On Tuesday WikiLeaks began releasing a series of encrypted documents dubbed “Vault 7,” detailing the surveillance activities of the CIA.
As part of the release, the organization posted to Twitter a password for “Vault 7” that read as follows: “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheW inds.”
That password was a subset of words spoken by President John F. Kennedy 54 years ago, only a month before he was assassinated:
“I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind,” were his exact words, according to a Kennedy administration official who spoke with The New York Times for a report published three years after JFK’s death.
Speaking in a History Channel program several years ago, Samuel Halpern, author of “The Assassination of JFK,” claimed that the threat stemmed from Kennedy’s frustration with the CIA, which he believed was becoming a “state within a state.”