President Donald Trump made good on another campaign promise this week with the release of thousands of additional files related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. By 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 2,182 files totaling 63,400 pages were
uploaded to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration’s website in accordance with Trump’s Jan. 23 executive order.
Academics, amateur sleuths, and others keen for additional insights into precisely what happened on Nov. 22, 1963, at Dealey Plaza are currently poring over the documents. Already, a few files have stood out, including a provocative document that wasn’t exactly a secret.
Numerous influencers seized upon the document numbered 104-10170-10145 in the latest tranche as new proof that the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly killed a sitting president.
The contents of the document — a July 19, 1967, CIA memo marked secret — consist of excerpts from a June 1967 article in Ramparts, a now-defunct leftist magazine that was deeply antagonistic of the CIA and
suspected by the FBI of “acting as the agent of a foreign principal” during the Cold War, along with notes about the persons and allegations referenced in the article. The allegations contained therein were discussed at length in a Playboy interview with a district attorney months later.
‘They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique.’
The
Ramparts article noted that John Garrett Underhill Jr., better known as Gary Underhill, “left Washington in a hurry” following the assassination, then showed up to a friend’s house in New Jersey in an agitated state. Underhill, who served with the Military Intelligence Service during World War II and then worked on special projects for the CIA, supposedly told his friends that a cabal of CIA agents was responsible for the assassination and indicated that he feared for his life. Six months later, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Washington apartment — this, Ramparts noted, was ruled a suicide.
According to the excerpt of the article included in the memo:
The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics and other contraband, and manipulating political intrigue to serve its own ends. Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could “blow the whistle on it.” Although the friends had always known Underhill to be perfectly rational and objective, they at first didn’t take his account seriously. “I think the main reason was,” explains the husband, “that we couldn’t believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless — and more efficient — as the mafia.”
The article noted further that Underhill was on a first-name basis with senior officials both in the Pentagon and the CIA and served as one of the agency’s “‘un-people’ who perform special assignments.” The leftist magazine spiced things up with the suggestion that Underhill had also been a one-time friend of Samuel Cummings of Interarmco, “the arms broker that numbers among its customers the CIA, and, ironically, Klein’s Sporting Gods of Chicago, from whence [sic] the mail-order Carcano allegedly was purchased by Oswald.”
Before meeting with Jim Garrison, a district attorney from Louisiana who investigated the assassination, Underhill was found dead in his apartment with a bullet wound behind his left ear. His death certificate
stated he “shot self in head with automatic pistol” on May 8, 1964.
The wound’s location behind Underhill’s left ear has prompted some suspicion it wasn’t actually a suicide, especially since Asher Brynes, his writing partner who found his body, indicated that “Underhill was right-handed,” according to the Ramparts article.
Paul Ogle, apparently an old friend of Underhill’s,
indicated in a letter months after the apparent suicide that, “Gary had been, for a short time, under psychiatric treatment about a year and a half ago. He unfortunately, did not carry on with it and deteriorated to quite an extent.”
‘I don’t believe it and I don’t disbelieve it.’
The agency memo provides some of its records on Underhill and Cummings, noting, for instance, that “CIA memoranda of February and October 1949 show that there was interest by the New York office of OO, Contacts Division, in using [Underhill] as a contact for foreign intelligence. Name checks were conducted with various military members of the intelligence community, but these yielded insufficient information, and OO was advised that contact should be developed with caution, on a limited basis, and that Subject was not to receive information classified higher than confidential.”
Underhill had apparently also brought the CIA’s attention to photographs of Soviet military subjects that a man named Herman Axelbank was trying to sell in 1949.
The memo indicated that Cummings also worked for the CIA, “traveled abroad extensively, buying foreign weapons,” bought weapons for the CIA “intended for resistance elements behind the Iron Curtain,” and “engaged in sharp practices in his conduct of business and was also extremely difficult to control.”
According to the memo, the Office of Security “recommended against [Cummings’] use by Domestic Contact Service as a source, and in December 1964 the CI Staff advised that it had no operational interest in Subject.”
Citing the memo, the popular X account Geiger Capital concluded, “The CIA assassinated JFK, the sitting President of the United States.”
ZeroHedge shared the document, writing, “Interesting.”
“This seems to be the biggest doc so far from the JFK files,” wrote Joshua Philipp, a senior reporter at the Epoch Times.
Underhill’s story similarly appeared to be news to evangelical media personality Lance Wallnau, who tweeted, “From the JFK data dump, we have a mysterious death of a CIA whistleblower who believed the agency was involved with the assassination.”
Although many online were quick to pounce on the memo, it contains virtually nothing revelatory about Underhill’s allegations and demise, which were discussed in Garrison’s
October 1967 interview with Playboy.
When asked whether he believed Underhill was murdered, Garrison said, “I don’t believe it and I don’t disbelieve it. All I know is that witnesses with vital evidence in this case are certainly bad insurance risks. In the absence of further and much more conclusive evidence to the contrary, however, we must assume that the plotters were acting on their own rather than on CIA orders when they killed the President.”
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Jfk assassination, John f. kennedy, Kennedy, Assassination, Cia, Deep state, Murder, Conspiracy, Gary underhill, Politics
