedy,

Edmund Gullion,

set a cable home saying,

contrary to the official explanation

for this, you know, tragic incident,

this was an assassination.

[Sutherland] The photographs of Hammarskjold show his body

as the only one not burned or charred.

And he had a playing card, reportedly the ace of spades,

stuffed into his shirt collar above the knot of the tie.

Now, due to Susan Williams' book

and the new evidence offered by Desmond Tutu

and the Union of South Africa's

Truth and Reconciliation Commission,

there are controversial documents

that indicate Allen Dulles was involved

in the sabotage of the plane.

The project was called Operation Celeste

and it was to be carried out

through a secret white supremacist group

called SAIMR.

[Mahoney] Kennedy understood

pretty early in his administration

that the Central Intelligence Agency

had an agenda that was completely their own.

[Sutherland] Kennedy now conveyed

to Prime Minister Macmillan of England

that he would not be backing European imperialism

in the Congo.

And he allowed UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson

to vote for a use of force resolution

to expel all foreign mercenaries

from the breakaway region.

At the end of 1962,

Katanga's forces fired on a UN helicopter and outpost.

Kennedy approved a UN military attack,

codenamed Operation Grand Slam.

One month after combat operations,

Katanga was defeated

and the Congo was one country again.

Kennedy came back to the United Nations

a year after that

to reiterate the fact

that the peacekeeping operation is working,

we have a democratic government,

and we still do not accept Belgium's role

in the secession of this province called Katanga.

[President Kennedy] Today the clouds have lifted a little

so that new rays of hope can break through.

The pressures on West Berlin appear to be temporarily eased.

Political unity in the Congo

has been largely restored.

A neutral coalition in Laos,

while still in difficulty,

is at least in being.

The integrity of the United Nations Secretariat

has been reaffirmed.

Today, we are here to review the major findings

of our full investigation of FBI domestic intelligence.

[Goldberg] After the Watergate scandal in 1975,

Senator Frank Church conducted

the first full-scale investigation

of the abuses and crimes of the CIA and FBI.

Many secrets were revealed

for the first time to the public.

For example, the FBI's programs

to destabilize the Black Panthers

and to harass and intimidate Martin Luther King

into perhaps taking his own life.

The public was also made aware of the CIA plots

to kill foreign leaders

like Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.

Former Warren commissioner Gerald Ford

was President at this time.

Prior to the formation of the Church Committee,

Ford had appointed his own commission

headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller

to investigate domestic CIA activities.

On January 16, 1975

at a luncheon with executives and editors

of The New York Times,

President Ford, in explaining why he appointed

such a conservative panel

to investigate these CIA crimes,

said that they needed to guard the national interest.

Editor A.M. Rosenthal asked, "From what?"

Ford blurted out,

"From things like assassinations."

Don't you think that is an exceedingly loose way

to run an agency, um,

particularly the CIA?

Well, we are going to try to run it tighter.

[Goldberg] When CIA director William Colby

turned out to be honest and open

with the Rockefeller and Church Committees,

he was replaced by George H.W. Bush,

who, during his confirmation hearing,

hid his relationship with the CIA.

As part of the Church Committee,

Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart

set up a subcommittee

to investigate the Kennedy assassination

and how the Warren Commission

had been served by the FBI and the CIA.

That report severely criticized

the Warren Commission's lack of independence

and their over-reliance on government investigators

for their findings.

After a lot of prodding and pressuring

from the Warren Commission counsel,

J. Edgar Hoover writes Mr. Rankin and said,

"Yes, we did have a relationship with Mr. Ruby

"and between March 11, '59, October 2nd, '59,

"on some eight, nine occasions,

"he acted as our, as our informant

"or something to that effect.

"Now, who said that?

"Who said that at the time "of the Warren Commission report?

"Did anybody ever imply that, that Jack Ruby

"was a confidential informant for the FBI?

"Nobody breathed that.

That was classified."

[Goldberg] The Church Committee had access

to the internal CIA report on their plots

with the Mafia to kill Castro

which began in 1960 under Director Allen Dulles.

In that report, the agency admitted

they had no Presidential authorization

for the assassination attempts,

yet during his nearly ten-month service

on the Warren Commission

Dulles never told his colleagues

about this Mafia connection.

Senator Schweiker was infuriated

by both the alliance and the attempted assassination

of a foreign leader.

I think the Warren Commission has in fact, uh,

collapsed like a house of cards.

