Jefferson Morley (original) (raw)
Primary Sources
(1) Jefferson Morley, Miami New Times (12th April, 2001)
When Fidel Castro's Revolutionary Armed Forces routed the U.S.-backed Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco 40 years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy took full responsibility for the defeat. But the contrition of the young commander in chief, while popular with the American people, played poorly among the tens of thousands of Cubans living here in Miami. Many believed the liberal chief executive's refusal to send planes to support the men scrambling for cover at Playa Girón was a failure of nerve, if not a betrayal. And to this day a certain embittered distrust of Washington, born four decades ago, runs deep in Cuban Miami, erupting whenever the federal government (in the person of Janet Reno or farm-belt Republicans in Congress) pursues policies contrary to the agenda of the first generation of el exilio. But the truth is that whatever the disappointment of the Bay of Pigs, Miami's Cuban exiles have never lacked for support at the highest levels of the U.S. government. From the beginning their anti-Castro cause was taken up by senior leaders of the CIA, who encouraged their ambitions to destroy the Cuban regime. For 38 years one of the most powerful of those leaders has guarded a secret about the events leading up to Kennedy's violent death, a secret potentially damaging to the exile cause as well as to the agency itself.
The man is Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. Now retired and living in the swank Foxhall section of Washington, D.C., the 89-year-old Helms declined interview requests for this story, the basic facts of which have emerged from recently declassified JFK files.
Through four intensive investigations of the Kennedy assassination, Helms withheld information about a loyal CIA officer in Miami - a dapper, multilingual lawyer and father of three - who guided and monitored the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (the Revolutionary Student Directorate, or DRE). His name was George Joannides, and his charges in the DRE were among the most notoriously outspoken and militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the early Sixties. For several weeks in the summer of 1963, those same exiles tailed, came to blows with, and harassed Lee Harvey Oswald, who just a few months later changed the course of U.S. history.
Helms never told the Warren Commission - the presidential panel set up after Kennedy's death to investigate the assassination - about his officer's relationship with the exile group. He never disclosed that the CIA was funding the DRE when it had contact with Oswald, who was agitating on Castro's behalf in New Orleans in August 1963. A skillful bureaucrat, Helms withheld files on Oswald's pro-Castro activities from an in-house investigation of the accused assassin (and when the veteran officer in charge of that probe protested, Helms relieved him of his duties).
Helms stonewalled again in 1978, when Congress created the House Select Committee on Assassinations to re-examine Kennedy's murder. Once more the CIA kept every detail of Joannides's mission in Miami under wraps. Worse still, in veiled contempt of that inquiry, the CIA assigned to Joannides himself the job of deflecting sensitive inquiries from the committee's investigators.
As recently as 1998, the agency still disavowed any knowledge of Joannides's actions in Miami. John Tunheim, now a federal judge in Minneapolis, chaired the federal Assassination Records Review Board, which between 1994 and 1998 opened more than four million pages of long-secret documents - including a thin file on Joannides. Yet even then the CIA was claiming that no one in the agency had had any contact with the DRE throughout 1963. The Joannides story, Tunheim says today, "shows that the CIA wasn't interested in the truth about the assassination."
Journalist and author Gerald Posner, whose 1993 best seller Case Closed argued that the DRE's harassment of Oswald was a "humiliation" that propelled him on his way to shoot the president, says he finds the Joannides piece of the JFK puzzle to be "obviously important" and suggests that the CIA is "covering up its own incompetence." In his view the agency's "intransigence, lying, and dissembling are once again contributing to suspicions of conspiracy."
G. Robert Blakey , who served as general counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, says the agency's silence compromised that investigation. "If I had known then what Joannides was doing in 1963, I would have demanded that the agency take him off the job (of responding to committee inquiries)," he asserts. "I would have sat him down and interviewed him. Under oath."
(2) Jefferson Morley, What Jane Roman Said (January 2002)
In the summer of 1994 I became curious if a retired employee of the Central Intelligence Agency named Jane Roman was still alive and living in Washington.
I was curious because I had just seen Jane Roman’s name and handwriting on routing slips attached to newly declassified CIA documents about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. This is what I found significant: these documents were dated before November 22, 1963. If this Jane Roman person at CIA headquarters had read the documents that she signed for on the routing slips, then she knew something of Oswald’s existence and activities before the itinerant, 24 year-old ex-Marine became world famous for allegedly shooting President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In other words, Jane Roman was a CIA official in good standing who knew about the alleged assassin in advance of Kennedy’s violent death.
What self-respecting Washington journalist wouldn’t be interested?
Of course, I knew enough about the Kennedy assassination to know that many, many, many people knew something of Lee Oswald before he arrived in Dealey Plaza with a gun—a small family, an assortment of far-flung buddies from the Marines, family and acquaintances in New Orleans and Dallas, some attentive FBI agents, not to mention the occasional anti-Castro Cuban, and even some CIA officials.
But Jane Roman was not just any CIA official. In 1963 she was the senior liaison officer on the Counterintelligence Staff of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. That set her apart. At the height of the Cold War, the counterintelligence staff was a very select operation within the agency, charged with detecting threats to the integrity of CIA operations and personnel from the Soviet Union and its allies. The CI staff, as it was known in bureaucratic lingo, was headed by James Jesus Angleton, a legendary Yale-educated spy, who was either a patriotic genius or a paranoid drunk or perhaps both. Jane Roman’s responsibilities in the fall of 1963 included handling communications between the CI staff and other federal agencies.
I was excited, perhaps foolishly, in June of 1994, when I learned that the CIA’s Jane Roman was living not far from me, on Newark Street in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington DC....
I was less interested in Jane Roman’s opinion about the conspiracy question than what she actually knew. That she knew about Oswald before Kennedy was killed was apparent from the records that the CIA released to the National Archives in the spring of 1994.Roman’s initials appeared on a routing slip attached to an FBI report about Lee Harvey Oswald dated September 10, 1963. That was ten weeks before that same Oswald allegedly shot Kennedy. By that date, anti-conspiracy writers such as Gus Russo and Gerald Posner say that Oswald was clearly on a path that would put him in the right place--and in the right state of mind--to kill the president. He had certainly tried to infiltrate one of the CIA’s favorite anti-Castro organizations. He had made himself a public spokesman for the leading pro-Castro group in the United States.
Even if you assumed Oswald was the lone assassin, the perspective of a CIA paper pusher such as Jane Roman on that moment in time was still interesting, and potentially newsworthy.
What did she make of this character Oswald? What did the CIA make of him as he made his way to Dealey Plaza? Did he raise any alarms?
(3) Jefferson Morley, Washington Monthly (January 2002)
It was 1:30 in the morning of Nov. 23, 1963, and John F. Kennedy had been dead for 12 hours. His corpse was being dressed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, touched and retouched to conceal the ugly bullet wounds. In Dallas, the F.B.I. had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody.
The lights were still on at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. John Whitten, the agency's 43-year-old chief of covert operations for Mexico and Central America, hung up the phone with his Mexico City station chief. He had just learned something stunning: A C.I.A. surveillance team in Mexico City had photographed Oswald at the Cuban consulate in early October, an indication that the agency might be able to quickly uncover the suspect's background.
At 1:36 am, Whitten sent a cable to Mexico City: "Send staffer with all photos of Oswald to HQ on the next available flight. Call Mr. Whitten at 652-6827." Within 24 hours Whitten was leading the C.I.A. investigation into the assassination. After two weeks of reviewing classified cables, he had learned that Oswald's pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination, especially his attempt to shoot a right-wing JFK critic, a diary of his efforts to confront anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, and his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. For this investigatory zeal, Whitten was taken off the case.
