The Secret JFK Records: The CIA and the Zapruder Film
Today, February 6, is when we are supposed to learn about President Trump’s “plan” for releasing CIA records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy, which the CIA has steadfastly and fiercely kept secret for more than 60 years — on grounds of protecting “national security” of course.
I remain doubtful that all of those decades-old records will be released, for the sample reason that I don’t believe that the CIA is going to permit Trump to disclose those records. I think it’s much more likely that the CIA will let Trump do what he did the last time he was president — release some records while keeping the rest secret. That would enable Trump to crow publicly about how he “released the JFK records” while the incriminating records continue to be kept secret.
After all, why didn’t Trump simply issue an order to the National Archives to immediately release all of the long-secret JFK-assassination-related records in its possession? Why didn’t he simply order the CIA to disclose all of its files on CIA officer George Joannides, who played a critically important role in the JFK saga? Why doesn’t he issue such orders today and just forget about coming up with a “plan” for releasing the records? What next? A committee to study the problem and come up with a report six months from now? (For more on Joannides, see FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation by Jefferson Morley and Morley’s January 30, 2025, article “JFK Most Wanted: The Joannides File.)
In any event, if and when those long-secret records are ever released, one thing I can say with 100 percent certainty: They will not include any records documenting the CIA’s dealings with the famous Zapruder film, the film in which Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder captured the JFK assassination. That’s because such records would have documented the CIA’s participation in the cover-up of the national-security establishment’s violent regime-change operation in Dallas on November 22, 1963,
I detail the CIA’s dealings with the Zapruder film in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. The reason I consider this book so important is that it outlines the steps that the CIA secretly took on the very weekend of the assassination to produce an altered copy of the film, which became the extant “original” film that today rests in the National Archives and that we see on the Internet.
Why is that important? Because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent film, any more than there is innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. A fraudulent film automatically means criminal culpability In the assassination itself. There is no way around it. (For details relating to the U.S. military’s fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body at Bethesda National Military Hospital on the very evening of the assassination, see my book The Kennedy Autopsy.)
Ever since the day after the assassination, the official narrative has been that the Zapruder film was shipped to LIFE magazine in Chicago. As each decade passed since then, the CIA never made any effort to disavow that official narrative.
In the late 2000s, however, a man named Dino Brugioni came forward and disclosed that the official narrative was false. Who was Brugioni? He was the world’s most renowned photo a
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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