FRANKFORT, Ind. — A Clinton County native who once held one of the most closely guarded security clearances in the federal government says he has evidence the CIA misled a congressional investigator decades ago about what records it held on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — and he will lay out that evidence in a public presentation Monday night at the Skanta Theatre. Pearcy’s talk is part of the Clinton County Chamber of Commerce Speakers Series.
Dr. Thomas Pearcy, a history professor who grew up in Clinton County, appeared Tuesday on WILO’s “Party Line” program, hosted by Shan Sheridan, ahead of two local appearances this week built around his role in the decades-long push to declassify government files related to the 1963 assassination. The visit culminates Monday August 3rd at 6:00 PM with a presentation at the Frankfort Community Public Library’s Skanta Theatre that organizers say will be broadcast live and worldwide, and archived afterward on Hoosierland TV.
“On Monday night I’m going to speak about things that are going to make people uncomfortable, but we should know these things,” Pearcy said.
A Rare Government Post
Pearcy said he spent years as the government’s “joint historian,” a position created in the 1990s that operated simultaneously for the State Department and the CIA and could not be denied clearance by any other federal entity. He said the role gave him access to some of the most restricted archives in the country, including files at a secure facility he described as heavily guarded.
“My job was not to declassify anything,” Pearcy said. “My job was to look at anything in the world at any level of classification and determine, as a professional historian, whether or not a thorough and accurate record of our government’s relations with other countries required this document.”
Pearcy said that while reviewing files in 2009, he came across a report describing how CIA officials prepared a “sterilized” set of records for G. Robert Blakey, the attorney who led the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, while withholding material connected to the Kennedy case.
According to Pearcy, the internal account included an aide’s characterization of Blakey as “the most intellectually uncurious human being I’ve ever dealt with” — a remark he said was itself redacted from the sanitized version Blakey was shown.
Pearcy said he waited nearly a decade before sharing what he had seen, approaching journalist Jefferson Morley in 2018 after reading a public CIA statement that troubled him. Morley is an American investigative journalist, editor, and author who has spent over 30 years working in Washington, D.C. journalism.
“I didn’t approach Morley until 2018,” Pearcy said. “I sat on it, in part because I enjoy living. I didn’t want to go to prison and would like to spend some time with my family.”
Tied to Ongoing Congressional Push
Pearcy said his account has since become part of the congressional record and has factored into a House task force, chaired by U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna from Florida’s 13th district, that is examining whether the CIA and other agencies are cooperating with a recent executive order calling for further declassification of assassination-related files. Pearcy said he attended a meeting with senior CIA officials in Luna’s office on Capitol Hill roughly two weeks ago, during which agency representatives pressed him for the search terms he used to locate the original document.
“I was blown away by her — she will take no nonsense from anyone,” Pearcy said of Luna. “She literally picked up her phone, called the director of the Central Intelligence Agency — did not answer — called the White House, spoke with the President and said, during this meeting, ‘Mr. President, we’re not getting the cooperation. We’re getting stonewalled.’”
Asked on air whether he considers himself a whistleblower, Pearcy said he does, though he draws a distinction between his disclosure and others that have preceded it.
“Certainly from Langley’s perspective and from the intelligence community’s perspective, I’m a whistleblower,” he said. “If they arrest me, they’re acknowledging that what I’ve said is true.”
Public Appearances Set for Monday
His full presentation, titled “Plausible Deniability in a Democracy,” will be held Monday, Aug. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Skanta Theatre inside the Frankfort Community Public Library. Organizers said the talk will be broadcast live and worldwide, and archived afterward on Hoosierland TV for those unable to attend in person.
Sheridan told listeners that the Friday and Tuesday appearances amounted to previews of the fuller account still to come. “These are teasers,” Sheridan said. “On Monday, he’s going to kind of give the full-blown presentation, and I don’t think anybody’s going to want to miss that.”
Pearcy, who has taught more than 31,000 students across four countries, said the Monday talk will walk through the broader history of the government’s handling of assassination-related records, including the CIA meeting he said misled Blakey’s committee decades earlier.
“It bothers me terribly that officials, elected or otherwise, can literally lie to Congress and lie to the President about really significant issues,” Pearcy said.