A Spy on Our Side: Amaryllis Fox Kennedy and JFK Assassination Transparency
The Axios news outlet ran a story a few days ago about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of his daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, for deputy director of the CIA (“Exclusive: RFK Jr.’s secret push to prove CIA killed uncle,” Stef W. Kight, Mike Allen, Dec. 11, 2024). Fox Kennedy is a former CIA officer who worked undercover in a counterterrorism capacity and wrote a book about her experiences, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA (2019). The CIA reacted by suing her for violating non-disclosure agreements and lost.
The Axios piece highlights RFK Jr.’s continued prioritization of transparency in the death of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, since a close and supportive family member in such a senior slot at the agency would further that goal. It surely couldn’t hurt. Nominees for the number-two position at the CIA don’t have to undergo Senate confirmation either, meaning President-elect Donald Trump could appoint Amaryllis directly once he takes office in five weeks’ time.
It's always welcome when Bobby Kennedy brings the JFK assassination back into the current news cycle, even if only briefly. Whenever a sixty-plus-year-old event, however momentous, raises its head in today’s headlines, mainstream media naturally sidelines it quickly, before the reading public even has time to focus on it, in favor of the flavor of the week. But the Amaryllis Fox Kennedy story has gained traction for more than a day. It was soon picked up by the neoconservative New Republic, The Telegraph of the U.K., and other outlets within 24 hours. As of this writing, the (RFK Jr.-hostile) New York Times has run an update to its Dec. 11 article on Friday, Dec. 13.
The backlash has already started, Bobby Kennedy’s foppish nephew, Jack Schlossberg, accuses him of being a “Russian spy” for daring to suggest that the CIA had a hand in the murder of America’s 35th president. Schlossberg posted the Axios article to X with the note: “@RobertKennedyJr you are so obviously a Russian spy … You all think I’m joking. Hahahaha”. I’m guessing Jack Schlossberg justifies his failure to offer any evidence that his uncle is an agent of Moscow on the basis that, if he did, he might compromise “national security.” That’s the usual excuse for making such claims. Who can disprove them, after all? Schlossberg’s implication is, if you question the official narrative on JFK’s death, you’re an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia. In fact, by the reasoning of more than one person I’ve encountered, anyone criticizing the CIA is one of those.
But what does today’s Russia have to do with the JFK assassination, a matter of U.S. national history? Schlossberg might be suggesting that JFK’s murder was the result of a Soviet conspiracy at the height of the Cold War, as one or two authors have argued. It is thus better to keep such evidence hidden under the “need to know” principle. But why? Assuming for the sake of argument that the Soviet KGB murdered Kennedy, the U.S.S.R. collapsed nearly 33 years ago, and the Cold War ended years before that. Schlossberg’s adolescent “in the know” posturing appears baseless. He always looks like he slept on the beach the night before after partying hard, at the expense of late-night research into the assassination of his grandfather. As Trump would say: Sad!
If the past is anything to go by, we can expect the Amaryllis Fox Kennedy story to die down in the news until Trump makes a decision on her. But again, importantly, the JFK assassination is still a live issue at the top of U.S. politics. A mutual acquaintance told me he asked RFK Jr. directly several months ago when he was running for the highest office, whether his first act as president would be to order the release of the JFK files. Bobby’s answer was that it would be second, after freeing the journalist Julian Assange of the U.S. Department of Justice’s prosecution. Now that Assange is back in Australia and not behind bars, JFK has presumably moved up a notch on the list of open government priorities. In the midst of pursuing his enduring passion to improve public health, Kennedy has found time to remind everyone that the murder of his uncle, who likely saved humanity from extinction during the Cuban Missile Crisis, is still a source of widespread public mistrust. That is a good thing.
It also needs to be mentioned that President Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has argued for some time in favor of transparency over JFK (along with 9/11 and other issues). He has vowed to take a “wrecking ball” to the Bureau and even told one interviewer he would shut down the J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue and reopen it as a “Museum of the Deep State.” While he’s at it, he could remove Hoover’s name from that monstrosity (considered, in all seriousness, to be a piece of “brutalist” architecture) as part of a national truth and reconciliation process. Alternatively, he could leave Hoover’s name on it when he converts it to a place that features halls of exhibits of the darkest chapters in 20th-century U.S. history. With members of the American public and the countless tourists descending on Washington every year from all over the world, leaving Hoover’s name on a museum like that might be apropos.
