George Joannides (original) (raw)
Primary Sources
(1) The Washington Post (14th March, 1990)
George E. Joannides, 67, a retired lawyer at the Defense Department who later established a private law practice in Washington, died March 9 at St. Luke's Hospital in Houston, where he had undergone heart surgery.
Mr. Joannides, Potomac resident, was born in Athens. He came to this country when he was 1 year old, and he grew up in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York and received a law degree from St. John's University.
Before moving to Washington in 1949 he worked for the National Herald, a Greek-language newspaper published in New York.
In Washington, Mr. Joannides worked for the Greek Embassy Information Service for a year. In 1951, he went to work for the Defense Department. His assignments included service in Vietnam and Greece. He retired in 1979.
When he left the government, Mr. Joannides began a law practice in Washington in which he specialized in immigration matters.
(2) G. Robert Blakey statement on the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003.
I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee. My reasons follow:
The committee focused, among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the months before he went to Dallas, and, in particular, (4) his attempt to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE.
These were crucial issues in the Warren Commission's investigation; they were crucial issues in the committee's investigation. The Agency knew it full well in 1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct dealings with!
What contemporaneous reporting is or was in the Agency's DRE files? We will never know, for the Agency now says that no reporting is in the existing files. Are we to believe that its files were silent in 1964 or during our investigation?
I don't believe it for a minute. Money was involved; it had to be documented. Period. End of story. The files and the Agency agents connected to the DRE should have been made available to the commission and the committee. That the information in the files and the agents who could have supplemented it were not made available to the commission and the committee amounts to willful obstruction of justice.
Obviously, too, it did not identify the agent who was its contact with the DRE at the crucial time that Oswald was in contact with it: George Joannides.
During the relevant period, the committee's chief contact with the Agency on a day-to-day basis was Scott Breckinridge. (I put aside our point of contact with the office of chief counsel, Lyle Miller) We sent researchers to the Agency to request and read documents. The relationship between our young researchers, law students who came with me from Cornell, was anything but "happy." Nevertheless, we were getting and reviewing documents. Breckinridge, however, suggested that he create a new point of contact person who might "facilitate" the process of obtaining and reviewing materials. He introduced me to Joannides, who, he said, he had arranged to bring out of retirement to help us. He told me that he had experience in finding documents; he thought he would be of help to us.
I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
That the Agency would put a "material witness" in as a "filter" between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.
The committee's researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckinridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people.
They were certainly right about one question: the committee's researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency's integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.
For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter.
What the Agency did not give us none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all of his testimony.
I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.
Significantly, the Warren Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government cooperated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.
Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.
I am now in that camp.
(3) Gerald D. McKnight, Breach of Trust (2005)
One of the most closely held of Helms's secrets had to do with George E. Joannides, the JM/Wave contact officer for the DRE in 1963. Helms never revealed that the CIA was funding the directorate when the DRE had contact with Oswald, who was publicly agitating in favor of the Castro revolution in New Orleans during the months of July and August. Joannides probably knew more about Oswald and his relationship with the DRE and other anti Castro exile groups in New Orleans than anyone else in the government. It was Helms who assigned Joannides to the CIA's Miami station because he was skilled in psychological warfare and disinformation operations. It was Helms who assigned veteran clandestine officer John Whitten to head up the CIA's in-house investigation of the Kennedy assassination and then withheld from him important information from Oswald's pre assassination file. When Whitten protested, Helms removed him and turned the investigation over to Angleton. It might have been just another awkward coincidence that David Atlee Phillips, the DRE's first contact officer, was chief of covert action in the Cuban Section of the CIA's Mexico City station when Oswald arrived in Mexico City in September 1963."
