By Phil Stewart, Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The officials arrived at the secret CIA archival facility in the Washington area one morning in early April. Their mission: to seize still-classified CIA files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The team pulled up in their vehicles unannounced, catching the spy agency off-guard, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
They were acting on behalf of Director of National
Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who wanted to take documents out of the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and start the process of declassifying them at the National Archives, the people said.
One of the people familiar with the matter said the CIA wasn't aware that it was about to receive direction that day "from a higher government agency." The person also described the moment as probably the most confrontational point in the still young relationship between Gabbard's office and the CIA.
The official leading the search, a Defense Intelligence Agency official named Paul Allen McDonald II who was on temporary assignment to Gabbard's office, declared that they were "on a mission" from Gabbard, two of the people said.
A Trump administration official who made a brief appearance that day after arriving in her minivan, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA veteran herself and the daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She did not have the necessary badge to access the warehouse but was waved in, the two people said. One said Fox Kennedy spent about an hour there, focusing on efforts to digitize the massive archive of papers.
The early April episode, which has not been previously reported, lasted until 2 a.m. the next morning when a massive trove of documents was eventually transferred to the National Archives, according to two of the people.
The case casts new light on the tension between two forces in Washington, the CIA and Gabbard's DNI, as Trump appointees sought to act on the president's orders to swiftly release the full accounting of Kennedy's murder in 1963, as well as the high-profile 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump had full confidence in both Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. "Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work," Cheung said.
A spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence said the ODNI "has worked in close coordination with the CIA since the beginning of the administration to carry out this historic release of files."
Trump issued an executive order in January instructing Gabbard and the other intelligence agencies to declassify records related to the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations.
Reuters could not independently determine if Gabbard directed this specific mission at the archives or the extent to which Trump may have been briefed ahead of time about individual missions related to the declassification effort.
The Director of National Intelligence serves as principal intelligence adviser to the president and has oversight over the 17 other agencies, including the CIA. The job typically includes managing interagency tensions.
In a joint statement, Gabbard's ODNI and the CIA said the two agencies "have and will continue working hand-in-hand to release and declassify documents of public interest and execute President Trump’s mission of restoring trust in the intelligence community."
‘THE DIRECTOR KIND OF PUT HER FOOT DOWN.’
A 45-day deadline in Trump's executive order to review documents and present a plan for declassification of the files related to Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had ended in March, and frustration was building on Gabbard's team about the slow pace of progress, one of the individuals said.
Upon arriving at the CIA's archive warehouse, the officials presented a document asserting that Gabbard's office had the legal authority to take the documents even without the CIA's approval, and cautioned that anyone impeding the process could be held accountable, according to one of the people familiar with the events.
The person said the ODNI took this step "because they (CIA officials) were not cooperating up until that point. So the director kind of put her foot down."
Another person described the CIA as highly cooperative and said Director Ratcliffe had briefed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on what the agency planned to release publicly about his father's killing.
Reuters could not establish the precise name or location of the CIA archives.
Two of the people familiar with the events described tensions at the entryway to the archives, including shouting. However, Gabbard's office and two other people Reuters spoke to said the interactions between Gabbard's team and the CIA were professional.
One of those who described the exchange as professional said there seemed to be "a shared recognition that while the timeline was short, it had also been 60 years" since the Kennedy assassinations, and it was time to follow through on declassification.
Gabbard broadly described the effort to declassify the files during an April 10 cabinet meeting, telling Trump she had sent "hunters" to scour archives at the CIA and FBI for materials. "We are actively going out and trying to search out the truth," Gabbard said at the meeting, as reporters looked on.
At that meeting, Trump praised the push to find documents, as did Kennedy Jr., who has long voiced suspicion that the CIA was involved in his father's and uncle's assassinations. The CIA has rejected such allegations.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES HAVE LONG ANIMATED MAGA BASE
The U.S. Justice Department and other federal bodies have said for more than 60 years that President Kennedy's murder in 1963 was the work of a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
But polls show many Americans remain unconvinced and conspiracy theories - from the Epstein files and QAnon to the decades-old questions about JFK's assassination - have long been a focus for key parts of Trump's MAGA base.
Former senator and then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated five years after his brother, JFK. Sirhan Sirhan confessed and was convicted of killing him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Faced with the demands from Gabbard's team at the archival site in April, security personnel called in CIA officials already involved in declassifying the agency's files, according to one individual familiar with the incident. The individual added that the CIA was not opposed to releasing the files under proper procedures.
The agency agreed to transfer the files to the National Archives, which has been in charge of digitizing and releasing the materials to the public, in a manner consistent with government regulations. This meant preserving the "chain of custody," ensuring the proper security and using government vehicles to transport the documents.
Making those arrangements, determining which files Gabbard’s delegation wanted and then transporting them to the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, took until 2 a.m. the following day, said the source.
“It all had to be coordinated,” the source said.
The ODNI did not make Allen McDonald or Fox Kennedy available for interview.
In March, the National Archives began releasing around 80,000 Kennedy assassination files, including CIA materials, on Trump's orders.
The declassified files provided more details on CIA's knowledge of Oswald than it had previously admitted to publicly, experts say. There has been no new information challenging the official conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman on November 22, 1963. The same has been true so far with the 70,000 RFK files released in April and May.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay. Additional reporting by Erin Banco. Editing by Don Durfee and Claudia Parsons)
