Jefferson Morley is a Washington intelligence expert and investigative journalist. He is co-founder and editor of JFK Facts and vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which sponsors the internet's largest archive of records related to JFK's assassination.
His latest book is Scorpions' Dance: The President, The Spymaster, and Watergate. The book reveals the Watergate scandal in a completely new light: as the culmination of a concealed, deadly power struggle between President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms.
Morley has been following the declassification and distribution of intelligence records related to the JFK assassination. Though their disclosure to the public has been mandated by Congress, Joe Biden has continued to delay full disclosure, despite releasing a large tranche in December 2022. There's still more to go. Morley has filed lawsuits to accelerate the process of release. Even the MSM has tuned in to his efforts (see embed below).
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This interview first appeared in CounterPunch magazine on 1/10/2023. This is an extension of that piece.
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John Hawkins: In 2022 you put out a new book, Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate. The book explores the relationship between President Richard Nixon and his CIA director Richard Helms in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's humiliating resignation from office. But it's been more than 50 years since the Watergate scandal. How is your book relevant for today's readers?
Jefferson Morley: Its relevant in two ways. First, over the last 50 years Washington has seen serial scandals involving large-scale, extra-legal conspiracies organized to prevail in the struggle for power. The Watergate affair was followed by Iran-Contra conspiracy, the Iraq WMD debacle, the implementation of the CIA torture program, and the January 6 insurrection. So understanding how Watergate unfolded in the media, the Congress and the Executive Branch tells readers something about how we got to where we are today. Second, Scorpions' Dance is a biography of power, tracing how a president and CIA director gained and wielded supreme authority, which I think helps the reader understand how the CIA functions in the American system.
Hawkins: Some people have compared Trump to Nixon. Especially their end days in office. Many news outlets passed on reports that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so concerned about President Donald Trump's mental health in the final months of his administration that he placed secret calls to a top Chinese general to assure him that the United States would not launch a nuclear attack against Beijing. This reminds me of Sy Hersh's piece "The Pardon," that he wrote for Atlantic in which he details the concerns of all those around Nixon about his mental health. One aide wonders:
Was it possible for the President of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without his secretary of defense knowing it? What if Nixon, ordered by the Supreme Court to leave office, refused to leave and called for the military to surround the Washington area? Who was in charge then? Whose orders would be obeyed in a crisis?
How were Nixon and Trump similar and dissimilar?
Morley: They were both graduates of the Roy Cohn School of Slash and Trash Politics, using invective to demonize elite foes and distinguish themselves as fighters for the people. They were dissimilar in that Nixon had a keen intellect, tenacious discipline, and master of policy. Trump had animal intelligence, lazy stubbornness, and policy ignorance. They were also dissimilar in relations with the CIA. Nixon sought to bend the Agency to his will through brow-beating and bureaucratic reorganization, and largely failed. Trump picked rhetorical fights with the CIA and its former leaders but had few objections to its policies and practices.
Hawkins: In Scorpions' Dance you describe the two Dicks doing a kind of martial dance with their foils raised. Why did Nixon distrust Helms?
Morley: Nixon initially distrusted Helms because he came from the CIA, which he blamed for favoring John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election. With his East Coast pedigree and silky style, Helms made Nixon, awkward poor boy from Whittier, uncomfortable.
Hawkins: You write that Helms was instrumental in helping to take down Nixon. Like the story about the associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, being huge in providing momentum to Washington Post reporters about following the money, the Helms role is underreported, it seems. Can you shed some specific details on what he did to help undermine Nixon?
Morley: I don't think I wrote that Helms was "instrumental" in helping take down Nixon. I certainly didn't intend to give that impression. I disagree with writers who say the CIA took down Nixon. Dick Helms did not. Helms didn't like Nixon as a man but he liked Nixon as a president saying he was the most qualified of all the presidents he knew (Ike, JFK, and LBJ), which is high praise. Like Nixon, Helms was a conservative and a Cold Warrior who supported Nixon more loyally than most of the cabinet.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Helms abetted Nixon's fall by artfully dodging responsibility for the Watergate burglars, whom he had effectively provided to White House via his longtime pal in covert action Howard Hunt. He also deployed his friend James McCord to deny CIA involvement and focusing media attention on the burglars patrons in the White House, not Langley. But when prosecutor Earl Silbert pressed Helms on the CIA ties of the burglars, the canny director never mentioned the June 23, 1972 meeting where Nixon demanded his help in shutting down the Watergate investigation. When released two years later, the transcripts of Nixon's conversations ended his presidency. So Helms could have damaged Nixon very badly if he had spoken candidly to prosecutors in October 1972. He never mentioned the meeting.