Thomas Powers's biography of Richard Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, could not have had a more fitting title. Helms kept Joannides and his DRE connections secret through four investigations into the Kennedy assassination." Joannides's name did not publicly surface until the 1990s, when the so-called JFK Act led to the establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Over a four-year period the ARRB, empowered to declassify JFK files, dislodged somewhere between four and five million pages of declassified documents. Joannides's record was one of those files, and his personnel records revealed that he had been the DRE's contact officer when the CIA claimed it had no contact with the directorate in 1963. But his file was purged, according to the Washington Post's Jefferson Morley, who is the researcher responsible for introducing Joannides into the historiography of the JFK assassination. Morley described the file as "thin." There were no reports in the Joannides file for the entire seventeen months that he was the DRE's contact officer. All that his personnel file revealed is that Joannides was paying the directorate for "intelligence" and "propaganda." John Tunheim, now a federal judge in Minneapolis, chaired the ARRB. After reviewing all the CIA suppression and stonewalling surrounding the Joannides story, Tunheim remarked to Morley, "[This] shows that the CIA wasn't interested in the truth about the assassination.
All the indicators strongly point toward Oswald having been connected to an American intelligence source. There is persuasive circumstantial evidence that Oswald was building a pro-Castro cover as part of an intelligence plan that ultimately took him to Mexico City. What we know today of his activities in Mexico City far exceeds what the Warren Commission chose to include in its report, out of design but more significantly because the CIA saw to it that the evidence was not available to the Commission and its staff lawyers.
(4) Letter signed by a group of authors including G. Robert Blakey, Anthony Summers, John McAdams, Gerald Posner, in the New York Review of Books (18th December, 2003)
As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we urge the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense to observe the spirit and letter of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act by releasing all relevant records on the activities of a career CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides, who died in 1990.
Joannides's service to the US government is a matter of public record and is relevant to the Kennedy assassination story. In November 1963, Joannides served as the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch in the CIA's Miami station. In 1978, he served as the CIA's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
The records concerning George Joannides meet the legal definition of "assassination-related" JFK records that must be "immediately" released under the JFK Records Act. They are assassination-related because of contacts between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a CIA-sponsored Cuban student group that Joannides guided and monitored in August 1963.
Declassified portions of Joannides's personnel file confirm his responsibility in August 1963 for reporting on the "propaganda" and "intelligence collection" activities of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), a prominent organization known in the North American press as the Cuban Student Directorate.
George Joannides's activities were assassination-related in at least two ways.
(1) In August 1963, Oswald attempted to infiltrate the New Orleans delegation of the DRE. The delegation - dependent on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided by Joannides - publicly denounced Oswald as an unscrupulous sympathizer of Fidel Castro.
(2) After Kennedy was killed three months later, on November 22, 1963, DRE members spoke to reporters from The New York Times and other news outlets, detailing Oswald's pro-Castro activities. Within days of the assassination, the DRE published allegations that Oswald had acted on Castro's behalf.
The imperative of disclosure is heightened by the fact that the CIA has, in the past, failed to disclose George Joannides's activities. In 1978, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal to the Congress his role in the events of 1963, compromising the committee's investigation.
(5) Letter signed by a group of authors including G. Robert Blakey, Anthony Summers, John McAdams, Gerald Posner, John M. Newman, David Kaiser, Michael Kurtz, Oliver Stone, David Talbot, Cyril H. Wecht, David R. Wrone in the New York Review of Books (11th August, 2005)
It is disappointing to learn that the Central Intelligence Agency filed motions in federal court in May 2005 to block disclosure of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy forty-one years ago.
In response to the journalist Jefferson Morley's lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA is seek-ing to prevent release of records about a deceased CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides.
Joannides's story is clearly of substantial historical interest. CIA records show that the New Orleans chapter of a Cuban exile group that Joannides guided and monitored in Miami had a series of encounters with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald three months before Kennedy was murdered. Fifteen years later, Joannides also served as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963 to Congress. The public record of the assassination and its confused investigatory aftermath will not be complete without his story.
The spirit of the law is clear. The JFK Records Act of 1992, approved unanimously by Congress, mandated that all assassination-related records be reviewed and disclosed "immediately."
When Morley filed his lawsuit in December 2003, thirteen published JFK authors supported his request for the records in an open letter to The New York Review of Books.
