Director Gates Wants to Open CIA Files to Refute ‘JFK’ Death Theories

Dismissing movie director Oliver Stone as a “self-styled expert” on the John F. Kennedy assassination, CIA Director Robert M. Gates said Friday he is determined to declassify the agency’s files on the case to refute the conspiracy theory of the film “JFK.”

While conceding that he has not seen the film, Gates told a House subcommittee that he considers Stone’s work to be “offensive to the agency and to the American government and to a number of people who were in office at that time, from . . . President Johnson on down.”

He rebuffed Stone’s request for a face-to-face meeting but said the CIA will make public as much of its Kennedy assassination files as possible without revealing confidential sources or violating the right of privacy of persons only tangentially connected to the case.

He announced last week that CIA files will be declassified and turned over to the National Archives for release. The file that had been compiled on Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination was sent to the archives last week.

David Gries, director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, told the subcommittee that the pre-assassination Oswald file did not contain any significant documents.