Major Break Coming in the JFK Assassination Story: The CIA is concealing a secret operation that involved accused assassin Oswald.
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CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination, new records reveal
Lee Harvey Oswald distributes "Hands Off Cuba" flyers in New Orleans. This photograph was used in the Kennedy assassination investigation. A newly released CIA document indicates an agent ran an operation that came into contact with Oswald before he was accused of assassinating President Kennedy in 1963. Photo: Corbis via Getty Images/National Archives
For the first time since President Kennedy's assassination nearly 62 years ago, the CIA has tacitly admitted that an officer specializing in psychological warfare ran an operation that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the Dallas killing.
Why it matters: The disclosure Thursday — nestled in a batch of 40 documents concerning officer George Joannides — indicates the CIA lied for decades about his role in the Kennedy case before and after the assassination, according to experts on JFK's slaying.
- The linchpin document: A Jan. 17, 1963, CIA memo showing Joannides was directed to have an alias and fake driver's license bearing the name "Howard Gebler."
- Until Thursday, the agency had denied that Joannides was known as "Howard," the case officer name for the CIA contact who worked with activists from an anti-communist group opposed to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro called the Cuban Student Directorate.
- For decades, the agency also falsely said it had nothing to do with the student group, which was instrumental in having Oswald's pro-Castro stances published soon after the shooting.
- The information comes to light as part of President Trump's order that the government meet its obligations to disclose all documents under the JFK Records Act of 1992.
- Little was known of Joannides' involvement in the case until disclosures in 1998 under the records act. New disclosures of previously hidden records keep adding slices of information to the story.
- On Aug. 9, 1963, more than three months before Nov. 22 assassination, four DRE operatives got into a scuffle with Oswald in New Orleans when he was passing out pro-Castro "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" pamphlets. The subsequent court hearing was covered by local news media.
- On Aug. 21 , 1963, Oswald debated DRE activists on local TV, providing more media attention to him as a communist.
- After the assassination, DRE's newsletter identified Oswald as a pro-Castro communist, and the Miami Herald and Washington Post covered the story.
- A year before Oswald became known as pro-Castro, the Pentagon formulated a plan called Operation Northwoods to stage a false-flag attack in the United States, blame Cuba and then attack it.
- All the records disclosed so far show how the CIA lied about financing or being involved with DRE. That includes the agency's interactions with the Warren Commission (1964), the Church Committee (1975), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977-78) and the Assassination Review Board (until 1998).
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The intrigue: Joannides didn't just have knowledge of Oswald before the assassination — afterward he played a central role in deceiving the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The intrigue: Joannides didn't just have knowledge of Oswald before the assassination — afterward he played a central role in deceiving the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
- At the time, the CIA appointed Joannides to be its liaison with the committee. But he and the agency hid the fact that he was involved with DRE and therefore the Kennedy case, slow-walked the CIA's production of records, and lied.
- The committee's chief counsel, Robert Blakey, testified in 2014 that he asked Joannides about "Howard" and DRE, and that "Joannides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE, but that he would keep looking," Blakey said.
- A former committee investigator, Dan Hardway, testified before a House Oversight committee last month that Joannides was running a "covert operation" to undermine the congressional probe into the assassination.
- Two years after stonewalling the committee, Joannides was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal by the CIA in 1981. He died in 1990.
- Morley and some others who've written extensively about Kennedy's assassination believe rogue CIA agents might have been involved in the killing, but Morley's not ready to say Joannides was one of them.
- Others, such as author Gerald Posner, believe Oswald was the lone gunman. But all are in agreement that the CIA acted in bad faith after Kennedy was killed.
- "It's vintage CIA. They never provide transparency. They don't tell the truth. They obscure. They obfuscate. And when the documents come out, they look bad," Posner said.
- A CIA spokesperson told Axios the agency "has fully complied and provided all documents — without redactions — related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy to NARA consistent with President Trump's direction in an unprecedented act of transparency by the agency."
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Scoop: Secret CIA report boasted about tricking Congress in JFK probe, whistleblower says
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A CIA whistleblower, revealing his identity for the first time, tells Axios he saw a secret document in which an agency official bragged about misleading congressional investigators about Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in Mexico before President Kennedy was assassinated.
