In a statement, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, where Morley is a vice president, said this document dump (the documents are completely disorganized, with no index) was the “most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s.”
What are some of the big takeaways from the release and redaction of these thousands of documents? Start with documents that are blockbusters, such as the long-suppressed deposition transcript of the legendary James Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief who secretly testified before the Senate in 1975 about arrangements between himself and CIA assassination chief Bill Harvey regarding the use of Israeli intelligence operatives in Havana, Cuba.
William King Harvey was the CIA’s point man for the infamous Operation Mongoose, an assassination plot to remove Fidel Castro. The plan traces back to the Eisenhower administration and eventually involved Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Much has been written about Operation Mongoose (code-named “ZR/RIFLE”), but it is still breathtaking to see a CIA chronology, without redactions, that lays bare the agency’s enlistment of assistance from criminal syndicate figures and the development of things like poison pills.
One entry, for April 21, 1962, reads: “Harvey passes the pills to ROSELLI [“Handsome John” Roselli, a Chicago mobster] in Florida. Roselli was to give the pills to Varona [Tony Varona was a Cuban exile leader in Miami], who had an asset in Cuba with access to Castro’s restaurant.”
In fact, if one enjoys spy stories, this one could not be more intriguing and convoluted. Code names abound—and fortunately for researchers, the Mary Ferrell Foundation has collected CIA cryptonyms, so one can look up most of the references while going through the CIA reports. For example, one document refers to “AMCARBON-2,” a person who is defined as a “Miami Herald journalist who introduced [Ted] Shackley [CIA Miami station chief] to [Miami journalist] Al Burt/AMCARBON-1 in late 1962 to ensure that CIA always had access to a Herald reporter. One possibility is Dom Bonafede, who was the chief Latin American correspondent until mid-1963…. Status: Speculative.” Through this sort of exercise, we learn more about the identity of journalists whom the CIA was using in Miami in the early 1960s.