Growing up, John Smith knew his grandfather as a serious academic — a bespectacled professor at the University of Maryland who wrote books on pre-Civil War presidents. He also knew E.B. Smith had traveled the world in his younger years.
What he didn’t know until this week is that his grandfather had once been a U.S. government asset, feeding Soviet-era intelligence to the CIA.
The Trump administration’s release of more than 77,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy has thus far shed little new light on the killing. But the unmasking of many previously redacted names has revealed the identities of people who worked with the clandestine services, roles that in many cases were hidden for decades even from close family members.