Hawkins: As you know, the CIA charter prohibits domestic operations and yet CIA assets and operatives were used in the Watergate crime. Do you see this as a violation of the charter and why did it play so small a role in the push for Nixon's resignation?
Morley: It was definitely a violation of the CIA's charter. I think the CIA's abuse of power played a relatively small role in Nixon's resignation because the Democrats in 1972 and 1973 wanted to focus their fire on the president, and the CIA (and Dick Helms) still had credibility on Capitol Hill. Democrats resisted implicating the CIA in the scandal because they believed Republicans, like Howard Baker, only wanted to investigate the Agency as a way of deflecting attacks on Nixon. Baker, while a partisan, was the only member of the Senate Watergate Committee not to take Dick Helms at his word. Democrats on Capitol Hill didn't turn on the CIA until 1975 in the wake of new revelations about domestic spying and foreign assassination plots. By then Nixon was gone, and so was the CIA's credibility.
Hawkins: Have Nixon and Trump left us with the scarifying realization that America is ripe for a future coup? Alexander Haig after Reagan was shot declared he was in charge to much chagrin and criticism. And though Milley called the Chinese to relieve them of the idea they'd be nuked, there is an aspect of it that seems treasonous. How do we reconcile?
Morley: Yes, they have. Nixon and Trump are reminders that our strong presidential system is vulnerable to lawless men at the top who can only be curbed or stop by people who operate within that system. They are reminders that what we call "the system" is often only a set of understandings, traditions, or customs that can be abandoned"or defended by individual action. To dispel the idiosyncrasies of court politics and coup plotting, we need more explicit and stronger guard rails. The revision of the Electoral Count Act is a good first step.
Hawkins: On another note, you have been following the JFK assassination for a long time and November 22 of this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the Dallas kill. Some analysts have concluded that the Deep State was involved -- a me'lange of corporatists, the CIA, and military DIA operatives, such as the scenario depicted in the film Executive Action (1973) -- and have helped cover up the event all these years. And it has never sat well with lots of the Left that Allen Dulles sat on the Warren Commission and was certainly in a position to influence the findings and cover up the CIA's role, if any, in the kill. Joe Biden said he'd release all the rest of the JFK archives, but he hasn't. Why not, Jefferson?
Morley: Biden, like Trump, has acquiesced to the CIA's extreme and bizarre claims of secrecy. At the end of the day, both presidents found it in their interest not to challenge the CIA on the JFK files, which tells you something about the Agency's entrenched power. The CIA has made clear it intends to retain the right to control what the public does and does not see about Kennedy's assassination. Some people say the CIA is hiding nothing of significance. I disagree. To me, the most plausible explanation for failure to disclose fully, as required by the JFK Records Act, is that they have something significant to hide. What they are hiding is the undisclosed interest of certain senior CIA officers in Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, while JFK was still alive. I first wrote about the undisclosed Oswald operation last November 22 at JFK Facts (jfkfacts.substack.com) and I will be reporting more on the story in 2023.
Hawkins: Speaking of films, Oliver Stone recently put out a retrospective of his JFK film, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. It covers much of the documentation that has been released over the years and anticipates the records die-hard JFK assassination students have been waiting for -- the final pieces. I thought the film was especially effective regarding the Book Depository witness information regarding where Oswald was at the time of the shooting. Have you seen the Oliver Stone release and, if so, what do you make of it?
Morley: Oliver and Jim DiEugenio are to be commended for doing something no major U.S. news organization has done: Review and summarize the vast body of new JFK evidence that has emerged since the release of Stone's 1992 movie. I appear in JFK Revisited, which is not the only reason I like it. It's a detailed reckoning with what we know now, compared to what we knew before.
Hawkins: Scorpion's Dance is a real interesting read and full of many surprises. You have an excellent account of Cuba in the lead up to the Castro regime. Another detail that surprised me was how the CIA undermined Aristotle Onassis. You write:
Nixon, too, was getting a taste for covert action. When President Eisenhower and executives of the Seven Sisters, the seven largest oil companies in America, grew concerned in 1954 that Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis was on the verge of gaining a monopoly on oil shipments from Saudi Arabia, Nixon led a CIA-organized initiative to block him. The Agency contracted with a former FBI agent turned public relations man named Robert Maheu to discredit Onassis in the press, antagonize his partners, and disrupt his incipient monopoly.
You make it sound like the CIA conducted industrial sabotage on behalf of the Seven Sisters. Did I get that right?