C.I.A. Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms blocked Whitten's efforts, effectively ending any hope of a comprehensive agency investigation of the accused assassin, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, who had sojourned in the Soviet Union and spent time as a leftist activist in New Orleans. In particular, Oswald's Cuba-related political life, which Whitten wished to pursue, went unexplored by the C.I.A. The blue-ribbon Warren commission appointed by President Johnson concluded in September 1964 that Oswald alone and unaided had killed Kennedy. But over the years, as information which the commission's report had not accounted for leaked out, many would come to see the commission as a cover-up, in part because it failed to assign any motive to Oswald, in part because the government's pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald had been more intense than the government ever cared to disclose, and finally because its reconstruction of the crime sequence was flawed.
(4) Jefferson Morley, The JFK Murder, The Reader's Digest(March, 2005)
In 1977, Mary Ferrell, a Dallas legal secretary and tireless JFK researcher, told the newly created House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that she'd heard an audiotape of Dallas police radio traffic around the time Kennedy died. That led the panel to retrieve the Dictabelts in May 1978. By then, the science of acoustic analysis had come a long way. The HSCA's general counsel, ex-federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, chose James Barger, a prominent audio scientist, to assess the recordings' value as evidence.
Barger decided to compare the sound impulses on the recordings with the sound of real gunfire. In August 1978, he led a team to Dallas for a series of elaborate ballistics tests. Setting up 36 microphones along the Dealey Plaza motorcade route, he recorded shots fired from the sixth-floor book depository window where Oswald was said to have fired, and from the grassy knoll. Barger compared the resulting sound patterns with the impulses on the Dictabelt. His findings contrasted with those of the Warren Commission, which ruled that Oswald fired three shots at Kennedy's limousine.
Barger identified at least four sound-wave patterns that he said closely resembled the muzzle blasts of gunshots in his test firing. Three of them closely resembled shots fired from the sixth-floor window. One resembled a shot from the grassy knoll, he said. Two other acoustic experts retained by the HSCA supported Barger's conclusion. The acoustic evidence became the keystone of the House panel's finding in January 1979 that Kennedy had "probably" been killed by conspirators who, besides Oswald, couldn't be identified.
Other experts disputed the findings. In 1980, the Justice Department turned to the National Research Council, a government think tank. In May 1982, a 12-scientist NRC panel unanimously ruled that Barger's supposed gunshots were something else and "came too late to be attributed to assassination shots." ( A Court TV analysis last year found essentially the same thing.)
Dictabelt No. 10 then went back to a file cabinet at the Justice Department. It was subsequently transferred to the National Archives. Then, in early 2001, Donald Thomas, a government scientist interested in the Kennedy assassination, published in a British forensics journal an article based on a mathematical review of all the acoustic evidence. Thomas's conclusion: Five shots had been fired at Kennedy's motorcade from two different directions.
(5) Jefferson Morley, The George Joannides Coverup (19th May, 2005)
People interested in the JFK story will be interested to know that the CIA is due to file papers in court tomorrorow, May 20, to block release of certain JFK assassination-related documents.
The records in question concern a deceased CIA officer named George Joannides. At the time of Kennedy's death, Joannides was the Chief of Psychological Warfare branch of the Agency's JM/WAVE station in Miami.
Among his primary responsibilities were guiding, monitoring and financing the Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate or DRE, one of the largest and most effective anti-Castro groups in the United States. CIA records show, and the group's former leaders confirm, that Joannides provided them with up $18-25,000 per month while insisting they submit to CIA discipline. Joannides, in his job evaluation of 31 July 1963, was credited with having established control over the group.
Five day later, Lee Harvey Oswald wandered into the DRE's New Orleans delegation, setting off a string of encounters between the pro-Castro ex-Marine and the anti-Castro exiles. Members of the DRE confronted Oswald on a street corner. They stared him down in a courtroom. They sent a DRE member to Oswald's house posing a Castro supporter. They challenged him to a debate on the radio. They made a tape of the debate which was later sent to Joannides. And they issued a press release calling for a congressional investigation of the thoroughly obscure Oswald. This, at a time, when the DRE had been warned to clear its public statements with the Agency.
What, if anything, Joannides made of the encounters between his assets in the DRE and the future accused assassin is unknown. Former leaders of the DRE are divided on the question.
Within an hour of Oswald's arrest on Nov. 22, 1963, the DRE leaders in Miami went public with their documentation of Oswald's pro-Castro ways, thus shaping early press coverage of the accused assasssin. Joannides told the group to take their information to the FBI.
Joannides connection to Oswald's antagonists was not disclosed to the Warren Commission.
In 1978, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Joanndides did not disclose his role in the events of 1963 to investigators. HSCA general counsel Bob Blakey says that Joannides's actions constituted obstruction of Congress, a felony. Joannides's support for the DRE was uncovered by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1998. Joannides died in 1991.
I filed suit against the CIA in December 2003 seeking records of Joannides's activities in 1963 and 1978. In December 2004, the CIA gave me about 150 pages of heavily redacted and obviously incomplete records from Joannides's personnel file. The Agency informed me that it retains an unspecified number of records about Joannides actions that it will not release IN ANY FORM.
Thus JFK assassination records are kept secret in 2005 in the name of "national security."
The records that CIA gave me are not reassuring. They show that Joannides travelled to New Orleans in connection with his CIA duties in 1963-64. They also show that he was cleared for two highly sensitive operations in December 1962 and June 1963. The nature of these operations is unknown.
It would be premature and foolish to speculate on what George Joannnides was doing in New Orleans in 1963. What is certain is that he had a professional obligation to report on the activities of the DRE in August and November 1963, especially as they related to Oswald. The CIA is legally obliged to make such records public.
Instead, they are stonewalling in court. This is a disappointing, if not disturbing.
I am interested in hearing from JFK researchers willing to publicly support a call to Congress to enforce the JFK Records Act. I know that the Joannides records are not the only assassination-related material that is being illicitly withheld so I am also interested in hearing from researchers about specific groups of records, known to exist, that have not been released.
Whatever one's interpretation of November 22, 1963, I think we can all agree that these records should be made public immediately.
(6) Jefferson Morley, Conspiracy Theories, Washington Post (November, 2005)
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the great unsolved mystery of American politics. With dozens of books in print on the subject, the case of the murdered commander in chief now seems to attract more interest from the publishing industry than from journalists or historians.
The fascination with a shocking crime is not hard to understand. On Nov. 22, 1963, the president was shot in the head during a motorcade through Dallas. Police arrested an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, who proclaimed himself a "patsy." Two days later, a Dallas strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, shot Oswald dead on national TV. Not until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, would the American people experience such a bewildering, sudden and painful loss.
Why official Washington has seemingly lost interest in the story in recent years is harder, though not impossible, to figure out. The JFK story remains an enduring symbol of popular mistrust. Public confidence in the federal government was somewhere near its high-water mark in 1964, the year the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, for no discernible motive, killed Kennedy alone and unaided. Confidence declined steadily over the next three decades. Rejection of the Warren report was not the only or even primary cause of that decline (think of Vietnam and Watergate), merely a vivid indicator.
