Treasure trove of JFK, LBJ documents declassified by CIA

[Octafish]

File: In this Oct. 29, 1962, file photo, President John F. Kennedy poses in the White House office with Gen. David Shoup, left, Marine Corps Commandant, and Adm. George Anderson, Chief of U.S. Naval Operations in Washington. The chiefs met with the president to review the situation in Cuba and operation of the U.S. naval blockade. As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba. That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015. (AP Photo/William J. Smith, File) William J. Smith AP

Treasure trove of JFK, LBJ documents declassified by CIA

Historian calls it “an incomparable window into a how a president thinks”

No new clues for conspiracy theorists looking for signs of CIA plots

CIA brief after JFK’s death featured a poem the president liked

BY PAUL J. WEBER
The Associated Press/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 16, 2015

As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, President John F. Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba.

Amid those grave concerns, the memo ends on a different note. A U.S. agent in Moscow describes “packed houses and enthusiastic applause” during a run of Russian performances by the New York City Ballet.

That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday. Stamped “For the President’s Eyes Only” on some pages, the dossiers were delivered daily by the spy agency to the White House.

Known as the President’s Daily Brief — President Barack Obama is the first to swipe through his on a tablet — they are tightly guarded rundowns of CIA intelligence from around the globe. For the first time, some of the oldest briefs are being made public, starting with those written in the 1960s for presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots are likely to be disappointed. Many of the briefs remain partially redacted, and what isn’t won’t rewrite textbooks.

CONTINUED...

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/article35487948.html

Nothing for "Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots." Of course. Thanks, AP, for the take-away.

Real thanks to the Startlegram for printing this news.

Some of what got edited from the story:

Freeing the President’s Daily Brief

John Prados
National Security Archive

September 16, 2015–Today the big pooh-bahs of the security services–Fearful Leader Clapper, the Machiavellian Brennan, former SEAL chieftain Admiral McRaven, and a number of their predecessors, have gathered in Austin, Texas, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Their purpose is to preside over an event at which the government agencies and the National Archives formally open for research the key intelligence reports for the ages. Today these are called the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs). Jack Kennedy knew them as the PICKL (predictably, “pickle”), or President’s Intelligence Checklist; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff had even more awkward names like “Synopsis of Intelligence Items Reported to the President.” (They never could find an acronym for that one.)

If you’re familiar with the PDB at all it is probably due to the now-notorious issue of August 6, 2001, in which CIA analysts reported their sense that Al Qaeda terrorists were likely to employ large aircraft as weapons. The Bush White House, which paid no attention, moved heaven and earth to keep that PDB out of the hands of 9/11 investigators. Michael Morrell, Mr. Bush’s CIA briefer, went on to great things at the agency after his time with the PDB, so you can see it’s serious business.

SNIP...

“Sources and methods” are spookspeak for intelligence tradecraft or for specific agent identifications or information compartments (such as overhead imagery, communications intelligence, or the like). But the PDBs are information reports, not efforts to create new intel channels or technologies. Names of agents and whatnot can easily be removed from ancient documents or are, in a number of instances, already known from the CIA’s declassification of specific cases. (For example, Tenet asserted sources and methods protection for PICKLs of the Cuban Missile Crisis in spite of the fact the agency had already released portions of those very documents, plus the actual transcripts of interviews with its Soviet spy Oleg Penkovskiy, whose information lay at the heart of that reporting.) A number of PDBs, bearing on Vietnam, Chinese nuclear weapons, the Six-Day war in the Middle East, and other subjects had already been declassified, with the secrecy apparatus considering them as simple information reports. Currying favor with the press and enhancing his stature as maven of top-level information, Henry Kissinger permitted the PDB to be photographed, a picture published in Newsweek on November 22, 1971. There’s no way a true “sources and methods” issue would have been treated in such a cavalier fashion. But suddenly the sources and methods bugaboo descended to chill the entire declassification process.

In 2004 the National Security Archive joined scholar Larry Berman to challenge this idiocy. Berman had requested and had been denied release of a pair of innocuous PDBs. The Archive joined him in a lawsuit for release of the material as is provided under the Freedom of Information Act. Though we lost the suit for the two specific PDBs in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007, the justices ruled that CIA could no longer claim a blanket exemption for the class of documents, and that PDBs from the Kennedy and Johnson eras had to be considered for release.

What is happening at the LBJ Library today is a direct result of that court battle. Notice that the agency took its sweet time–8 years– to cough up any of this material. Without seeing the rest of the documents I nevertheless expect the collection will be laced with redacted passages, pages, and whole documents. The organizers of this event promise that PDBs will be posted on the CIA website, presumably today after the event. I have argued elsewhere that the agency’s declassification process has been corrupted. It functions to protect proper secrets only at the margin and is far more concerned with preventing embarrassment–a stance explicitly prohibited in the regulations supposed to govern secrecy and declassification. I’ll have more to report on the PDBs once I get the chance to see what the agency has done.

CONTINUED...

http://johnprados.com/2015/09/16/freeing-the-presidents-daily-brief/

President's Daily Brief docs and more from National Security Archive at GWU:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB530-Presidents-Daily-Briefs-from-Kennedy-and-Johnson-Finally-Released/