- "It's a blueprint of a cover-up, how to lie to Congress and the American people," former CIA-State Department historian Thomas L. Pearcy tells Axios.
Driving the news: The 62nd anniversary of JFK's assassination is Saturday, and President Trump has pledged to disclose all records related to the tragedy in accordance with the JFK Records Act of 1992.
- A CIA spokesperson said the agency "is committed to full transparency" and has made extra efforts to produce JFK records during the Trump administration, which was just made aware of the documents Pearcy referenced.
- The report, contained in a manila folder, was essentially a damage assessment by the agency to determine how much its reputation had been harmed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HCSA), which investigated the assassination.
- The report included memo from a CIA official who boasted on Aug. 23, 1978, about how he and two others from the agency had misled Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the HSCA.
- Blakey wanted to see the agency's three-volume series of investigative files from the CIA's Mexico City Station, which Oswald visited before he allegedly killed JFK, officials say.
- Because the books were so "sanitized," Pearcy said, Blakey had no questions after thumbing through each of them for 20 to 30 minutes.
- In a memo, CIA officer Martin Hawkins seemed to denigrate Blakey as "incurious" for not asking questions, Pearcy recalled.
- The CIA inspector general's report, he said, also contained a reference to four Hasselblad cameras and 2,300 photographs taken in Mexico City.
- The CIA has denied having any photographs or film of Oswald in the city when he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies before the assassination.
- Both panel's reports were seen as whitewashes by historians such as Jefferson Morley, who pens the influential "JFK Facts" website and has advised Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) as she pushes for more disclosure about JFK's death.
- The JFK Records Act of 1992 helped change historians' understanding about the depth of CIA cover-ups over the assassination. It required full disclosure of more records by 2017, a goal that hasn't been met.
- In addition to meeting the requirements of the JFk records act, the CIA told Axios, the agency "has been working with Rep. Luna and the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets and will continue to do so on this important matter."
- In July, the CIA tacitly admitted that one of its shadowy agents, George Johannides, monitored Oswald before the assassination, Axios reported.
- Johannides also specifically misled the HSCA, which Blakey later learned due to Morley's reporting and disclosures from the JFK Records Act.
- One of those documents, released in 2004, helps confirm Pearcy's recollection of the memo he saw because its title confirmed Blakely was shown "Sanitized Portions of History of Mexico City Station."
- Pearcy kept his story to himself but later allowed Morley in 2024 to print what he saw while protecting his identity.
- Morley said Pearcy wanted to remain anonymous because President Biden's administration was more zealous about prosecuting people for unauthorized classified documents disclosures. Trump's administration has signaled it's safer for JFK-related whistleblowers.
- Morley and Pearcy said the document in question should be easily findable by the CIA because they have an alpha-numeric record locator from the "sanitized" memo.
- "This document should have been released a long time ago," Morley said.
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Exclusive: How Gabbard's 'hunters' pounced on secret CIA warehouse fo…
Phil StewartNovember 26, 2025 12:41 AM UTC · Updated ago
Documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy released following an order from U.S. President Donald Trump, in Washington D.C.
WASHINGTON, Nov 25 (Reuters) - The officials arrived at the secret CIA archival facility in the Washington area one morning in early April. Their mission: to seize still-classified CIA files on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The team pulled up in their vehicles unannounced, catching the spy agency off-guard, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
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They were acting on behalf of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who wanted to take documents out of the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency and start the process of declassifying them at the National Archives, the people said.
One of the people familiar with the matter said the CIA wasn't aware that it was about to receive direction that day "from a higher government agency." The person also described the moment as probably the most confrontational point in the still young relationship between Gabbard's office and the CIA.
The official leading the search, a Defense Intelligence Agency official named Paul Allen McDonald II who was on temporary assignment to Gabbard's office, declared that they were "on a mission" from Gabbard, two of the people said.
A Trump administration official who made a brief appearance that day after arriving in her minivan, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA veteran herself and the daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She did not have the necessary badge to access the warehouse but was waved in, the two people said. One said Fox Kennedy spent about an hour there, focusing on efforts to digitize the massive archive of papers.
