Orhan Gündüz’s assassination becomes national news as FBI informants warn of a plot to kill another Turkish diplomat — along with thousands of innocent bystanders. After Loosciano’s VW Rabbit resurfaces, the Bureau zeroes in on a suspect.

As a result of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, the Central Intelligence Agency ostensibly produced a copy of the Hart Report, more famously known as the “Monster Plot,” which was intended to be a definitive account of the Yuri Nosenko affair and a takedown of disgraced spymaster James Angleton. What the CIA actually released, however, resembles Hart’s actual report as much as the television edit of The Big Lebowski resembles the actual dialogue.

In 1978, a JFK assassination hoax emerged that continues to fuel conspiracy theories and accusations against the Central Intelligence Agency. Two news stories began to circulate claiming that the House Select Committee on Assassinations had obtained an alleged 1966 CIA memo placing Howard Hunt, of Watergate infamy, in Dallas on the day of President John Kennedy’s assassination. Some conspiracy enthusiasts have tried to use the two articles to corroborate each other, unaware that they shared the same source. A review of over 1,000 pages of documents and testimony gives the story of - and dismantles - the HSCA memo hoax.

With Sunshine Week just around the corner, we wanted to count down the days to our favorite time of year with a closer look at what’s going on behind the black bars: the nine federal FOIA exemptions. Today, b(6): the privacy exemption.

Panama has a long history of coups and interventions involving the United States that go back to the establishment of the Panama Canal, some of which resulted in pro-U.S. governments, while other seemed to benefit Communist groups. Documents show that the confessed assassin of Panamanian President José Antonio Remón Cantera was a Central Intelligence Agency asset, and that at least one other CIA asset was on the scene and arrested at the time of the assassination in 1955. Both also share ties to the Cuban community, as well as vague connections to the JFK assassination - and one of them may have also been involved in a plot to kidnap and/or assassinate Vice President Spiro Agnew and CIA Director Richard Helms.

MuckRock published over twice as many articles in 2017 as we did last year, which necessitated breaking this year in review into two parts. Let’s pick up where we left off, just in time for FOIA’s 51st birthday.

Some researchers in the JFK assassination community are aware of the fact that one of the doctors that treated Jack Ruby was none other than Louis Jolyon West, a figure equally infamous for allegedly killing an elephant with LSD and for his work in MKULTRA - the Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous interrogation, hypnosis, and mind control program.

When much of the JFK files were released on October 26th, over 50 thousand emails from the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent agency to re-examine for release the assassination-related records, were separately released and largely overlooked. These emails show a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the ARRB, the review and release process, and provide new insight into how our history came to be written.

The underwhelming nature of the so-called “final release” of records related to the JFK assassination provides an excellent opportunity to talk about our culture’s curious acceptance of “classified” history.

In the 2008 epilogue to his book Oswald and the CIA, John Newman begins with a relatively simple fact and ends with a conclusion that not only reaches far beyond the evidence - it contradicts it. While it’s reasonable to point out the Central Intelligence Agency’s determination to avoid being dragged into World War III by the suspicion Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Russians, it’s quite unreasonable to use this as evidence of a massive cover-up premeditated weeks in advance by none other than CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.