So while a new crop of JFK assassination books blooms every November, the Washington press corps, confident in its own ability to uncover wrongdoing, tends to see the JFK story as a black hole of misinformation and irrationality. That viewpoint has gotten plenty of support over the years from ludicrous conspiracy theories positing that Kennedy was killed by a gunman lurking in a sewer, by a bystander wielding a dart-shooting umbrella or (my favorite) by an accidental gunshot from a Secret Service agent. After the fierce debate over Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 hit movie "JFK," which portrayed the assassination as the work of a sinister CIA-Pentagon cabal determined to kill Kennedy lest he pull out of Vietnam, much of the Washington press corps never rejoined the discussion of his murder. Most (but not all) historians and journalists scorned Stone's scenario as unfounded, wild-eyed and destructive. But a CBS News poll taken two years later found that far more respondents thought the CIA was involved with JFK's murder (49 percent) than thought that Oswald acted alone (11 percent). This impasse fuels the industry of new assassination books.
The case that Oswald acted alone was most persuasively restated by the investigative reporter Gerald Posner in his 1993 bestseller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK . His success prompted furious rebuttals of his reading of the evidence.
Beginning in 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board declassified thousands of once-secret JFK records. They generated yet more JFK books but also (mercifully) eliminated some of the least plausible theories. First to go was the claim that Oswald had acted on behalf of the Soviet Union, a claim effectively debunked by the new U.S. records and records from the former communist spy agencies.
The Board also dispatched the far-fetched claim that the U.S. government had altered Abraham Zapruder's famous home movie of the assassination to hide evidence of a conspiracy. David R. Wrone, a historian, refuted this bogus theory in his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination . The unaltered film, Wrone concluded, shows that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different directions.
Another leading theory -- that the Mafia killed Kennedy -- has endured in the memoirs of people close to top organized-crime figures. But reams of recently released FBI surveillance records do not provide any corroboration. Nor has Oliver Stone's malign vision of murder-by-military-industrial-complex found any substantiation.
The new records have bolstered other scenarios, however. Gus Russo's 1998 book Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK resuscitated the lone-gunman theory by giving it what it had long lacked: a motive. Russo, an investigative reporter, argued that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's secret efforts to overthrow Castro in 1963 were much more extensive than had previously been known. He suggested that Oswald, acting out of leftist conviction, killed JFK in defense of Castro's revolution, perhaps with Havana's help.
The Board's documents arguably enhanced another popular scenario -- that CIA operatives manipulated or framed the pro-Castro Oswald. In his 1995 book Oswald and the CIA , John Newman, a former military intelligence officer, demonstrated that senior CIA officials gave pre-assassination reporting on the itinerant ex-Marine far more attention than they ever admitted. Newman refrained from passing judgment on whether Oswald was involved in an authorized, still-classified CIA operation with a legitimate purpose and no apparent connection to Kennedy's assassination. He noted that the agency had not released all of its JFK records, which remains true in 2005.
The rational reader is confronted by the paradox that while plenty of wacko theories circulate on the Internet, a good-faith parsing of the evidence can still yield reasonable doubt. After all, many people in high places concluded that JFK had been ambushed by his enemies. Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, never believed that Oswald acted alone; he suspected Cuba's Fidel Castro had retaliated for CIA efforts to kill him. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said that JFK aide Kenneth O'Donnell had told him in 1968 that "he had heard two shots" from the "grassy knoll." Conspiratorial fears found support in 1979 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations, led by former federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, concluded that JFK had been killed by unidentifiable conspirators. Former cabinet secretary Joseph Califano, intimately involved in JFK's Cuba policy, wrote in his autobiography that he had "come to share LBJ's view" that Oswald was not a loner.
In 1997 it was revealed that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed there was a conspiracy in Dallas. In their book on the Cuban missile crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali reported that the president's widow and brother sent an envoy to Moscow in late 1963 to tell a Soviet intelligence officer that they believed JFK had been killed by what the authors called a "large political conspiracy" originating in the United States. The grief-stricken widow and brother wanted the Kremlin to know that RFK would resume his brother's policy toward the Soviet Union as soon as he became president himself. This rather startling revelation deserved more attention in Washington than it got at the time. Inside the Beltway, the idea that serious political players believed that JFK's murderer got away with it was somehow inadmissible. Elsewhere, the strange circumstances of the Dallas tragedy make Jackie and Bobby's suspicions seem almost commonsensical. Conspiracy theories endure. Yet, as two new JFK assassination books illustrate, there is still no compelling case to explain who the alleged conspirators were, if they existed at all.
(7) Rex Bradford, George Joannides Ruling (2nd October, 2006)
Oct 2, 2006: Jefferson Morley's lawsuit to obtain CIA records of officer George Joannides was dismissed last Friday by Judge Richard Leon (see judge's opinion). Joannides was the former chief of anti-Castro psychological warfare operations in Miami in 1963, which included oversight of the DRE, the Cuban exile group whose members knew Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. For background on the Joannides story, see our Unredacted interview with journalist Jeff Morley (pictured at left) and AARC President Jim Lesar.
Judge Leon upheld the CIA's right to block disclosure of records about Joannides's operational activities in August 1963. That's when Joannides' agents in a Cuban exile student group had a series of encounters with accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and used U.S. government funds to call attention to his pro-Castro activities.
At the time, CIA records show that Joannides was guiding and monitoring the Cuban Student Directorate and providing it with up to $25,000 a month. When JFK investigators later questioned Joannides about his knowledge of Oswald and the events of 1963, he stonewalled. In fact, the CIA had placed him in a position as liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, without informing them of Joannides' prior role. When G. Robert Blakey, the House Committee's Chief Counsel, learned of this recently, he wrote a scathing response which begins: "I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee."
The dismissal of the Morley lawsuit shows that, with the demise of the Assassination Records Review Board, there is a problematic lack of enforcement of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.
(8) Letter to the New York Times signed by David Talbot, Jefferson Morley, Anthony Summers and Norman Mailer (17th June, 2007)
Bryan Burrough’s laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. “Conspiracy theorists” — blithe generalization — should according to Burroughs be “ridiculed, even shunned ... marginalized the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” Let’s see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately: Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon; Attorney General Robert Kennedy; John Kennedy’s widow, Jackie; his special adviser dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood; F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (!); Senators Richard Russell (a Warren Commission member), and Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart (both of the Senate Intelligence Committee); seven of the eight congressmen on the House Assassinations Committee and its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey; the Kennedy associates Joe Dolan, Fred Dutton, Richard Goodwin, Pete Hamill, Frank Mankiewicz, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and Walter Sheridan; the Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who rode with the president in the limousine; the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley; Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago; Frank Sinatra; and the “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt. All of the above, à la Burrough, were idiots.
Not so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the “lone assassin” version. That doubt remains today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.
This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer’s activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the “immediate” release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.
And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.
(9) Jefferson Morley, The Man Who Did Not Talk (November, 2007)
In the 44 years since the assassination, there have been three critical milestones in the effort to explain this devastating crime. The first story was the report of the Warren Commission, the official government body assigned to investigate the shooting. In September 1964, the Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, described as a pro-Castro Marxist, fired three shots at the presidential motorcade and killed Kennedy for reasons known only to him. They held that Oswald acted alone and unaided, and did not pay attention to the protests raised upon his arrest that he was "a patsy." He was shot to death, while in police custody, two days after his arrest by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner who had ties to organized crime that the Commission chose not to share with the American people.
Within a week, 62 percent of respondents to a University of Chicago poll rejected the notion that Oswald had acted alone. Contrary to mainstream media mythology JFK conspiratorial suspicions were not whipped up years after the fact by cranks and fantasists. Those suspicions arose immediately, they spanned the political spectrum and they percolated in the Washington political elite. Both Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy believed that JFK was the victim of a major domestic conspiracy. JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, suspected that the assassination resulted from the struggle for power in Cuba. Richard Nixon hounded the CIA for files on "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," which his aides understood to mean Kennedy's assassination.
