JFK Assassination: The CIA Is Hiding Something Big

Critics of Donald Trump say that he is burning everything to ground with no regard for institutions or even the Constitution, but ironically, one of his promises is to right the wrong of what could have been the broadest attack on the American system in the 20th Century: a government conspiracy to kill—at the very least, to cover up the killing of—a U.S. president.

It has been nearly 62 years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and yet thousands of records—at least 3,000 in the National Archives, and an untold number not yet turned over by the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies—remain classified, beyond the sunlight of public scrutiny. 

Nevertheless, the drip-drip of declassification, beginning in the late 1990s, has allowed for a disturbing picture to come into focus. For one, the CIA lied about its relationship with the alleged lone gunman and assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Not only did the agency know who he was before Nov. 22, 1963, but agents had been following him for years, and there is mounting evidence that he may have been the target of a covert counterintelligence operation in the months leading up to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, a former journalist for the Washington Post and New Republic whose investigative projects have shed light on the Iran Contra Affair and the War on Drugs, is one of the preeminent writers on declassification today. His determination to piece together the story contained in the documents is tempered with a journalist’s methodical approach, and he is careful in its interpretations. But, as one can see in the presentation at his popular blog JFK Facts, the results have been explosive. 

In Morley’s view, there was a conspiracy: Oswald did not act alone, and Kennedy was likely killed by enemies within his own government. 

That someone with Morley’s bona fides can say this openly without fear of rebuke as a crank and fool is a testament to the evolution of this story. Decades ago, director Oliver Stone was lambasted by the Washington establishment for leaping to such conclusions in his 1991 film JFK. Still, the swirl of popular speculation spurred Congress to pass a new law demanding public disclosure of all the records by 2017, leading to the declassification of hundreds of thousands of documents by the late 1990s, though delays prevented a full release. 

In 2022, President Joe Biden ordered 13,000 of the remaining records released per the law, but in his final years in office held approximately 3,000 back. In the meantime, a foundation of fact—not just speculation—about what happened in 1963 has formed, making the official narrative propounded by the Warren Commission, once sanctified as the final word on the assassination, look like the stuff of magical thinking, or something darker.

“There’s a much broader public understanding of how weak the government’s official story was,” Morley told me in a podcast conversation. “And for years, anybody who questioned that official story and the obvious errors and lies that are built into it was considered a conspiracy theorist, and so their corrections to the record were just dismissed. Well, as people themselves got to look at these records, they realized that wasn’t fair.”

Trump’s executive order on January 23 directed the director of national intelligence, now Tulsi Gabbard, and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to release the remaining JFK records. Morley and others are concerned that the agencies might again try to slow-walk the release. There is also the issue of the records that the National Archives don’t have—files still located somewhere in dark corners of the federal bureaucracy that were never handed over to the official review board 30 years ago.

We know they exist. The FBI said on February 11 that, in an effort to comply with Trump’s EO, it was handing over 2,400 heretofore undisclosed files to the archives for declassification. In an interview with The American Conservative after the release, Morley said it showed the “process is working.”

“Why wasn’t this shown to the review board in the ’90s? I have a kind of a private hunch that it may be that these are personnel records and they were judged private and couldn’t be released on privacy bounds, but that was not for the Bureau to make that determination,” he said. “That was for the review board. But I think it’s good that they produce the records and are putting them out for public consumption soon.”

What Morley is really waiting for are 44 records in a personnel file connected to one now-deceased case officer, George Joannides—information he says is a “smoking gun” of the CIA’s “sources and methods” regarding Oswald. 

Morley argues that the CIA is hiding the key details of a covert operation that involved Oswald for intelligence purposes in the summer of 1963, three months before President Kennedy was killed. “These are serious claims and have profound implications for the official story,” Morley said in a presentation of the already known facts of the story in 2023.

Much of this thread of the assassination story was pieced together based largely on declassifications of the CIA’s Oswald file in 2001 and 2023—meaning this information was not known to the Warren Commission. For example, James J. Angleton, former head of counterintelligence for the CIA, had been surveilling Oswald since 1959 when he defected to the Soviet Union. “Angleton and his minions,” Morley said, “had been monitoring this alleged minor character as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City and then finally to Dallas.” We now know from the documents that top CIA officers were aware of his travels, his work, and his personal life. They even read his mail.

In the year preceding the assassination, JFK was rhetorically committed to overthrowing the Castro government in Cuba, but it was not a priority and he was still smarting from the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, a major embarrassment to his presidency. 

In 1963 “his dovish policy” in this regard “privately angered the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA men in Miami, and their Cuban allies,” said Morley, who noted that Kennedy was also trying to reign in a CIA cutout—the anti-Castro Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE)—which had been aggressively critical of the Kennedy administration. The DRE was funded by the CIA under the auspices of an agency counterintelligence network named AMSPELL. Kennedy had also shut down the CIA-led “Operation Mongoose” the same year.

“The Cuban communities of Miami and New Orleans, once centers of strong support for the Kennedys, were now centers of opposition” due to this pullback of exile activity beginning in 1962, according to Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s 1984 book The Kennedys.

But what was Oswald’s role here? What is the CIA hiding? This is where Joannides comes in. Joannides, an experienced CIA station officer, was sent down to Miami and New Orleans to “handle” DRE/AMSPELL in 1963. He was given a high-level security clearance in June 1963 and cleared for “special intelligence” for wiretapping. Morley says the CIA was targeting at that time the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Campaign, of which Oslwald was a member, in a COINTELPRO-style operation intended to destroy it.

On August 1,1963 Joannides took over the psychological warfare branch at the CIA’s Miami station to directly manage the AMSPELL network. According to the historical record, Oswald then had several well-publicized clashes with the DRE in New Orleans, which spurred televised debates in which Oswald himself acknowledged being a “Marxist-Leninist” but not “a communist.” As a result, there were police records, photos, and TV footage of Oswald the activist—all which quickly surfaced in the nightly news report by Walter Cronkite hours after Oswald was arrested for killing a Dallas police officer and held on suspicion of killing the president, on Nov. 22, 1963. 

“What a difference 30 days makes,” Morley said. Before Joannides arrived to take over the DRE/AMPSELL operation, “Oswald had no public record as an activist on Cuba” or for Fair Play for Cuba. By Sept. 1 a “legend had been created” and on November 22, it was reported that a pro-Cuba nut had killed the president.

Meanwhile the CIA operation had ultimately succeeded: Fair Play for Cuba was devastated by the Oswald ties and closed shop shortly after the assassination.  

Forty-four documents in Joannides’ personnel file deal with his role in this operation and remain declassified. If released, they likely will not prove beyond any doubt that the CIA was complicit in the assassination, but Morley says they could be a “smoking gun” of a CIA operation involving Oswald that is still being concealed to this day. Even if the files don’t prove the agency’s involvement in the assassination, they could demonstrate its incompetence in handling Oswald before the killing and may even reveal a post-assassination cover-up. 

After so many years of collecting the drip-drip, Morley has his own opinions.

“I don’t have a theory, but the preponderance of evidence tells me that the president was killed by enemies [in] his own government, who had the ability to make it look like something else,” Morley declared in a podcast interview earlier this month. 

Only full disclosure can resolve this question. We hope that Trump is listening.

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