Morley: I don't think the seven sisters said we have a problem here. US policy makers said they were getting complaints from people in the oil business that this monopoly would hinder US interests. And they were working with Onassis's great rival, Stavros Niarchos, another Greek shipping magnate who also wanted to break Onassis's monopoly. So, US officials got together. Niarchos provided some money. Nixon rode herd on the whole thing and Bob Maheu executed the dirty tricks part of it and they bombarded Onassis with lawsuits, planted newspaper stories, all sorts of complaints, and just harassed him until eventually the Saudis just dropped him because it was too much trouble.
So, you know, it was the collusion of US intelligence officials at the top. People from private industry. So, it was a revealing incident. There's more about this in a document I saw the other day in the latest JFK releases describing Maheu's background with the agency, because that was something people [in the CIA] were wondering about when in the 1970s: who was this guy and was he really associated with us? And indeed, he was. And Maheu did all sorts of dirty tricks. The thing that I found [in] declassified [documents] last month was Maheu's role in procuring women for visiting foreign dignitaries. That was one of his specialties. And so that was declassified last month. So, yeah, just collusion is the word.
Hawkins: That common, do you think?
Morley: Yeah, I would assume that still goes on today.
Hawkins: But it sounds like the parallel government that the Kennedys worry worried about, and they didn't want to be in a situation where they were working in parallel with something counter to their own interests.
Morley: Well, you know, I mean, you have a CIA, which is a clandestine service by definition, and then the clandestine service itself takes operations off the record. So they're not even accountable to the minimal standards that the clandestine service is subject to. So that was just another layer of secrecy in which they operated. And yeah, Kennedy was definitely worried about the independent power of the CIA. One of the documents that we were most interested in for declassification this time around was a memo from Arthur Schlesinger to JFK about reorganization of the CIA. That's the title of the memo. And Schlesinger goes through in a very detached but critical way about the problems that the CIA presented to Kennedy's presidency, namely that they did foreign policy by fait accompli and the State Department and the president were pre-empted and really had no policymaking power compared to the CIA, at least in a lot of specific examples.
And so, Schlesinger lays out this case to Kennedy, who had, as we all know, mused about breaking the CIA up and scattering it to the winds. Well, this was the kind of formal policy execution of that impulse. It was a more restrained and technical description of how would you go about reorganizing the CIA and why? And there's about a page and a half of that memo that's still classified 60 years later, and the contents are controlled by the CIA. So, we were very interested. Is the CIA going to declassify this document? And so we went and looked and we discovered that they had declassified exactly one sentence of the page and a half that had been classified. And they said, you know, this document is available in a less redacted form. And so they basically, out of 250 words, they declassified about 18. So that that was a very telling example of the kind of the sham disclosure that we got last month and also about the CIA's continuing ability to control the record and the narrative of the assassination. Yeah.
Hawkins: Well, it goes back a way -- to Ike's warning in 1960 about the military industrial complex. I've seen stuff on PBS. Bill Moyers openly admits there's a deep state. There's parallel governance.
Morley: Well, I mean, you have the deep state, according to Trump, which is, you know, anybody who criticizes him. So, the term itself is subject to very different interpretations. But, you know, the reality [that there are] power centers outside of the formal structures of US government -- yeah, that's a very sound concept. Do we call it the deep state? I mean, in light of all the Trump and Bannon bullshit, I tend not to.
Hawkins: I'm going with Bill Moyers.
Morley: Yeah, that's right. Since Moyers did that episode, the term has been debased by the proto-fascist forces.
Hawkins: Scorpions' Dance paints a mighty cosy picture of the CIA and the press and media. One reads that Richard Helms went straight out of college to work at UPI. And Howard Hunt had a close relationship to conservative journalist William F. Buckley who notoriously defended the party line. You note that the popular animated version of Animal Farm (1954) was partially a CIA production. We've learned of Operation Mockingbird. More recently, the CIA was said to have influenced the framing of Zero Dark Thirty by pushing a line out of the Obama White House which gave declassified documentation on the spot that allowed Kathryn Bigelow to claim that the film was journalistic.
Morley: Well, I think the story that I tell in Scorpions' Dance [is that] Dick Helms, if he hadn't gone into intelligence work, if, say, there'd been no World War Two, Dick Helms would have been a conservative newspaper publisher in the Midwest perhaps in Indianapolis or someplace like that. So, he brought a publisher's mentality and ambition to the CIA director's job, and he understood the broad importance of defining the story, capturing elite public opinion and harnessing it towards his own ends. And that is certainly what he did. As CIA director, he was not friends with William Buckley. He was very good friends with Howard Hunt, who was friends with William Buckley, and he sponsored Hunt for the purpose of burnishing the image of the CIA.