The second official story came in 1979. After lengthy hearings, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded Kennedy had been killed by Oswald and co-conspirators who could not be identified. By then popular skepticism about the government's "lone nut" scenario was souring into cynicism. When the HSCA's final report declared that Kennedy had been killed in a conspiracy, TV talk show host Johnny Carson said he was shocked. "Next thing you know," Carson gibed, "they'll be telling us Hitler started World War II."
Then came Oliver Stone. His box office smash JFK, released in 1991, offered an all-too-persuasive depiction of the murder of America's liberal 35th president as a virtual coup d'etat orchestrated at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the CIA. Stone endured much abuse at the hands of the Washington press corps for taking liberties with the historical record in his well-researched screenplay. The director delivered an incisive retort: If the government had nothing to hide on JFK's assassination, why was it hiding so many millions of pages of documents on the subject?
Congress was shamed into approving the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The 1992 law mandated the "immediate" release of all government documents related to Kennedy's murder. Between 1994 and 1998, a civilian review panel oversaw the declassification of millions of pages of classified JFK records. Stone's cinematic agitation shook loose a library of records that conventional journalism never would have captured. Many of the most important new documents can be seen on the best JFK website, www.maryferrell.org.
Neither individually nor together do these documents dramatically change our understanding of November 22, 1963. But they do enlighten the evidence, and pose important questions. First, the documents show that a handful of top CIA officials had far greater knowledge of Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy was killed than they ever let on, and at least one of these operatives remained quiet about what he knew to perhaps a criminal extent. Second, the scientific evidence supporting the lone gunman theory has weakened.
(10) Jefferson Morley, The Man Who Did Not Talk (November, 2007)
Now let us put the crime scene in a larger context, the context of CIA intelligence gathering and psychological warfare operations in late 1963. Let us return now to the man who didn't talk.
What was George Joannides's reaction to Oswald's appearance at the Dallas scene?
"We called him right away," says Tony Lanuza, a Miami businessman who was active in Cuban politics in 1963. He served as the coordinator for the far-flung delegations of the Cuban Student Directorate. When he and his friends heard that a man named Oswald had been arrested for killing Kennedy, Lanuza immediately recalled the confrontations between Carlos Bringuier and the obnoxious interloper from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee the previous August. They rushed to the Directorate's headquarters in South Miami, where someone called their CIA contact to inform him the group had evidence about the communistic ways of Kennedy's killer.
Joannides's first impulse was to consult with his superiors, two months before the DRE was recruiting assassins to kill Castro. What did they know about Oswald was one question that an intelligence officer might want answered.
"He told us to wait an hour," Lanuza recalls. "He had to consult with Washington."
The DRE started calling reporters anyway with the scoop on Kennedy's killer. He was a communist and a Castro supporter. A headline in the DRE's newspaper the next day described Oswald and Castro as "the presumed assassins." When Joannides called back, he told them to take their evidence to the FBI.
The CIA man apparently did not investigate Oswald's Cuban contacts. No former DRE leader can recall any conversations with Joannides about the accused assassin. Joannides did not account for the contacts between the AMSPELL network and the accused assassin, at least not according to the available CIA records. His role as sponsor of Oswald's Cuban antagonists was not disclosed to the Warren Commission. He preserved the U.S. government's ability to "plausibly deny" any connection to the Cuban students who publicized Oswald's pro-Castro ways.
All the while, the DRE leaders continued to feed JFK information to Joannides. The group's records from early 1964 include several memos to CIA contact "Howard" about Jack Ruby's Cuban connections. From New Orleans, Carlos Bringuier sent a report about the ongoing Warren Commission investigation there. That too was passed to Joannides.
On April 1, 1964, the Warren Commission sent Carlos Bringuier a letter informing him that a commission staff would be contacting him soon about taking his testimony about the DRE and Oswald. According to a CIA travel form made public in 2004, Joannides, the DRE's case officer and an attorney, traveled from Miami to New Orleans that same day for unknown reasons.
For the rest of his career, Joannides would be commended for his actions around events related to the Kennedy assassination.
In May 1964, his bosses praised him as a "hard-working, dedicated and effective officer" with a flair for political action operations. His annual job evaluation made no mention of the fact that his AMSPELL assets had tried and failed to call attention to the man who apparently killed Kennedy or that his young friends in the DRE were using agency funds to allege that Oswald acted at Castro's behest. Joannides received the highest possible marks for his service in 1963.
He went on to serve in Athens, Saigon and CIA headquarters. In 1979, after Joannides stonewalled congressional investigators about his knowledge of Oswald he received praise from CIA director Stansfield Turner and other top agency officials. "He was the perfect man for the job," said one.
Two years ago, the CIA acknowledged in a court filing that Joannides had received an even greater honor upon retirement. In March 1981, he received the Career Intelligence Medal, bestowed for "career contributions" to the Agency.
Why Joannides was honored after his Oswald cover-up remains a secret -- for reasons of "national security." In September 2006 federal judge Richard Leon upheld the CIA's arguments in a Freedom of Information lawsuit that it did not have to release the JFK material in Joannides's file. The National Archives then requested the Joannides files from the Agency earlier this year. As of late October 2007, the CIA was still resisting disclosure.
So what can one safely and reliably conclude about the JFK story today?
On the crime scene evidence, reasonable people will differ. To me, the single bullet theory, the forensic linchpin of all arguments for Oswald's sole guilt, has lost scientific validity in the past decade via both Pat Grant and Erik Randich's ballistics analysis and via the sworn testimony of FBI agents Sibert and O'Neill.
The JFK medical evidence is much less trustworthy than was known a decade ago. Photographs have been culled from the collection. Multiple new witnesses say independently and under oath that Kennedy's body and wounds were cleaned up before being photographed for the record. Any indictment of Oswald based on the medical evidence of Kennedy's wounds has been undermined.
The acoustic evidence remains in dispute. In my view, it has not been disqualified until an alternative explanation for the order in the data is confirmed.
The new JFK forensic science, in short, has narrowed the limits of plausible conjecture by eliminating the single bullet theory as an explanation of Kennedy and Connally's wounds and by not eliminating the possibility that the fatal shot was fired from the grassy knoll.
The best minds in forensic science might be able to clarify things, Pat Grant told me in an e-mail following our interview. Grant admitted that he and probably most other experts in the most advanced forensic techniques are not up to date on the acoustic evidence and other JFK evidentiary specimens.
"The evidence should be viewed and examined by a select group of forensic scientists, by invitation only, that best represents the most advanced forensic methods possible today," Grant wrote, adding, "These cannot be encompassed solely by the practices of today's criminalistics labs." He proposed these scientists prepare "a summary report detailing prioritized recommendations for ensuing analyses, their estimations for success of each recommended analysis and the anticipated information to be gained from each."
As for the new JFK evidence from CIA archives, that too awaits clarification. Some of the most basic questions about George Joannides -- what did he know about Oswald and when did he know it? -- cannot be answered as long as the Agency withholds his files from public view. The CIA's insistence, 44 years later, that it cannot declassify those files for reasons of "national security," not only encourages the notion the Agency is still hiding something significant, it also reminds us of the infuriating truth. When it comes to the JFK story we know a lot more than we did a decade ago: We know we still don't have the full story.
