Why the latest JFK files left big questions open

HostIt feels like for my whole life, there has been this promise of a final box. A set of papers sitting in a dark room that would finally tell us everything about what happened in Dallas that day in 1963. We keep getting these big dates where the government says they're letting the last secrets out, and then the dates pass, the papers come out, and the cloud is still there. Why is it that even after thousands and thousands of pages have been let loose, we still feel like we're missing the heart of the story?

GuestIt's a bit of a trick, really. We had this big law back in the early nineties that said every single record had to be made public by 2017. That was the finish line. But when we got there, and then again a few years later, and then again recently, the goalposts moved. As of now, the government says ninety-nine percent of the files are out there. To most people, that sounds like a win. If you have ninety-nine pieces of a hundred-piece puzzle, you should be able to see the picture. But in the world of spy work and old secrets, that last one percent isn't just random filler. It's often the exact part that explains why the other ninety-nine pieces matter.

HostHold on, ninety-nine percent? That sounds like the job is basically done. If researchers have millions of pages to look at, surely they can piece it together. Are people just being picky, or is that last one percent actually doing a lot of heavy lifting?

GuestThink of it like a letter where every name is crossed out with a thick black pen. You can read the whole thing, but you don't know who sent it or who they were talking about. The big release we had recently brought out over thirteen thousand files. That sounds huge. But many of those were just versions of things we already saw, just with a few less black marks. The real problem is that the bits still hidden aren't about the day of the shooting itself. They're about what the spies knew before it happened. There's one name that keeps coming up that people are obsessed with, a man named George Joannides. He was a CIA officer. For a long time, the agency didn't even want to admit he had a role in any of this.

HostIt feels like you're saying a few blacked-out names are worth all this drama. Is it really that big a deal? I mean, we know who the main players were. What could one officer really change about the story?

GuestIt changes the story because of who he was talking to. He was the guy in charge of a group of Cubans who hated Castro. This group actually had a very public run-in with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans just months before the shooting. They got into a fight in the street, it was in the papers, it was a whole thing. For years, the story was that this was just a random clash. But if the man running that group was a high-level spy, and he never told the people looking into the death of the president about his link to Oswald, that changes everything. It suggests that the people supposed to be helping the investigation were actually hiding how much they knew about the shooter before he ever pulled the trigger.

HostBut even then, that sounds like people just trying to cover their own tracks because they messed up. It doesn't mean they were part of a plot. I don't buy that it's about national security anymore. It has been over sixty years. Who's still alive to care? How can the government still claim that showing these names would hurt the country today?

GuestThat's the big fight happening in court right now. Groups are suing because the law says you can only keep things secret if there's a real, living threat of harm. The government argues that it's about how they do their work. They say if they show how they watched people in the sixties, it might reveal how they watch people now. Or they might have promised a foreign country back then that a certain name would never be spoken, and they want to keep that promise to look trustworthy to allies today. But many people think that's a weak excuse. They think the real harm being protected is the image of the agencies themselves. If it turns out they had Oswald on a leash or were watching his every move and still let it happen, that's a stain that never goes away.

HostSo when the President signs a paper saying the review is finished, like happened recently, what does that actually mean for the files that are still half-covered in ink? Does that mean they stay that way forever?

GuestIt means the official push is over. The government is basically saying they have done their chores and they want to move on. They have moved the files into a new system where they'll be checked every few years, but the sense of urgency is gone. The researchers are still finding weird gaps, though. For example, there's a story about a tape of Oswald at an embassy that supposedly got wiped or lost. People want the papers about that tape. They want the raw files from the officers who were on the ground in Mexico City. The bits we get are often copies of copies. We're looking at the shadow of the proof rather than the proof itself. The most frustrating part for the people who have spent their lives on this is that the clock is working against them. The people who were there are almost all gone.

HostIt's wild to think we're still parsing through folders for a name like Joannides to see if a spy was watching a shooter in a street fight.

GuestThat's the one specific thread that could pull the whole thing apart because it places a hand on the shoulder of the shooter when everyone said he was standing alone.

HostWe started looking for a final box of answers, but it seems like we just found more rooms full of paper with the most important words still hidden under black ink.