And so, in 1966, he gives Hunt a year off to write spy novels in the vein of James Bond, with the hopes that these will be picked up by Hollywood and glamorized the American clandestine Service. The way that the zero seven movies glamorized the British intelligence service. It didn't happen because Howard Hunt was too much of a hack. Certainly more of a hack than Ian Fleming. And it never came to fruition. But, you know, Hunt, I mean, Helms had his eye on that kind of thing. And in a more general way, the international operations division of the CIA under Cord Meyer, a friend of Helms, you know, worked very hard to co-opt independent sources of opinion making, like the Partisan Review or the Iowa Writers Workshop and make sure that that what they did didn't conflict with the CIA's goals.
Morley: So that perspective of how do you stay on top of public opinion, appeal to public opinion, protect yourself with mythmaking in public opinion. You know, that was something that Helms and Hunt pioneered. Howard Hunt, you know, helped produce the animated version of Animal Farm in the 1950s. He bought the rights to the movie through from Sonia Orwell, George Orwell's widow, and arranged for a production of the film, which was a critical and commercial success. And nobody understood, until many years later, about the hidden hand of the CIA.
So, does that thing still go on today? Sure. You look at movies like Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, you know, the CIA will extend generous cooperation to people in exchange for script approval. And when they are sure that they've got a script that suits their needs, then they provide all the help that Hollywood could want. And that helps. That makes for a better movie. It's more convincing. It has more convincing details, it has more credibility and news organization, that sort of thing. So, yes, it definitely still goes on.
Hawkins: You say this is a smoking gun of the JFK assassination records around Oswald in the still unreleased 44 documents. Can you elaborate on that?
Morley: The document I'm talking about is the CIA's operational interest in Oswald and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee before Kennedy's assassination, while JFK is still alive. And this operation or operations were approved by senior agency officials. Right now, we can only see the lowest level guy who's executing their orders in Miami and New Orleans. An officer named George Joannides. But what the documents that we're seeking, and that are known to exist, are who authorized those operations involving the Fair Play for Cuba in 1963 that have never been disclosed? So, yeah, that's the smoking gun. I expect that we will see that material in 2023.
Hawkins: One curiosity came from reading your book. And it surprised me a little bit when I thought about it. Why would the US government still be working with Cubans after what happened with JFK? Why would it be taking the chance of working with Cubans, given the sort of conspiracy theorizing that went along with the Kennedy assassination?
Morley: The CIA never investigated Fidel Castro for possible involvement in the Kennedy assassination, which is very peculiar, given that the alleged assassin was supposedly a Castro supporter affiliated with an organization, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that supported Castro. So, you know, to me, that's kind of a giveaway, right? They knew Castro didn't kill Kennedy and they didn't investigate him because they didn't want any investigation of Oswald. Because if you investigated Oswald, the trail did not lead to Cuban intelligence. The trail led to the CIA. And so, the CIA was not going to investigate itself. And so, nothing happened. So that's a dog that didn't bark to use the Sherlock Holmes story. It's a very strange omission, and it tells you a lot, and it tells you what they didn't want to do. What they didn't want to do was investigate Oswald.
Hawkins: Well, speaking of that, Gerald Ford was on the Warren Commission, in charge of the Oswald portfolio and tasked with making the killing a single gunman -- Oswald.
Morley: Yeah. Gerald Ford and Allen Dulles were running interference for the Agency throughout the Warren Commission proceedings. That's very clear. They wanted to make sure that there was no real investigation of the CIA's role in the events that led to the assassination. And they succeeded.
Hawkins: The Church Era was huge for Americans looking for closure from the 60s and Nixon era, as it the committee hearings seemed to back what the counter culturalists were saying about the government. There was grief, but also hippie validation: we was right about The Man and bongs were passed around in celebration of the wisdom of the Demos. Then they came back at us or the hemp lulled us back to sleep and now we got the shiver of Auschwitz back in the air again, and the surveillance state Church warned about mocking us with the Internet of Everything, and, as Ed Snowden tells in his memoir, we each have Permanent Records to worry about. What happened since Nixon, Jeff?
Morley: Well, you know, the Warren Commission is really a key moment. That the CIA's story of a "lone nut" was a cover story, that this was not a guy who came out of nowhere. This was a guy who was very well known to the upper echelon. I mean, and when I say the upper echelon, I mean the top 20 people in the CIA knew all about this guy six weeks before Kennedy was killed. If that had been known, they all would have lost their jobs and Congress would have taken a look and public opinion would have taken a look at it. That didn't happen.