(11) Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico (2008)
Birch O'Neal, head of Angleton's Special Investigations Group, weighed in, via cable, with a suggestion. He told Win that it was "important you review all LIENVOY tapes and transcripts since Sept 27 to locate all materials possibly pertinent." O'Neal thought correctly that such material would date to September 27, the day Oswald first contacted the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. But how did he know that? It was either a lucky guess or, more likely, SIG knew of Oswald's Cuban contacts in advance of Kennedy's assassination.
Another key question: Where were the surveillance tapes of Oswald, aside from those of his October 1 call to the Soviet embassy? Headquarters demanded an answer from Win, and David Phillips came up with one. They had been erased. More than a decade later, Phillips told the Church Committee exactly when it happened. "It was not until after 5 pm on November 23, 1963 that Agency headquarters cabled its station in Mexico City as to whether the original tapes were available," the committee stated in its final report. "David Phillips recalls that this inquiry precipitated CIA station's search for the tapes which confirmed that they had been erased."
Phillips's recollection was technically accurate. It was true that the originals had been erased. Phillips did not know or did not say that Anne Goodpasture had a duplicate of at least one of the Oswald conversations. Win said the same thing. He relayed three of the transcripts of Oswald's phone calls to Helms in Washington. He did not send the transcript of the call about Oswald's travel plans made by Cuban consulate employee Sylvia Duran on September 27. About the Saturday, September 28, conversation, he wrote, "Subject is probably OSWALD. Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior to receipt of 2nd call." With that dubious claim, the CIAs false story that there were no LIENVOY tapes of Oswald's conversations came into being.
The issue of Oswald's visit to the Cuban consulate was, as always, handled with the utmost discretion. One pressing question for Win was, what did Sylvia Duran know about Oswald? The station already had a "substantial interest" in her before the assassination, Phillips later admitted, not the least because surveillance had revealed that she had had an affair with Carlos Lechuga, the former Cuban ambassador in Mexico City, who was now serving as Castro's ambassador to the United Nations. At least one Mexican source on the CIA payroll had told his case officer that "all that would have to be done to recruit Ms. Duran was to get a blonde, blue-eyed American in bed with her."
Win called Luis Echeverria, the trim, self-effacing sub secretary to Diaz Ordaz, the minister of government, whom Win had recruited into the LITEMPO network. Echeverria, as LITEMPO-8, had shown the ability to get things done. Win asked him to have his men arrest Sylvia Duran. Then he called Diaz Ordaz, expecting full cooperation from the Gobernacion minister. He asked that Duran be held incommunicado until she gave all details of her contacts with Oswald. Diaz Ordaz agreed. Within an hour, President Lopez Mateos himself called. Win was expecting condolences for Kennedy's death, but his friend wanted to share some intelligence. His people working in the LIENVOY joint operations center had located the transcript of Oswald's September 28 call.
But when Win reported his aggressive police work to CIA headquarters, he was rebuked. Mexico desk chief John Whitten called on a nonsecure phone line with urgent orders from Helms's top deputy, Tom Karamessines: call off the Mexicans. Don't arrest Sylvia Duran. Win told him it was too late, but not to worry. The Mexican government would keep the arrest secret and make sure no information leaked.
Not reassured, Karamessines followed up with a cable to make sure Win understood his instructions.
ARREST OF SYLVIA DURAN IS EXTREMELY SERIOUS MATTER WHICH COULD PREJUDICE [U.S. ] FREEDOM OF ACTION ON ENTIRE QUESTION OF [CUBAN] RESPONSIBILITY. WITH FULL REGARD FOR MEXICAN INTEREST, REQUEST YOU ENSURE THAT HER ARREST IS KEPT ABSOLUTELY SECRET, THAT NO INFORMATION FROM HER IS PUBLISHED OR LEAKED, THAT ALL SUCH INFO IS CABLED TO US, AND THAT FACT OF HER ARREST AND HER STATEMENTS ARE NOT SPREAD TO LEFTIST OR DISLOYAL CIRCLES IN THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT
A decade later, when investigators discovered this cable and asked for an explanation, Karamessines said he had no recollection of it. When pressed on why he might have issued such an order, he said that the CIA might have "feared that the Cubans were responsible [for the assassination] and that Duran might reveal this during an interrogation." He further ventured that "if Duran did possess such information, the CIA and the U.S. government would need time to react before it came to public attention." But Karamessines could not explain why he sought to prevent Win from using his Mexican contacts to learn what Duran knew.
John Whitten, chief of the Mexico desk, wrote a rare memorandum for the record stating that he opposed Karamessines's order. When Senate investigators asked him about his objections in 1976, he too said he had no recollection of the memo he had initialed. But he did attempt an explanation. "We were concerned about blowing the revealing our telephone taps, prematurely revealing our knowledge that Oswald had been in the Cuban consulate at all," he told investigators. "Of course, that all came out later in the papers and so on but at this juncture... the 23rd, the next day. We were keeping a lid on everything because we didn't know which way the thing was going to go." Might the United States attack Cuba in retaliation for the murder of the president? That question did not need to be asked at CIA headquarters, Whitten said. "It was just in the air."
Two years later, Whitten came up with a more incisive explanation. At the time we were not sure that Oswald might not have been a Cuban agent, and the arrest of a foreign consular person was quite a serious matter under international law. Although Sylvia Duran was a Mexican.... Karamessines may not have known at the time and simply felt that this breach of international law, violation of her immunity, might have made it awkward for the United States, if we wanted to let out a roar of outrage if we discovered that Castro had been behind the assassination. In other words, Karamessines feared that this whole thing [the arrest of Duran] might be laid at the United States doorstep."
But why wouldn't American officials want to question a communist who had contact with the man who had apparently killed the president?
Jim Angleton did not want to answer that question. He told congressional investigators he had a "vague recollection" of Karamessines's order. 'All I would say is that usually if Tom intervened it was for good reason ... because he had superior information."
Karamessines's order to Win showed that within twenty-four hours of Kennedy's assassination, top CIA officials were maneuvering to preserve their "freedom of action" to blame the crime on Castro an option that would have generated the U.S. invasion of the island that Cuba hawks had long favored. The command evoked the mind-set that generated Operation Northwoods, the Pentagon pretext operations conceived and rejected by JFK in 1962 and 1963: if Castro could be blamed for a horrible crime against American interests, then the U.S. government might be able to justify an invasion to overthrow him. The Karamessines order also illuminated the difference between Win and his superiors in Washington.
(12) William E. Kelly, Our Man in Mexico (26th March, 2008)
Jefferson Morley’s Our Man in Mexico sets the scene and the tone of the times for one of the puzzling and mysterious jaunts south of the border by any American.
The book is a biography of CIA officer Winston Scott, Mexico City is the scene and the American is Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO), the accused assassin of President Kennedy.
It was Oswald’s September 24 to October 2 1963 sojourn to Mexico City, six weeks before Kennedy was killed that cuts right to the heart of the question of whether the President was killed by a deranged lone nut or a covert pawn in a much more serious and complex scenario.
Morley really wants to address the issue of who was manipulating the accused assassin of the president as well as the group of anti-Castro Cuban students (Student Revolutionary Directorate DRE) Oswald associated with in New Orleans before going to Mexico.
Morley approaches this issue by way of the biography and career of Win Scott, Our CIA Man in Mexico at the time, and through the perspective of Win Scott’s son Michael, who wants to come to understand the secret side of his father’s life.