Eighteen months later, the CIA is still stonewalling. The agency now acknowledges that it possesses an undisclosed number of documents related to Joannides's actions and responsibilities in 1963 which it will not release in any form. Thus records related to Kennedy's assassination are still being hidden for reasons of "national security."
As published authors of divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we say the agency's position is spurious and untenable. Its continuing non-compliance with the JFK Records Act does no service to the public. It defies the will of Congress. It obscures the public record on a subject of enduring national interest. It encourages conspiracy mongering. And it undermines public confidence in the intelligence community at a time when collective security requires the opposite.
We insist the CIA observe the spirit of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act by immediately releasing all relevant records on the activities of George Joannides and any records at all that include his name or relate in any way to the assassination story - as prescribed by the JFK Records Act. The law and common sense require it.
G. Robert Blakey , former general counsel, House Select Committee on Assassinations
Jefferson Morley, journalist
Scott Armstrong, founder National Security Archive
Vincent Bugliosi, author and former prosecutor
Elias Demetracopoulos, retired journalist
Stephen Dorril, University of Huddersfield
Don DeLillo, author of Libra
Paul Hoch, JFK researcher
David Kaiser, Naval War College
Michael Kurtz, Southeastern Louisiana University, author of Crime of the Century
George Lardner, Jr., journalist
Jim Lesar, Assassination Archives and Research Center
Norman Mailer, author of Oswald's Tale
John McAdams, moderator, alt.assassination.jfk
John Newman, author of Oswald and the CIA
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed
Oliver Stone, director JFK
Anthony Summers, author of Not in Your Lifetime
Robbyn Swan, author
David Talbot, founding editor, Salon.com
Cyril Wecht, former coroner, Alleghany County, PA
Richard Whalen, author of Founding Father
Gordon Winslow, former archivist of Dade County, Florida.
David Wrone, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, author The Zapruder Film
(6) 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.
(7) Rex Bradford, Mary Ferrell Foundation, 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) Shane O'Sullivan, Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?, The Guardian (20th November, 2006)
At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a "sick, villainous smile" on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver.
As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy's plans to sell bombers to Israel) and notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. Witnesses place Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy, but the fatal bullet is fired from one inch behind. And more bullet-holes are found in the pantry than Sirhan's gun can hold, suggesting a second gunman is involved. Sirhan's notebooks show a bizarre series of "automatic writing" - "RFK must die RFK must be killed - Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68" - and even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember shooting Kennedy. He recalls "being led into a dark place by a girl who wanted coffee", then being choked by an angry mob. Defence psychiatrists conclude he was in a trance at the time of the shooting and leading psychiatrists suggest he may have be a hypnotically programmed assassin.
Three years ago, I started writing a screenplay about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, caught up in a strange tale of second guns and "Manchurian candidates" (as the movie termed brainwashed assassins). As I researched the case, I uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing. I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and started dipping into the nether-world of "assassination research", crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales, a fearsome Yaqui Indian.
Morales was a legendary figure in CIA covert operations. According to close associate Tom Clines, if you saw Morales walking down the street in a Latin American capital, you knew a coup was about to happen. When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that finished: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." From this line grew my odyssey into the spook world of the 60s and the secrets behind the death of Bobby Kennedy.
Working from a Cuban photograph of Morales from 1959, I viewed news coverage of the assassination to see if I could spot the man the Cubans called El Gordo - The Fat One. Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy's speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil moustache took notes.
The source of early research on Morales was Bradley Ayers, a retired US army captain who had been seconded to JM-Wave, the CIA's Miami base in 1963, to work closely with chief of operations Morales on training Cuban exiles to run sabotage raids on Castro. I tracked Ayers down to a small town in Wisconsin and emailed him stills of Morales and another guy I found suspicious - a man who is pictured entering the ballroom from the direction of the pantry moments after the shooting, clutching a small container to his body, and being waved towards an exit by a Latin associate.