And I believe that the Warren Commission

was set up at the time,

uh, to feed pabulum to the American people,

uh, for reasons not yet known,

and that one of the biggest cover-ups

in the history of our country occurred at that time.

[Goldberg] While working as a technician

at a film facility,

Robert Groden had come into possession

of a copy of the famous eight millimeter Zapruder film.

In six years, he had shown it in public only three times.

In 1975,

television host Geraldo Rivera heard about this

and scheduled Groden

and comedian social activist Dick Gregory

on his ABC program Good Night America.

...the film shot by

the Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder.

And it's the execution of President Kennedy.

[Robert Groden] Now, before he goes behind the sign,

the President is waving to the crowd.

When he comes out from behind the sign,

he is shot. Then Governor Connally is shot.

[Geraldo Rivera] He's already been hit.

[Groden] He's already been hit.

[Rivera] And now?

[Groden] At the bottom of the screen,

the head shot.

That's the shot that blew off his head.

Now the Warren Commission said that

all of the shots were fired from behind

by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin

firing at the President.

And as you can see clearly,

the head is thrown violently backwards.

Completely consistent with the shot

from the front right.

That's the most upsetting thing I've ever seen.

We'll talk about it in a minute.

[Goldberg] Due to public outrage

that national viewing caused

the creation of the second major inquiry

into President Kennedy's murder.

This was called

the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

[Dr. Cyril Wecht] When one considers all the things

that happened and did not happen,

the missing pieces of evidence

and, uh, and, uh, documents that were destroyed and so on,

I have no idea what might have happened

in Dallas that day.

What's the situation with the HSCA files in 1979?

After the House Select Committee on Assassinations

close up shop,

they-they sealed many of the witness reports.

These were not available to the public.

[Judge John R. Tunheim] Close to half a million records

which were segregated,

they were to be sealed under house rules

at the time until 2029,

uh, some of them had leaked out, some were a part of the report

on the House Select Committee on Assassinations,

but most were not released.

If it takes me 30 years to nail every one of the assassins,

then I will continue this investigation for 30 years.

I owe that not only to Jack Kennedy

but to the country.

Hey, there's Clay!

[Goldberg] But then, in 1991,

due to the uproar over the film JFK,

hearings were held on Capitol Hill.

Most Americans did not believe or support the verdict

of the Warren Commission initially.

And now more than three in four,

according to all recent samplings

of public opinion,

think some conspiracy was involved.

[Goldberg] At the end of that film,

the public was made aware

that the House Select Committee had classified

the vast majority of their materials

until 2029.

Of course we could not go further

than we could because many of these files,

as you know, were sealed to the American public

in the 1960s,

and were never opened

and the Warren Commission information

was always compromised by the fact

that the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence

never gave any significant information

to the Warren Commission members.

And in fact, the Warren Commission

was chaired, uh... was one of the members

of the Warren Commission was Allen Dulles,

who had been fired by President Kennedy

as the chief of the CIA.

There seems to be the element

of the fox investigating the chicken coop here.

[Goldberg] Because of the massive media controversy

that accompanied the film,

Congress was forced to do something

about the secrecy

still existing 30 years after Kennedy's death.

Clerk will report the title.

Senate 3006,

an act to provide for the expeditious disclosure

of records relevant to the assassination

of President John F. Kennedy.

I will not permit petty posturing to deflect us

from the higher goal of securing public access

and official accountability.

Judge Tunheim, what was the concept

behind the JFK Records Act?

President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992,

was what it was called,

was created largely to clear up

all the questions that people had

about the assassination of President Kennedy.

There was a frustration that the agencies themselves

were never going to release the information,

and people wanted to know,

and I think people have the right to know,

and that's what underlined the entire act.

What were some of your difficulties

working with the CIA?

One of the censors at the CIA was at a meeting with us,

and there was a document that we put up on the screen,

said we were prepared to release it.

And I asked him, you know,

"Tell us why we shouldn't release this record?"

And it was silence for about two minutes.

And he finally said,

"I know there is a reason,

I just can't think of what it is."

[Judge Tunheim laughs]

[Goldberg] Over five million pages

of collected records and artifacts

are housed at the National Archives

in College Park, Maryland,

and most may be viewed in person.

The Review Board had an unbelievable task

to get at the bottom of the assassination,

not as a reinvestigation,

but to make the record of the assassination

as robust as possible.

And that included really pressing

federal agencies

on records that they may not have thought about

as assassination records,

but also state and local government.

Obviously Dallas was important,

New Orleans was important.

[Stone] What about the Oswald KGB file?