Michael Scott, whose name is listed on the credits of the popular TV series Unsolved Mysteries, has been seeking the historic truth about his father, much like the sons and daughters of other peripheral figures in the assassination – E. Howard Hunt’s son, Oswald’s daughters and Frank Olson’s son, who were children at the time and have now grown up wondering what really happened.
As much as they can, Morley and Scott have been piecing together their respective stories from what’s in the official files. Michael Scott has been privately seeking the CIA records of his father, especially an autobiographical novel "Foul Foe," while Morley has been seeking the CIA records of George Joannides, the CIA case officer responsible for the DRE students who associated with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.
While both Michael Scott and Jeff Morley have been thwarted by CIA lawyers in their pursuit of these records, both have won small victories, Scott obtaining a much redacted version of his father’s autobio novel, and Morley in court, obtaining a judgment to which the CIA must respond (by late April).
(13) Jefferson Morley, George Joannides (14th July, 2025)
A Spy Called "Howard": George Joannides obtained a fake driver's license in January 1963 for his off-the-books operations, in which his agents exposed accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in August 1963, then advertised for assassins to kill Castro, triggering an explanation from his agents, who generated headlines about Oswald and the FPCC in the wake of JFK's murder.
With the release of a portion of a long-suppressed CIA file on July 3, the saga of the JFK assassination files has entered a new phase. The longtime gatekeepers of CIA records on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 have been replaced by Director John Ratcliffe. CIA records related to JFK's assassination not previously shared with the National Archives are now being released. For the first time since 2017, the CIA is coming into compliance with the 1992 JFK Records Act, which mandates "immediate" release of all JFK files in the government's possession.
The first of these disclosures (now available on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and, in less accessible form, on the CIA's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room) confirms the previously denied role of a CIA officer in the surveillance of leftist activist Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing Kennedy and was killed in police custody.
In response to a request from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chair of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, the CIA has declassified 62 previously redacted pages from the personnel file of officer George Joannides, who served as chief of the covert action branch of the Agency's Miami station in November 1963.
The Joannides file is a breakthrough in the understanding of how the 35th president was shot dead in public and no one was ever brought to justice for the crime. It reveals the existence of a covert operation involving Oswald, authorized by senior CIA officials, that was not disclosed to any investigation of Kennedy's murder. A fake driver's license shows how Joannides' operation targeting the accused assassin was taken "off the books" in early 1963.
A declassified memo reveals that Joannides was honored for stonewalling congressional investigators looking into his agents' contacts with the ex-Marine-radar-operator-turned-leftist-pamphleteer.
The file and other recently released JFK records tell a tale unknown to the Warren Commission, which concluded Oswald killed JFK "alone and unaided." They provide a glimpse into the world of the CIA in the months before JFK was killed.
The Joannides file documents the work of a highly regarded undercover officer running an aggressive "off the books" CIA operation in the fall of 1963 that illegally targeted U.S. citizens, generated propaganda about an accused assassin, triggered an anti-Castro riot in New York City, possibly recruited assassins to kill Castro, and, after JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, shaped news coverage of Kennedy's murder.
While major news organizations have concluded, almost unanimously, that there is nothing in the latest JFK files to change anyone's mind about the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK alone and unaided," that was before the release of the Joannides file.
The Joannides file, along with other recently released JFK material, revises the narrative of a "lone gunman" with the revelation that Oswald and his Cuba-related activities were the target of sustained attention by the chief of the covert action branch of the CIA's Miami station in the last months of JFK's life - an interest that was never disclosed to investigators, to the public, or to the Agency itself.
Whether or not Oswald killed the president, the story in the Joannides file had to be hidden - and was - for 62 years.
The file raises new questions about Joannides, one of three CIA officers known to have lied about their knowledge of Oswald while JFK was alive. Did Joannides target Oswald for anti-Castro propaganda purposes and fail to see he posed a threat to JFK? Or did Joannides and his agents manipulate Oswald into the role of "patsy" for the men who ambushed the president in Dealey Plaza? Or is there some other explanation for these long-denied events?
The Joannides file does not answer those questions, but it does identify other still-classified files that will shed new light on the CIA's role in the events leading to JFK's assassination.
"It's one thing for the CIA to tell you they will release something; it's another thing when they actually do it," said Rep. Luna, a second-term Republican, in a phone interview. Luna's task force held two hearings on the JFK files in April and May.
The release of the Joannides file, she said, "is a good symbol of the new transparency the CIA and the intelligence agencies are trying to achieve."
I first became interested in the story of George Joannides in 1998, when the National Archives released a CIA memo that I knew to be false. In the memo, written by senior analyst Barry Harrelson, the CIA disavowed any knowledge of a CIA agent in Miami in 1963 who used the alias "Howard." The memo asserted that "knowledgable sources" at the CIA concluded "Howard" was not a real person.
The problem? I had interviewed several Cuban men in Miami who had told me in detail about their dealings with the CIA man whom they knew as "Howard," right down to his New York accent and Egyptian pinky ring. They shared with me dozens of memos they had written to "Howard" when working with the CIA man in 1963.
I felt sure that the CIA was lying about a matter related to JFK's assassination, which I thought would make for a good story. My editors at the Washington Post disagreed, so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which turned into a lawsuit covered by the New York Times and Fox News, and which went on for 15 years until Brett Kavanaugh killed it.
All the while, the CIA stuck to the story that they didn't know anything about "Howard" who didn't exist. That satisfied anti-conspiracy theorists who insisted the CIA was telling the truth and there was no reason to doubt its version of the events of 1963. The release of the Joannides file, however, has changed the CIA's story. Harrelson now acknowledges that his 1998 memo, sent to a civilian review board in charge of declassifying JFK files, was indeed not true.
"It was wrong," Harrelson said in an interview with JFK Facts, "but there was no attempt to misdirect." Harrelson's welcome admission means that the CIA has acknowledged, for the first time in 62 years, that Joannides - using the alias "Howard Gebler" - did exist and the CIA knew of his actions in late 1963. He did run an illegal but plausibly deniable operation via his agents in the Cuban Student Directorate (also known by its Spanish acronym, DRE), to confront and denounce Oswald's one-man chapter of the leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in August 1963, three months before JFK's assassination.
The confirmation of the identity of "Howard," in turn, shows that Joannides sanctioned the Directorate's public efforts in September 1963 to recruit assassins to kill Castro. An article in a popular men's magazine sold nationwide offered a $10 million dollar reward "to person or persons who, with the help of the DRE, will assassinate Fidel Castro." Joannides submitted an implausible denial for the file and the matter was forgotten.
Not only did the up-and-coming CIA man run an "off the books" operation illegally targeting U.S. dissidents (the FPCC) for disruption. Not only did his agents have contact with Oswald, the accused assassin from the FPCC. A national publication said his agents were recruiting assassins to kill Castro at the time. xxx And all of this was hidden by official secrecy until July 3, 2025.
The Joannides file corroborates the sworn testimony of Dan Hardway, a former House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigator who is now an attorney in West Virginia. Hardway told Rep. Luna's Task Force in a May 20 hearing on Capitol Hill that Joannides had personally blocked his efforts to investigate the contacts between Oswald and his Cuban agents.
When the Committee's investigation got underway in the spring 1978, Joannides was called back to headquarters after having heart surgery to "assist the Agency's senior coordinator " for work with the HSCA. "When Joannides was introduced to the investigation," Hardway said, "we were told that he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy investigation that was the subject of our investigation. In addition to that, the CIA assured us they had no working relationship with the DRE, an anti-Castro student group, when representatives of that group had an encounter in New Orleans with Oswald which they turned into quite a propaganda coup [after JFK's assassination].