The Church Committee, ten years later, is kind of a delayed reaction to the CIA, the accumulated impact of the CIA's abuses of power, which were revealed first in the Watergate affair. Six out of the seven burglars were connected with the agency and then with the revelations of domestic spying on the antiwar movement, illegal opening of mail, the MKULTRA mind control program and the foreign assassination plots. And so, in the seventies, with the advent of the Church Committee, you have a real accounting. You know, the CIA is called on the carpet for the first time. Congress stops being taking all of their statements at face value and actually looks at what they do. And the Church Committee issues a very comprehensive, very thorough, very fair report about what the CIA had been doing in the first 25 years of its existence.
So and some real reforms resulted in the creation of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the creation of the FISA courts. CIA's budget is cut for the first time. People are fired. Unheard of in the whole history of the agency. And there's a real reckoning. But with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, you know those kind of reforms, they lose their teeth. Congress loses its appetite. The Iran-Contra affair shows that the CIA's abuse of power is still a real problem. Three top agency officials are indicted and heading for a conviction when they're pardoned by President Bush. And so in both in the 1970s and with the Iran-Contra affair, the agency is in a lot of trouble in terms of public opinion and Capitol Hill opinion. But both times they escape from their would-be tormentors and go on to achieve or regain the power that they had. And so, what happened? Well, there was never accountability from the start. And then the entrenched power of the CIA was able to outlast its critics within the Capitol Hill system and exploit new developments, 9/11 to maximize its budget and its power. But, you know, one of the things that is the result of all of that is that the agency has lost a lot of credibility.
And you see that mostly, now, on the right, where the CIA and the FBI were once sacrosanct on the American right, both in elite and popular opinion, now they're frankly regarded in both elite and popular opinion on the right as the enemy, as a threat to American democracy. And so, the credibility that they once had with 30 or 40% of the population is gone. And in combination with the enduring suspicions from the liberal left, you know, I think they're in a more precarious situation than they've ever been.
And we're going to see what's going to happen with the Republicans in Congress now saying that they're going to start a new Church Committee and they'll invoke the Church Committee because precisely because it was considered a great liberal cause and accomplishment. And they want to co-opt Democratic criticism because liberal Democrats are not going to criticize the Church Committee. They're going to say that was a good thing. And, you know, I think the idea of another Church Committee is a good idea. I don't think that that's what these people have in mind. That's the problem.
Hawkins: Many reporters and pundits have argued that the assassination of Iran's Qassem Soleimani was murder and not justifiable, since America is not at war with Iran, and they are not on a terrorist list. James Risen, who spent all of Trump's presidency hating on the pink thug, wrote a piece for the Intercept headlined:Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani. At your Wikispooks blog you report that Trump had Soleimani killed almost as a favor to Israel, especially for his good bud Bibi. Iran has vowed revenge. Do you believe they will exact revenge? And how has the assassination changed the status quo in the region?
Morley: The assassination of Suleimani exemplified the close relationship of the United States and Israel. Iran will exact revenge but not in a comparable high-profile attack but with strategy of revolutionary fervor, paramilitary support, and diplomatic initiatives. Knowing that the U.S. and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority, Iran pursues its goals through asymmetric warfare: cultivating allies in Iraq, saving Assad's regime by defeating U.S.-backed jihadist, and supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi in Yemen. The assassination was a blow to Iran but I do not think it changed the status quo in the region.
Hawkins: I subscribe to Ed Snowden's Substack site, Continuing Ed. He recently published an entry -- his first since Christmas 2021 -- titled America's Open Wound: The CIA is not your friend. Great piece. Historical overview of the Agency, then bam, no more pieces. Have you read the piece and, if so, do you want to speculate on why a piece on the CIA would be his only blog entry in a year?
Morley: I think Snowden and his wife have had a couple of kids. Maybe he has more rewarding things to do in life than write about the dirty tricks business. That's just a guess.
Hawkins: Anything else you want to add?
I am struck by how many hard-right conservatives subscribe to JFK Facts, which is just a reflection of a large phenomenon that many have noted. Skepticism of the CIA and FBI, once a mainstay of the liberal left, has become a strain of hard-right conservativism, while the Democrats have become more sympathetic to the FBI and CIA, perceiving them as institutional enemies of Trump's authoritarianism. Now some people like Glenn Greenwald say this is a terrible betrayal by the liberal left but I think thee perception is accurate. Certainly, a CIA and FBI run by Trump or another MAGA president would pose much more of threat to American democratic institutions than secret agencies run by a Democratic president. That said, I hope CIA accountability could become an issue that transcends the culture war. Both left and right have good, if different, reasons, for demanding CIA accountability. This might be that rare thing: depolarizing issue.
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Memorandum from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Special Assistant to the President, to President John F. Kennedy, "CIA Reorganization," June 30, 1961.######
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