With all that said, including assassination transparency advocates in the Trump II cabinet (Tulsi Gabbard as DNI deserves a mention) is only half the task. Trump himself has said repeatedly that release of the JFK files would be his first act on reentering the Oval Office, aptly describing it to Joe Rogan as a “cleansing” process for the country. But even with the best of intentions, Trump has to handle this carefully, or the federal agencies in control of relevant records will evade even his executive orders, just as they’ve evaded the law until now. The problem, as veteran assassination researchers know, is that the redacted files in the JFK Collection at the National Archives are only part of what’s still hidden. Trump will need a permanent mechanism to “cleanse” the government, and that means a new bureaucratic entity. With his push to “trim fat” from the federal government with the aid of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and a new Department of Government Efficiency, he might feel a new declassification unit would be at cross purposes. Let’s hope not.
As many here know, I’ve written frequently for the JFK Facts publication of investigative author and historian Jefferson Morley. As vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF), he qualifies as an “activist” in the issue of official disclosure in the JFK assassination. So do the other principals of MFF, such as Rex Bradford and Bill Simpich. MFF is in federal court in California now, still suing the government in the civil action of Mary Ferrell Foundation v President Biden and the National Archives (MFF v Biden). Simpich is the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, who include Josiah Thompson and Dr. Gary Aguilar, and Larry Schnapf is co-counsel. In writing occasional articles about that case, I’ve acquired a greater-than-average familiarity with what’s actually at stake in advocating for government transparency in the matter of JFK. It’s as disturbing as it is fascinating.
At the core of the litigation isn’t just the JFK Collection. That does, admittedly, include thousands of still-redacted documents that should all be released. However, in many ways the JFK Collection feels like a distraction from the main issue. Government officials and other public figures have occasionally propagated the “nothing to see here” argument about those files. In other words, they say, they’ve seen them, and there’s nothing left there that’s really relevant to the assassination of President Kennedy, so move on. Mike Pompeo said as much in an interview with John Stossel last year. Kash Patel told Glenn Beck several months ago that he had already seen “the entire JFK file,” and that what’s withheld isn’t what JFK assassination researchers are looking for.
With all due respect, this is very doubtful indeed. Both Patel and Pompeo basically argue that continued redactions only conceal the identities of people who are still alive and still in need of protection today. That isn’t true. It’s also not true that the still-redacted files left in the JFK Collection don’t relate to the assassination. All you have to do is select a bunch of redacted files at random, read around the redactions, and see that a ton of documents are directly relevant as defined under the controlling federal law, the JFK Records Act of 1992. No one believes that the June 1961 memorandum to President Kennedy by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on reorganizing the CIA, for example, is unrelated. A page-and-a-half block of its text is redacted, and it’s not all names of individual CIA agents still alive. In short, there are still thousands of files in the JFK Collection kept at NARA II that need to be released in full. They are vital to the ongoing process of completing the historical record. At the same time, however, releasing those files in full won’t get to the heart of the matter.
Recently I wrote a piece for JFK Facts on Kash Patel’s nomination, entitled, “One Key JFK File That Kash Patel Could Release If He’s Confirmed as FBI Director.” It’s a 30-page FBI file on the prolific Cuban hit man Sandalio Herminio Diaz Garcia, usually known simply as Herminio Diaz, who settled in the U.S. four months before the assassination after requesting political asylum and being debriefed by the CIA. At that time he was working for two people: Florida crime boss Santos Trafficante (as a bodyguard), and ex-Cuban premier Tony Varona (as an agent). Varona himself was a CIA agent with two cryptonyms, AMHAWK and AMDIP-1 who headed the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), which lost its direct government funding some time in 1963, as the Kennedy administration moved toward peaceful coexistence with Castro. But anti-Castro Cuban exile groups such as the CRC had already been cooperating with Trafficante and other organized crime leaders for years, and without financial support from the U.S. government, the Mafia became more important. In the middle of all this was Herminio Diaz, perhaps the most conspicuous human nexus between the CIA and the Mob in the entire JFK assassination saga.