"Thanks to the work of the ARRB, though," Hardway went on, "we now know that not only was DRE still a CIA operation all through 1963, but its controlling case officer was also none other than George Joannides. I believe we were close to some major discoveries. Then the CIA ran an undercover operation against us. They assigned us a man who knew exactly how to keep us from finding what we were looking for. Reasonable inferences may be drawn about what they did not want us to find."
Joannides was not merely a bureaucratic obstructionist. He did not just fudge the facts in defense of the CIA's interests. He was keeping quiet about his own knowledge of ex-defector Lee Harvey Oswald while JFK was alive. xxx Inside the Agency, the file shows Joannides' stonewalling of investigators about his agents' contacts with Oswald in 1963 was deemed honorable.
"He was rated Outstanding for his handling of this unusual special assignment," reads a memo in the file recommending Joannides for a Career Intelligence Medal. The story of the Joannides file begins with an order from JFK in 1962 and ends with the stonewalling of the last official investigation of JFK's murder in 1978.
In November 1962, President Kennedy was basking in acclamation for his statesmanship in the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the looming specter of a war sure to go nuclear, Kennedy had secured the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba without a shot being fired. JFK skyrocketed in the polls and reaped the gratitude of a relieved world. Yet, much to the dismay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA men in south Florida, JFK's statesmanship had allowed the impudent revolutionary Fidel Castro to remain in power in Havana.
Joannides had just been assigned to the CIA's station on the University of Miami campus in southern Dade County. The first page of his personnel file identifies his operational specialty: "PP Action Through Clandestine and Controlled Channels."
That's a spy's way of saying Joannides knew how to generate political propaganda and public activity through clandestine means or via persons under covert control, all without disclosing the hidden hand of the CIA. He would display this skill a few months later when his agents tangled with an unknown character named Lee Harvey Oswald.
(14) Matthew Petti, The Reason Magazine (14th July, 2025)
The CIA's coverup about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is unraveling. Despite the agency denying that it knew anything about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder, newly declassified documents shed light on the links between Oswald, a Cuban guerrilla group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), and CIA case officer George Joannides.
Several months before the assassination, Oswald had offered to work for the DRE, a CIA proxy overseen by Joannides. Years later, Joannides�operating under a fake name - became the CIA's liaison to Congress during a congressional investigation into the assassination. The documents add to a pile of evidence that the CIA had been following Oswald for years and deliberately covered it up afterward.
Oswald "really wasn't alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years," said Jefferson Morley, a historian who has long pushed for opening the Joannides files, in an interview with The Washington Post.
Decades of dogged investigative work have poked plenty of holes in the official story around Kennedy's assassination. But they haven't produced a smoking gun, a single document that demonstrates what the CIA wanted out of Oswald or what knowledge it had about his fatal plans. And that smoking gun may never turn up; Morley and others speculated to the Post that Joannides was running an "off-the-books" operation through the DRE.
The same is likely to be true about another case that's in the news this week: that of the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. After he died in custody in 2019, calls have grown for the government to release the "Epstein client list." As I argued several months ago, such a list likely doesn't exist. What does exist is a scattered patchwork of evidence about the people Epstein associated with and leads waiting to be followed up on.
To be clear, the official story on Epstein has some troubling inconsistencies. Last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that they found "no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions." But it has been publicly reported that Epstein attempted to extort tech tycoon Bill Gates over Gates' (legal) extramarital affair.
The Trump administration has not exactly inspired confidence in its transparency or diligence. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that bombshell information was "sitting on my desk," then released a heavily redacted set of documents labeled "Epstein Files: Phase 1," most of which were already public. Last week, the Department of Justice claimed it would release "raw" surveillance footage from Epstein's prison wing on the night he died, then published a sloppily compiled video clip with a minute of footage missing.
President Donald Trump himself told his followers on Saturday not to "waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about." (It was a change in tune from last year, when Republican politicians attacked the Democratic administration for not pursuing the Epstein case enough.)
Government coverups rarely involve compiling one document that lays out all the wrongdoing in detail�such as the CIA's "family jewels" in the 1960s - and hiding it from the public. It makes far more sense for officials to keep the wrongdoing from being put to paper in the first place. Conspirators make informal plans off the record. Internal investigators turn a blind eye to evidence that they think might lead to inconvenient places.
Epstein was only arrested in 2019, after all, because reporting by Julie Brown in the Miami Herald and a lawsuit by victim Virginia Giuffre forced the federal government to reopen the case. Authorities had originally struck a plea deal with Epstein in 2007 that gave him a short prison term along with immunity for any co-conspirators who might come to light.
Official defensiveness around information is not necessarily proof that officials know about a smoking gun hidden around the corner. Oftentimes, it seems that they fear an investigation because they don't know what it will turn up. And that's exactly why it's worth pushing for more transparency, whether in the Kennedy assassination or the Epstein case. Even if there is no smoking gun to be found, following the trail can bring worthwhile revelations. Often the search can go in completely unexpected directions.
The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 has helped uncover many other mysteries of Cold War espionage history. Just this year, the U.S. government was forced to release information about its espionage in Mexico and on U.S. soil, its foreign election interference, its 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its role in the South Vietnamese coup of 1963, all because these documents touched the intrigue surrounding Kennedy's assassination.
Following Epstein's connections to world leaders could similarly uncover modern political intrigue. While some conservative media have fixated on Epstein's connections to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, his Rolodex also included a British prince, a close confidant to the royal family of Dubai, a Russian cabinet minister, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Trump himself.
Not everyone who crossed paths with Epstein was involved in his sexual crimes. (Although the paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking visited Epstein's private island, for example, the internet memes about his debauchery there were completely fake news.) Still, it's worthwhile on its own to figure out which powerful figures Epstein brought together and what they discussed at his gatherings.
While there's a danger in being too credulous about fantastical conspiracy theories, there's also a danger in being too credulous when powerful people insist that there is nothing to see here. After Trump told conservative journalist Charlie Kirk to tone down his criticism of Bondi over the Epstein files, Kirk said on air that he's "done talking about Epstein. I'm going to trust my friends in the administration. I'm going to trust my friends in the government."
With that attitude, we wouldn't know what we know about the Kennedy assassination�and Epstein would still be a free man.
(15) Tom Jackman, The Washington Post (15th July, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the CIA claimed it had little or no knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. That wasn't true, new documents unearthed by a House task force prove. The revelation adds fuel to the long-simmering questions around what the agency knew about the plot to murder the president, and what else it may be hiding.
The documents confirm that George Joannides, a CIA officer based in Miami in 1963, was helping finance and oversee a group of Cuban students opposed to the ascension of Fidel Castro. Joannides had a covert assignment to manage anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups, even as the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying.
The CIA-backed group known as DRE was aware of Oswald as he publicly promoted a pro-Castro policy for the U.S., and its members physically clashed with him three months before the assassination. And then, a DRE member said, Oswald approached them and offered his help, possibly to work as a mole within his pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
The CIA had long denied any involvement with the Cuban group, or any awareness of Oswald's pro-Cuba advocacy. After the most recent release of documents, the agency did not respond to a request for comment.
The House Oversight Committee created a task force on "federal secrets" to revisit the executive orders by President Trump, in both of his administrations, requiring the release of assassination files by government agencies. After the task force held hearings on the JFK assassination this spring, Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) led a push for the CIA to revisit its archives, which produced some significant discoveries, including new details about Joannides, who had previously only been identified with the alias of Howard.