Ayers' response was instant. He was 95% sure that the first figure was Morales and equally sure that the other man was Gordon Campbell, who worked alongside Morales at JM-Wave in 1963 and was Ayers' case officer shortly before the JFK assassination.
I put my script aside and flew to the US to interview key witnesses for a documentary on the unfolding story. In person, Ayers positively identified Morales and Campbell and introduced me to David Rabern, a freelance operative who was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961 and was at the Ambassador hotel that night. He did not know Morales and Campbell by name but saw them talking to each other out in the lobby before the shooting and assumed they were Kennedy's security people. He also saw Campbell around police stations three or four times in the year before Robert Kennedy was shot.
This was odd. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and Morales was stationed in Laos in 1968. With no secret service protection for presidential candidates in those days, Kennedy was guarded by unarmed Olympic decathlete champion Rafer Johnson and football tackler Rosey Grier - no match for an expert assassination team.
Trawling through microfilm of the police investigation, I found further photographs of Campbell with a third figure, standing centre-stage in the Ambassador hotel hours before the shooting. He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F Kennedy.
Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joann-des when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99% sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: "If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.
We move to Washington to meet Wayne Smith, a state department official for 25 years who knew Morales well at the US embassy in Havana in 1959-60. When we show him the video in the ballroom, his response is instant: "That's him, that's Morales." He remembers Morales at a cocktail party in Buenos Aires in 1975, saying Kennedy got what was coming to him. Is there a benign explanation for his presence? For Kennedy's security, maybe? Smith laughs. Morales is the last person you would want to protect Bobby Kennedy, he says. He hated the Kennedys, blaming their lack of air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
We meet Clines in a hotel room near CIA headquarters. He does not want to go on camera and brings a friend, which is a little unnerving. Clines remembers "Dave" fondly. The guy in the video looks like Morales but it is not him, he says: "This guy is fatter and Morales walked with more of a slouch and his tie down." To me, the guy in the video does walk with a slouch and his tie is down.
Clines says he knew Joannides and Campbell and it is not them either, but he fondly remembers Ayers bringing snakes into JM-Wave to scare the secretaries and seems disturbed at Smith's identification of Morales. He does not discourage our investigation and suggests others who might be able to help. A seasoned journalist cautions that he would expect Clines "to blow smoke", and yet it seems his honest opinion.
As we leave Los Angeles, I tell the immigration officer that I am doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. She has seen the advertisements for the new Emilio Estevez movie about the assassination, Bobby. "Who do you think did it? I think it was the Mob," she says before I can answer.
"I definitely think it was more than one man," I say, discreetly.
Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, weeks before he was to be called before the HSCA. Joannides died in 1990. Campbell may still be out there somewhere, in his early 80s. Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there. Lopez believes the CIA should call in and interview everybody who knew them, disclose whether they were on a CIA operation and, if not, why they were there that night.
Today would have been Robert Kennedy's 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated.
(9) David Talbot & Jefferson Morley, The BBC's Flawed RFK Story (July, 2007)
On November 20, 2006 - the day that would have been Robert Kennedy's eighty-first birthday -- the BBC program Newsnight aired a startling report alleging that three CIA operatives were caught on camera at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of Kennedy's assassination. The story suggested that they were involved in his killing. The BBC broadcast, produced by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan, identified the three CIA operatives as George Joannides, David Morales and Gordon Campbell. All three were known to have worked for the Agency in Miami in the early 1960s when the White House ordered up a massive, not-so-secret effort to overthrow Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba...
We spent six weeks interviewing dozens of people from Washington DC to Florida to California and Arizona who knew Joannides, Morales and Campbell at different times in their lives. We spoke with former CIA colleagues, retired State Department officials, personal friends and family members...
