Some of the coverage of the release of JFK assassination documents this week has been atrocious.
A June 1967 memo details how a former US Army intelligence officer, Gary Underhill, fled Washington, DC, “very agitated” the day after Kennedy was shot — and claimed to a friend that a “small clique within the CIA” was behind the assassination.
“The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening, he showed up at the home of a friend in New Jersey,” reads the memo, quoting from a story in the comtemporary left-wing magazine Ramparts.
“He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country,” the document goes on.
“Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
Underhill, a Harvard graduate and former US Army captain who worked as a journalist and intelligence officer during World War II, was said to be on a “first-name basis with many of the top brass in the Pentagon” and on “intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CIA officials.”
“The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband,” the Ramparts passage reads.
It noted that the CIA clique allegedly killed Kennedy because he caught “wind” of their business and was “killed before he could ‘blow the whistle.’”
Underhill’s suicide was also called into question since he had been found with a gunshot wound behind his left ear, but Asher Brynes, his writing partner who found his body, said, “Underhill was right-handed.”
Anti-climactically, the memo — created in response to a much-criticized 1967 probe of the assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison — described Underhill’s connection to that investigation as “tenuous” and did not address the claims reported by Ramparts at all.
Here is the unredacted document on Gary Underhill. This is not a new document - it was first released in 1998. A few passages are now unredacted - and all of the redactions relate to a supposed friend of Underhill's, Samuel Cummings..
On page four of the document from 2022, we find this passage:
Here is the unredacted paragraph:
On page five of the document from 2022, we find this other passage:
Here is the unredacted paragraph:
Another redaction from page five:
Here is that paragraph unredacted:
There is no doubt that Underhill was emotionally disturbed and that his suicide had nothing to do with the JFK assassination. The person who found his body accepted that he had committed suicide - he was having a lot of personal difficulties and he had separated from his wife a year earlier.