[Judge Tunheim] The National Security Council

in September 1998

refused to allow the issue to be raised

in the Clinton-Yeltsin meeting.

We went to Moscow to try to negotiate release.

We got some records, not very much.

We got no help from the Department of State.

In fact, we weren't even allowed

to go into the United States embassy

in Moscow.

Uh, they claimed later it was just a mix-up.

But we could have used some diplomatic help.

How much media coverage did the ARRB get?

We issued a hundred or more press releases.

We didn't get really too much attention.

We were followed most closely,

probably by The New York Times,

because they had writers

that focused on intelligence and intelligence issues.

[Thomas Samoluk] I wish there had been more attention.

It seemed like, uh, the American public today,

even 20 years after the Review Board

was in business,

is still as interested as they were then

and the day of the assassination.

It very definitely should have been an open-ended process.

I think there was some thought probably among the agencies

that they could just wait us out.

You know, if they didn't respond and delayed,

eventually we wouldn't be in office

as a Review Board anymore

and they wouldn't have to turn over records.

How did you obtain the Zapruder film

for the National Archives?

You know, it's the most important piece of evidence

of one of the most shocking crimes

of American history.

May I have your name, please, sir?

My name is Abraham Zapruder...

[Judge Tunheim] We tried to get the family

to donate the film to the United States,

the original.

They could keep the copyright,

they can sell,

uh, you know, the rights to use it.

They can do whatever they want with it.

But we wanted the original

and the arbitrators, in a two to one vote,

voted to award what was really, I think, an excessive sum.

It was around 16 million dollars.

A hard one to swallow as far as the amount.

But I think that there would have been

criticism if that film

was not part of the official JFK collection.

The Zapruder family, after getting all this money,

after this windfall profit,

they decide to donate the copyright

to the Sixth Floor Museum.

So if you want to publish a book

or do a documentary about the Zapruder film,

you have to get the permission of the Sixth Floor Museum.

[Goldberg] The Sixth Floor Museum

to this day insists that Oswald shot Kennedy

from that sixth floor window.

And virtually everything in the museum

is dedicated to that proposition.

The Zapruder film shows Kennedy

being knocked violently backwards

as he was hit in the skull.

His body goes back and to the left.

Yet this shocking moment

is not discussed in the Warren Report.

One of the most serious problems

the Warren Commission had

was in placing Oswald on the sixth floor

at the time of the shooting.

They said he was there at 12:30 firing shots.

They then had him stow the rifle between boxes,

and run down the single set of stairs

in order to flee the crime scene.

The problem was, there were other employees

in the vicinity of his alleged escape path.

And the testimony of three of them

conflicted with what was in the Warren Report.

Barry Ernest went looking for one of these employees.

My focus was on finding

a specific witness to the assassination,

which was Victoria Adams.

This would have gone on

from when I returned from Dallas in late '68

until probably 2000.

There was not much written about her,

even in her testimony.

But one thing she did say

was that she graduated from high school

in San Francisco.

I finally ended up with a school

called Presentation High School,

and it had her name in it.

And I wrote to them, the alumni office

to try and find out if I could get

an email address or a telephone number

for this woman.

I never received a response,

but the state police officer who I knew said,

"Let me handle it."

And within a week,

he had written to Vicki Adams

and asked her if she was the woman

who once worked in Dallas

and had been a witness to the JFK assassination.

She had replied to him, "Yes, that's me."

Vicki worked on the fourth floor

of the Texas School Book Depository.

She testified that immediately

after the assassination,

she ran down the back stairs

in an effort to get outside to see what was going on.

[Goldberg] According to the Warren Report,

Oswald was seen in the second floor lunchroom

within 90 seconds of the shooting

by Dallas police officer Marrion Baker

and Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly,

as they went up the stairs to the sixth floor.

I turned around and asked him if the man worked for him,

and if he knew him.

And he said, "Yes, he works for me,

and I-I know him."

[Goldberg] For Vicki Adams to have reached the first floor

within 60 seconds

and not have seen or heard Oswald,

or Baker and Truly,

on the wooden stairs

was in conflict

with the Warren Commission's assumption

that Oswald was on those stairs at the time.

[Barry Ernest] So what the Warren Commission did

was successfully deceive the public

into thinking that Vicki was just another

mistaken or a confused witness.

The whole case based on the Warren Commission

is Vicki was wrong

because she went down the stairs

later than she thought,

and she saw two men there who couldn't have been there

unless she had come down the stairs later.

