More from John Hunt and Howard Hunt

Allegations of involvement with the Kennedy assassinations[edit]

John F. Kennedy[edit]

Main article: John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

After the death of E. Howard Hunt in 2007, John Hunt and David Hunt revealed that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.^[3][4] In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father including Morales, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, William Harvey and an assassin he termed “French gunman grassy knoll” who some presume was Lucien Sarti.^[4][5] (Lucien Sarti was in prison in France at the time of the assassination,^[6] but Corsican hit man, Jean Souetre, who came to New York on Nov 19, 1963 and then left the country from Laredo, Texas on Dec 6^[7] is thought more likely to be the “Sarte” or “Satre” mentioned in Hunt’s son’s book^[8] as the Corsican assassin allegedly contracted for “the big event”.^[7])

The two sons alleged that their father cut the information from his memoirs, “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond”, to avoid possible perjury charges.^[3] According to Hunt’s widow and other children, the two sons took advantage of Hunt’s loss of lucidity by coaching and exploiting him for financial gain.^[3]

Robert F. Kennedy[edit]

Main article: Robert F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

In November 2006, BBC Television‘s Newsnight aired a twelve-minute screening of Shane O’Sullivan‘s documentary RFK Must Die.^[9][10] O’Sullivan stated that while researching a screenplay based on the Manchurian candidate theory for the assassination of Robert Kennedy, he “uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing”.^[9][10] He claimed that three men seen in video and photographs of the Ambassador Hotel immediately before and after the assassination were positively identified as CIA operatives Gordon Campbell, George Joannides, and Morales.^[9][10] Several people who had known Morales, including family members, were adamant that he was not the man who O’Sullivan said was Morales.^[10] After O’Sullivan published his book, assassination researchers Jefferson Morley and David Talbot also discovered that Campbell had died of a heart attack in 1962, six years prior to the assassination of Kennedy.^[10] In response, O’Sullivan stated that the man on the video may have used Campbell’s name as an alias.^[10] He then took his identifications to the Los Angeles Police Department whose files showed the men he identified as Campbell and Joannides to be Michael Roman and Frank Owens, two Bulova sales managers attending the company’s convention in the Ambassador.^[10] O’Sullivan stood by his allegations stating that the Bulova watch company was a “well-known CIA cover”.^[10]

George Efythron Joannides (July 5, 1922 – March 9, 1990) was a Central Intelligence Agency officer who in 1963 was the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the agency’s JMWAVE station in Miami, and in 1978 was the agency’s liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Joannides attended the City College of New York and St. John’s University School of Law.^[1] He joined the CIA in 1952. By 1963 he was chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the Central Intelligence Agency‘s JM/WAVE station in Miami, with a staff of 24 and a budget of $1.5 million.^[2] In that role, he was also known as “Howard”, “Mr. Howard”, and “Walter Newby”.^[3][4] Joannides directed and financed Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), or Student Revolutionary Directorate, a group of Cuban exiles whose officers had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.^[5][6][7] By some accounts, fashioned with the “plausible deniability” typical of CIA operations, the plan was designed to link Oswald to Castro’s government, without disclosing the CIA’s role. He left the agency in 1976 to start an immigration-law practice in Washington, DC.^[1]

In 1978 the CIA summoned Joannides to serve as the agency’s liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, in specific regard to the death of President Kennedy. Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley wrote that, “the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It wasn’t until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy’s death, that Joannides’ support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light.”^[8] Joainnides retired permanently from the CIA in November 1978.^[1] In July 1981 he was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal.^[9]

In 2013 John R. Tunheim and Thomas E. Samoluk wrote in the Boston Herald: “There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the Kennedy assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.”^[10]

Personal life and death[edit]

In addition to speaking English, Joannides was fluent in Greek and French, and competent in Spanish. He and his wife Violet had three children, and lived in Pinecrest, Florida. In his later years, Joannides had hea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S%C3%A1nchez_Morales

Circa 1949, Meyer started working for the Central Intelligence Agency, joining the organization in 1951 at the invitation of Allen Dulles. At first he worked at the Office of Policy Coordination under former OSS man, Frank Wisner.^[5] In 1953, Meyer came under attack by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which claimed he was a security risk for having once stood at the same podium of a “notorious leftist”, and refused to give him a security clearance. An internal CIA inquiry summarily dismissed the claims.^[6]

According to Deborah Davis in her 1979 book Katharine the Great, Meyer became the “principal operative” of Operation Mockingbird, a plan to secretly influence domestic and foreign media.^[7] Meyer befriended James Angleton, who in 1954 became the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief. From 1954 until 1962, Meyer led the agency’s International Organizations Division.^[8] Meyer headed the Covert Action Staff of the Directorate of Plans from 1962.^[5]

On 18 December 1956, Meyer’s nine-year-old son, Michael, was hit by a car and killed. Meyer and his wife Mary divorced in 1958. On 12 October 1964, his former wife Mary was shot dead by an unknown assailant alongside the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.^[9] Her sister and brother-in-law Benjamin C. Bradlee, later the executive editor of The Washington Post, caught Angleton breaking into Pinchot’s residence.^[6] Angleton apparently was looking for Mary Meyer’s diary that allegedly contained details of a love affair with John F. Kennedy, the recently assassinated U.S. President.^[6][10]

From 1967 to 1973, Meyer was Assistant Deputy Director of Plans under Thomas Karamessines,^[4][9] and from 1973 to 1976 was CIA station chief in London.^[11]

Later years[edit]

He retired from the CIA in 1977. Following retirement, Meyer became a syndicated columnist and wrote several books, including an autobiography. Some insiders incorrectly suspected that Cord Meyer was Deep Throat, a key informant in the Watergate Scandal.^[12]

Meyer died of lymphoma on March 13, 2001.^[4]

Allegations of involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy[edit]

After the death of former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt in 2007, Saint John Hunt and David Hunt revealed that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.^[13][14] In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed how his father drew a diagram of the conspirators:

E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.”

Many presume the “French gunman grassy knoll” were Lucien Sarti and William Harvey.^[14][15] The two sons alleged that their father cut the information from his memoirs, “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond”, to avoid possible perjury charges.^[13] According to Hunt’s widow and other children, the two sons took advantage of Hunt’s loss of lucidity by coaching and exploiting him for financial gain.^[13] The Los Angeles Times said they examined the materials offered by the sons to support the story and found them to be “inconclusive”.^[13]