Several people who had worked with Joannides over the years said the man in the Ambassador Hotel photograph was identical to the man they knew. But other former colleagues disagreed, as did relatives and close friends. Helen Charles, widow of Greek Embassy spokesman George Charles who was one of Joannides' closest personal friends in Washington for four decades, said the man in the BBC photo was not Joannides. "That's not George," said Mitzi Natsios, widow of a fellow Greek-American CIA colleague who knew Joannides well. Robert and Louise Keeley, a retired State Department officer and his wife, who worked and socialized with Joannides in Greece in 1965-68, also said they did not recognize the man depicted in the BBC report. "That is not my uncle, I can tell you that," said Timothy Kalaris, a nephew of Joannides who lives in the Washington area. "I don't know how anybody who ever knew him could say that's him." Photographs of Joannides, whose picture has never been published before, show him at a June 1973 CIA party in Saigon where he served as chief of political action operations. Joannides wears glasses as did the man in the BBC report but he has a more pointed jaw, larger ears, a different hairline, and a more olive complexion. The CIA also declined to release Joannides’ travel records. Most likely he was in Athens in June 1968.
(10) Jefferson Morley, The Man Who Did Not Talk (November, 2007)
Perhaps the single most intriguing story to emerge from the JFK files concerns a career CIA officer named George Joannides. He died in 1990 at age 67, taking his JFK secrets to the grave in suburban Washington. His role in the events leading up to Kennedy's death and its confused investigatory aftermath goes utterly unmentioned in the vast literature of JFK's assassination. Vincent Bugliosi's otherwise impressive 1,600 page book debunking every JFK conspiracy theory known to man mentions him only in an inaccurate footnote. In 1998, the Agency declassified a handful of annual personnel evaluations that revealed Joannides was involved in the JFK assassination story, both before and after the event.
In November 1963, Joannides was serving as the chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA's Miami station. The purpose of psychological warfare, as authorized by U.S. policymakers, was to confuse and confound the government of Fidel Castro, so to hasten its replacement by a government more congenial to Washington. The first revelation was that Joannides had agents in a leading Cuban student exile group, an operation code-named AMSPELL in CIA files. These agents had a series of close encounters with Oswald three months before JFK was killed.
The second revelation was that the CIA's Miami assets helped shape the public's understanding of Kennedy's assassination by identifying the suspected assassin as a Castro supporter right from the start.
The third revelation, the one that is most shocking, is that when Congress reopened the JFK probe in 1978, Joannides served as the CIA's liaison to the investigators. His job was to provide files and information to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But far from being a helpful source and conduit, Joannides stonewalled. He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963, even when asked direct questions about the AMSPELL operation he handled.
When the story of the Joannides file emerged, former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey was stunned by the audacity of Joannides's deception. Blakey, a former federal prosecutor, thought the Agency had cooperated with Congress's effort to look into JFK's murder. Twenty-three years later he learned that the CIA bureaucrat ostensibly assisting his staff was actually a material witness in the investigation. "The Agency set me up," reported the Washington Post.
Blakey, now a law professor at Notre Dame, says Joannides's actions were "little short of outrageous. You could make a prima facie case that it amounted to obstruction of Congress, which is a felony."
Blakey has long argued that organized crime figures orchestrated Kennedy's assassination. The revelation of Joannides's unknown role has given him second thoughts about the CIA's credibility.
"You can't really infer from the Joannides story that they [the CIA] did it," he says. "Maybe he was hiding something that is not complicitous in a plot but merely embarrassing. It certainly undermines everything that they have said about JFK's assassination."
In November 1963, Joannides was serving as the chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA's Miami station. The purpose of psychological warfare, as authorized by U.S. policymakers, was to confuse and confound the government of Fidel Castro, so to hasten its replacement by a government more congenial to Washington. The first revelation was that Joannides had agents in a leading Cuban student exile group, an operation code-named AMSPELL in CIA files. These agents had a series of close encounters with Oswald three months before JFK was killed.
The second revelation was that the CIA's Miami assets helped shape the public's understanding of Kennedy's assassination by identifying the suspected assassin as a Castro supporter right from the start.
The third revelation, the one that is most shocking, is that when Congress reopened the JFK probe in 1978, Joannides served as the CIA's liaison to the investigators. His job was to provide files and information to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But far from being a helpful source and conduit, Joannides stonewalled. He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963, even when asked direct questions about the AMSPELL operation he handled.