[Goldberg] Employees William Shelley

and Billy Lovelady

had been on the front steps of the building

watching the motorcade pass.

According to their statements,

after the shooting,

they then went to the railroad tracks

beside the grassy knoll,

returning to the Book Depository

within several minutes.

The Warren Commission,

needing to keep the stairs clear

for Oswald's descent,

claimed that Vicki had come down

after Baker and Truly had passed

the fourth floor on their way up,

and late enough to see Shelley and Lovelady

return from the railroad tracks.

According to her testimony,

she left the window on the fourth floor

within 15 to 30 seconds of the assassination.

The Warren Commission elevated that time to one minute.

She said she arrived on the first floor

within 60 seconds of the assassination.

The Warren Commission elevated that time

to several minutes.

When Vicki was giving her Warren Commission testimony,

she felt that David Belin, who was questioning her,

did not believe her.

And so she asked Belin

if she could be a part of the reenactments

that were going on.

Belin refused.

When she then said, "Interview Sandra Styles,

a coworker who went down the stairs with me,"

Belin said, "We don't need her. We have you."

Sandra Styles, when I interviewed her,

uh, she corroborated everything Vicki had said.

She came down the stairs with Vicki,

she didn't see or hear anyone on the stairs,

and she didn't see Shelley and Lovelady

on the first floor.

In light of that, I went to the National Archives

searching for her original testimony.

I wanted the original stenographer's tape

that was made by the court reporter,

the only other person in the room

when David Belin interviewed Vicki Adams.

But when I asked about Vicki's tape,

I was told that the tape

containing her testimony was missing.

And later, I learned that that tape had been destroyed

by the Warren Commission for no apparent reason.

And Vicki named three people who could corroborate her.

And the Commission had an affidavit from one of them.

The three people who were Elsie Dorman,

who was a coworker,

happened to be filming the motorcade

from the fourth floor window.

Sandra Styles and Dorothy Garner,

Vicki's immediate supervisor,

and had stood at the window with Vicki.

Not a one of them was called as a Commission witness.

In 1999, I found a document in the National Archives

that had been suppressed for 35 years.

It was a letter written by

Assistant US Attorney Martha Jo Stroud.

It was addressed to J. Lee Rankin,

the head honcho

of the Warren Commission's investigation

at that point.

It was a transmittal letter

forwarding Vicki's signed testimony.

In the last paragraph of that letter,

the letter quotes Garner as saying

that she saw Vicki go down the stairs

before she saw Officer Baker and Roy Truly come up.

Now, this is in direct contradiction

to the Warren Commission's conclusion

that Vicki was on the stairs

much later than all this had occurred.

When I found and interviewed Dorothy Garner,

she confirmed everything.

She said that she had been at the window with Vicki,

that Vicki had left the window immediately,

that she actually followed Vicki outside the office

and to a point where she could

see her going down the stairs.

And it was only after that,

that Baker and Truly came up the stairs,

according to her.

And during that whole time, she never saw Oswald.

Garner was putting Vicki on the stairs

exactly when she said.

So the Stroud letter became a very, very dangerous document.

[Goldberg] The Warren Commission

concealed the Stroud document.

Without the Review Board's declassification process,

we would never have learned of the corroborating testimony

of three witnesses that provide powerful evidence

that Oswald was not on the sixth floor

at the time of the shooting.

[reporter] Tonight, President Trump

getting caught up in his own JFK conspiracy

after deciding not to release all the documents

tied to the assassination.

So all of the records were supposed

to have been released in 2017.

What happened?

President Trump, uh,

tweeted that he was excited

to release all of the remaining records

of the assassination and what they might disclose.

And then at the last minute, after meeting with the CIA,

he decided to postpone release.

It's 1960s-era material

and there are redactions that we put in

because we felt in the 1990s there was still a reason

to keep them from being released.

But that's changed.

Uh, this is 56 years after the assassination.

There's no reason

to protect this information anymore.

It's certainly against the spirit,

uh, of the JFK Records Act

and technically now against the law,

because the mandate was to get everything out by 2017.

You know, they had 25 years to plan

for the due date in Washington.

It's not just the Trump administration,

but they're the ones who tweeted out

saying it's all coming.

Why the delay?

[Tom Llamas] Well, the White House is citing

national security concerns,

we know that at least 18,000 records from the CIA

are still being guarded.

[reporter] The President's decision

coming after an appeal

from the CIA and the FBI,

that releasing certain files could put the lives

of some of our spies in danger.

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