That's the name members of the DRE in Miami had for the CIA contact they kept apprised of their actions, but the CIA informed both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that Howard didn't exist. In 1998, after the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA again said it had no records related to Howard and the name may have been "nothing more than a routing indicator."
Documents from Joannides' CIA personnel file were released earlier this month showing he had obtained a phony D.C. driver's license. The name on it: "Howard Mark Gebler." "This confirms much of what the public already speculated: that the CIA was lying to the American people, and that there was a cover-up," Luna said in an email.
The documents also show the CIA gave Joannides a career commendation medal in 1981 in part for his handling of the Cuban group and also for his role as a liaison to the House assassinations committee, in which researchers have said that Joannides stonewalled them when they dug deeper into CIA files. The commendation noted his assignment as "Deputy Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch" in Miami in 1962, and said "He did particularly well with the handling of exile student and teacher groups."
"It's a breakthrough, and there's more to come," said Jefferson Morley, a longtime JFK researcher and former Washington Post reporter, who first sued the CIA for their assassination files in 2003. "The burden of proof has shifted. There's a story here that's been hidden and avoided, and now it needs to be explored. It's up to the government to explain."
There is no indication in any of the files that the CIA was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, which the Warren Commission declared in 1964 was the work of Oswald as a lone gunman. The House in 1976 launched a select committee to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and concluded that Oswald worked as part of a "probable conspiracy," but they could not determine who else was in the conspiracy.
Staff members for the committee have said they were making progress on unearthing documents from the CIA in 1978 until a new agency liaison was installed: Joannides, whom they had no idea was at the center of what they were trying to uncover.
"Joannides began to change the way file access was handled," committee staff member Dan Hardway testified before Luna's task force in May. "The obstruction of our efforts by Joannides escalated over the summer [of 1978]. … It was clear that CIA had begun to carefully review files before delivering them to us for review."
After the movie "JFK" launched new questions about the slaying, Congress in 1994 created the Assassinations Records Review Board, which again tried to recover key documents from federal agencies, and again probed the CIA. The CIA responded with its memo about "Howard," saying he didn't exist.
"My memo was incorrect," said J. Barry Harrelson, a former CIA official who wrote the memo. "But this wasn't deliberate." He said he wasn't provided Joannides's personnel file, but that it was provided to the review board. Morley said the review board received the file, but seeing no references to Oswald, didn't realize its relevance. Harrelson said the release of the D.C. driver's license notes was "the first time I'd seen it."
In an interview, Harrelson also said Howard was not listed in the "registered alias" database of the CIA. Morley said that was an indicator that Joannides's Miami operation was "off the books," and not formally recognized by the agency. Harrelson disagreed, saying "he had a public driver's license" and that the Cuban students knew his name, though not his real identity.
Harrelson's memo also noted that progress reports on Joannides's Miami operation were missing for the 17 months he was there, which Morley said was another indicator that the anti-Castro program was secret even within the CIA.
The search for Howard began in the 1990s when Morley interviewed members of the Cuban group DRE, short for Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, or Student Revolutionary Directorate. Among them was Jose Antonio Lanuza, now 86, who told The Post that "Howard" dealt only with the DRE's leader, Luis Fernandez Rocha, and Rocha would pass on direction from "Howard."
Previously released records show that the CIA had begun reading Oswald's mail in 1959, when he defected to the Soviet Union, a move that attracted American media attention. Oswald returned to the U.S. in 1962 with a new wife and daughter in tow and settled in Dallas. Morley has found that the CIA continued to monitor Oswald.
"At least 35 CIA employees handled reports on Oswald between 1959 and 1963," Morley said, "including a half dozen officers who reported personally to [counterintelligence chief James] Angleton or deputy director Richard Helms." The files included State Department and FBI reports about his defection and his activities with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro group in the U.S. for which he launched a one-man chapter in New Orleans in August 1963.
When Oswald publicized his involvement in the pro-Castro group, the DRE swung into action and confronted him on the street in New Orleans, leading to a brief altercation and police involvement. One of the DRE members challenged Oswald to a debate, which was broadcast on the radio in the Crescent City. Rocha sent a tape of the debate to Howard, DRE records show.
Not long after that, Oswald approached one of the DRE members in New Orleans and offered his help, Lanuza said in an interview. "He indicated he might be interested in helping us train for military operations," Lanuza said. Then, Oswald sent a letter to the DRE, Lanuza said.
"It was handwritten, two pages," Lanuza recalled. "It was crap. A ranting thing. ‘I am willing to go to Miami to help you guys.' It was all building up a legend. I was constantly getting letters from gringos who wanted to come in and dress up in military garb and show up in my office." He filed it away.
Was Oswald secretly offering to spy on Fair Play for Cuba, something the CIA had other operatives doing? Lanuza thinks so, but the DRE didn't follow up with Oswald. "Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to get in the good graces of the CIA," Lanuza said. "He said ‘I'll do whatever.'"
But when the news hit that Oswald had been arrested three months later, Lanuza and Rocha called Howard. Lanuza said Howard told them to call the FBI and provide the letter, and then alert the media to Oswald's pro-Cuba leanings. The FBI came and took Oswald's letter with a promise to return it, Lanuza said, but never did.
Lanuza then phoned his contacts in the news media, who promptly added Oswald's political leanings to their coverage. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee soon imploded from its association with Oswald, a massive victory for the CIA - and for Howard.
Morley and other researchers always suspected Howard was Joannides, who died in 1990, but it wasn't confirmed until the driver's license documents were released July 3.
"Why couldn't they say that [before 2025]?" Morley asked. "I think the only reason is there's something nefarious going on. If it's something innocent, just say this is what happened."
Oswald said "I'm a patsy" when speaking to journalists in Dallas police headquarters after his arrest, and many disbelieve the Warren Commission conclusion that he was a lone gunman. xxxx "He really wasn't alone, he had the CIA looking over his shoulder for four years," Morley said.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA counterintelligence officer who has delved deeply into the case, said, "This looks a hell of a lot like a CIA operation."
He said a plausible theory was rogue CIA officers created the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, unknown to the agency, and that "the CIA covered it up not because they were involved, but because they were trying to hide the secrets of that period." He said many in the CIA were angry with Kennedy after he withdrew support for the agency's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 as well as for his gradual move toward peace with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
"The question is what was Joannides doing for the CIA monitoring Oswald?" Mowatt-Larssen said. "The people who were orchestrating this had access to Joannides's reporting. They used that to monitor Oswald. His bona fides are being set up to be a lone gunman," a cover story for other shooters.
"We are getting closer to the truth about Oswald and the CIA, but I do think there is more to come," said Senior U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim of Minneapolis, who chaired the assassinations review board in the 1990s. "The Joannides disclosures are most important, I think."
Tunheim said he didn't see any CIA complicity "at this point. I see hiding information to avoid embarrassing questions, information that proves past lies." He noted that Congress passed the JFK Records Act in 1992. "Where are Howard's monthly reports and progress reports? Howard's files must exist, probably apart from Joannides's files."
Luna agreed with Mowatt-Larssen that "there was a rogue element that operated within the CIA, outside the purview of Congress and the federal government, that knowingly engaged in a cover-up of the JFK assassination. I believe this rogue element intentionally turned a blind eye to the individuals that orchestrated it, to which they had direct connections. I think this rogue element within the CIA looked at JFK as a radical. They did not like his foreign policy, and that's why they justified turning a blind eye to his assassination and those involved."