When the story of the Joannides file emerged, former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey was stunned by the audacity of Joannides's deception. Blakey, a former federal prosecutor, thought the Agency had cooperated with Congress's effort to look into JFK's murder. Twenty-three years later he learned that the CIA bureaucrat ostensibly assisting his staff was actually a material witness in the investigation. "The Agency set me up," reported the Washington Post.
Blakey, now a law professor at Notre Dame, says Joannides's actions were "little short of outrageous. You could make a prima facie case that it amounted to obstruction of Congress, which is a felony."
Blakey has long argued that organized crime figures orchestrated Kennedy's assassination. The revelation of Joannides's unknown role has given him second thoughts about the CIA's credibility.
"You can't really infer from the Joannides story that they [the CIA] did it," he says. "Maybe he was hiding something that is not complicitous in a plot but merely embarrassing. It certainly undermines everything that they have said about JFK's assassination."
"We are going to kill Castro"
In July 1963, George Efythron Joannides turned 41 years old. He was a 10-year veteran of the clandestine service who presented himself as a lawyer for the Defense Department. He dressed well, spoke several languages and enjoyed the confidence of CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms. In his cables, he was identified as "Walter Newby." To his Cuban friends in Miami he was "Howard" or "Mr. Howard."
Joannides's chief job responsibility in 1963 was handling AMSPELL, a program of CIA support for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, also known as the Cuban Student Directorate. By 1962, the DRE was perhaps the single biggest and most active organization opposing Fidel Castro's regime. In Miami, Joannides was giving the leaders of the group up to $25,000 a month in cash for what he described as "intelligence collection" and "propaganda."
In August 1963, the DRE's New Orleans chapter had taken a vocal and very public interest in an itinerant ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald because of his blatantly pro-Castro politicking. Oswald was 23 years old, an erratic but street-smart schemer who knew how to make his way in the world. He lived in the Soviet Union for a couple of years and was married to a Russian woman, the former Marina Prusakova. He wrote letters to left-wing political organizations and drifted from job to job. And then in early August 1963 he attempted to infiltrate the DRE.
Oswald approached Carlos Bringuier, a 29-year-old lawyer who served as the group's spokesman in the Crescent City. Oswald offered to help train DRE commandos to fight the communist government in Cuba. A few days later, when the DRE boys saw him on a street corner passing out pamphlets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), a notoriously pro-Castro group, they picked a fight with him.
Bringuier took an interest in Oswald. He directed a DRE member to go to Oswald's house and pose as a Castro supporter to learn more about his background. Bringuier also debated Oswald on a local radio program, and sent a tape of the debate to DRE's Miami headquarters. He also sent one of Oswald's FPCC pamphlets. Bringuier went so far as to issue a press release on Oswald, calling for a congressional investigation of the then-obscure ex-Marine. "Write to your congressman for a full investigation on Mr. Lee H. Oswald, a confessed 'Marxist,'" the DRE spokesman wrote on August 21, 1963.
Did George Joannides of the CIA ignore Bringuier's prescient and potentially life-saving call for investigating Oswald? Bringuier, now retired and living in Texas, refused to be interviewed for this article. He said he never received money from the CIA and said he did not know Joannides or "Howard." But other DRE members were more forthcoming.
"He definitely knew about what we we're doing with Oswald," says Isidro Borja, a Miami businessman who was active in the DRE in 1963. "That was what he was giving us the money for -- for information we had."
To get a flavor of the dangerous psychological warfare that George Joannides was waging at that time take a look at the cover of See, a men's magazine from the fall of 1963. "The CIA Needs Men -- Can You Qualify?" asked one headline. Next to this recruitment pitch was a poster, "Wanted Dead or Alive: Fidel Castro for Crimes Against Humanity." The article inside, bearing a byline of a DRE member, was headlined "We are going to kill Castro." In the article, the group announced it was offering a $10 million reward "for the death of the Cuban tyrant."
(11) 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.
(12) 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.
(13) 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.
(14) 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."