Whether or not you believe Herminio Diaz took part in the assassination of JFK (as Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien concluded in their popular podcast of last year, “Who Killed JFK?”) and whether or not Diaz really was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, either as a gunman or some kind of facilitator, documents about him are clearly “assassination related” under the federal statute. Has Kash Patel seen the heavily redacted FBI report on Diaz? I wouldn’t bet on it. Furthermore, I’d bet that that report – despite having been created by the FBI – is in Herminio Diaz’s “personality” (201) file, and is thus in the possession of the CIA. If Herminio Diaz’s 201 file is in the JFK Collection at the National Archives, I’m not aware that anyone has located it. There’s the rub.
The purpose of MFF v Biden isn’t just to compel the government to disclose in full all the files in the JFK Collection. It’s to make sure the process of declassification continues beyond that. As many experts on the subject (some on this site) will confirm, the CIA never honored the “memorandum of understanding” it signed with the National Archives and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1998 to follow up on search requests that remained outstanding when the ARRB wrapped up. Instead, the CIA just dragged its heels and directed researchers to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for their requests all these years. The very purpose of the JFK Records Act and ARRB were to remedy the deficiencies of FOIA. It’s just as in 1964, when CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton advised his agency colleagues to “wait out the commission.” It’s like from 1976-1979, when the Agency stonewalled investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) through illegal appointment of ex-CIA “liaison” George Joannides, as the former chief counsel of the HSCA, Robert Blakey, now publicly admits. And it’s just like when the CIA “waited out” the ARRB from 1994-1998, so that when records were coming in very fast in the final days of the Review Board’s life, the Agency was able to bury important files in the mass and withhold them from the declassification process, as the board’s former chairman, Judge John Tunheim, now publicly admits. As a result, not everything relevant is in the JFK Collection in the Archives today.
With all the good will in the world, therefore, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, Kash Patel, RFK Jr., and even President Donald J. Trump himself are going to have to do more to “cleanse” the body politic where the JFK assassination is concerned. Patel has suggested setting up a “24/7 declassification office” in the White House to “take incoming” from the American public on everything from JFK to 9/11 and beyond. Great idea, and we should all hope to see it. But Patel will have to focus on what the “Deep State” he wants to upend is really hiding with regard to JFK, and it isn’t just the names of still-living informants. It’s the 201 file of Herminio Diaz, who died in 1966 in a raid on Cuba, led by Cuban CIA agent Tony Cuesta. It’s more than 40 files on the long-dead Joannides, which the CIA – through sleight of hand – never turned over to the Review Board. It’s a CIA Inspector General’s report spotted by a CIA officer in a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in Herndon, VA, relating to CIA strategy to deceive and divert the HSCA, along with a videocassette in a case labeled “Oswald in Mexico.” People with much greater, more detailed knowledge than I have could provide a much longer list, and I would urge anyone wanting more to visit MFF’s lawsuit page (and to donate to the plaintiffs’ case if you can).
In conclusion, I’d like to make a plug for bipartisanship in these toxically polarized times. To increase our chances of achieving full JFK disclosure, the Trump administration should reach across the aisle to Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), perhaps the only member of our national legislature who still qualifies as a genuine “activist” on the subject of JFK. He has sought out other members of Congress over the years to oppose repeated presidential postponements and even secured the signature of a Republican on one his many letters to the White House and (murky) Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), urging prompt release of the records. The scheme Biden imposed by executive order in December 2022 – the CIA-devised “Transparency Plan” – is supposed to replace the process established under the JFK Records Act, essentially burying a living law passed unanimously by Congress. Biden has been deaf to all criticism of what he had done on the issue.
Cohen is currently crafting a bill to recreate the ARRB in some form, to finish the work it was established to do before its premature termination in 1998. The Trump administration should support such an effort. I noted in my article on Kash Patel that his White House declassification office should be compatible with Cohen’s new Review Board. It’s not one or the other. We should have both, and they should work together, one housed in the White House, the other at the Archives. With advocates like Kash Patel and Amaryllis Fox Kennedy occupying high offices in the executive branch, a new statutory panel can help ensure the job is done thoroughly. Of all the issues polarizing Washington today, the JFK assassination spans the toxic divide and has the potential to bridge it. That’s what genuine “truth and reconciliation” means, and that’s what we need.