The early April episode, which has not been previously reported, lasted until 2 a.m. the next morning when a massive trove of documents was eventually transferred to the National Archives, according to two of the people.
The case casts new light on the tension between two forces in Washington, the CIA and Gabbard's ODNI, as Trump appointees sought to act on the president's orders to swiftly release the full accounting of Kennedy's murder in 1963, as well as the high-profile 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump had full confidence in both Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. "Efforts by the legacy media to sow internal division are a distraction that will not work," Cheung said.
A spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence said the ODNI "has worked in close coordination with the CIA since the beginning of the administration to carry out this historic release of files."
Trump issued an executive order in January instructing Gabbard and the other intelligence agencies to declassify records related to the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations.
Reuters could not independently determine if Gabbard directed this specific mission at the archives or the extent to which Trump may have been briefed ahead of time about individual missions related to the declassification effort.
The Director of National Intelligence serves as principal intelligence adviser to the president and has oversight over the 17 other agencies, including the CIA. The job typically includes managing interagency tensions.
In a joint statement, Gabbard's ODNI and the CIA said the two agencies "have and will continue working hand-in-hand to release and declassify documents of public interest and execute President Trump’s mission of restoring trust in the intelligence community."
‘THE DIRECTOR KIND OF PUT HER FOOT DOWN.’
A 45-day deadline in Trump's executive order to review documents and present a plan for declassification of the files related to Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had ended in March, and frustration was building on Gabbard's team about the slow pace of progress, one of the individuals said.
Upon arriving at the CIA's archive warehouse, the officials presented a document asserting that Gabbard's office had the legal authority to take the documents even without the CIA's approval, and cautioned that anyone impeding the process could be held accountable, according to one of the people familiar with the events.
The person said the ODNI took this step "because they (CIA officials) were not cooperating up until that point. So the director kind of put her foot down."
Another person described the CIA as highly cooperative and said Director Ratcliffe had briefed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on what the agency planned to release publicly about his father's killing.
Reuters could not establish the precise name or location of the CIA archives.
Two of the people familiar with the events described tensions at the entryway to the archives, including shouting. However, Gabbard's office and two other people Reuters spoke to said the interactions between Gabbard's team and the CIA were professional.
One of those who described the exchange as professional said there seemed to be "a shared recognition that while the timeline was short, it had also been 60 years" since the Kennedy assassinations, and it was time to follow through on declassification.
Gabbard broadly described the effort to declassify the files during an April 10 cabinet meeting, telling Trump she had sent "hunters" to scour archives at the CIA and FBI for materials. "We are actively going out and trying to search out the truth," Gabbard said at the meeting, as reporters looked on.
At that meeting, Trump praised the push to find documents, as did Kennedy Jr., who has long voiced suspicion that the CIA was involved in his father's and uncle's assassinations. The CIA has rejected such allegations.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES HAVE LONG ANIMATED MAGA BASE
The U.S. Justice Department and other federal bodies have said for more than 60 years that President Kennedy's murder in 1963 was the work of a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
But polls show many Americans remain unconvinced and conspiracy theories - from the Epstein files and QAnon to the decades-old questions about JFK's assassination - have long been a focus for key parts of Trump's MAGA base.
Former senator and then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated five years after his brother, JFK. Sirhan Sirhan confessed and was convicted of killing him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Faced with the demands from Gabbard's team at the archival site in April, security personnel called in CIA officials already involved in declassifying the agency's files, according to one individual familiar with the incident. The individual added that the CIA was not opposed to releasing the files under proper procedures.
The agency agreed to transfer the files to the National Archives, which has been in charge of digitizing and releasing the materials to the public, in a manner consistent with government regulations. This meant preserving the "chain of custody," ensuring the proper security and using government vehicles to transport the documents.
Making those arrangements, determining which files Gabbard’s delegation wanted and then transporting them to the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, took until 2 a.m. the following day, said the source.
“It all had to be coordinated,” the source said.
The ODNI did not make Allen McDonald or Fox Kennedy available for interview.
In March, the National Archives began releasing around 80,000 Kennedy assassination files, including CIA materials, on Trump's orders.
The declassified files provided more details on CIA's knowledge of Oswald than it had previously admitted to publicly, experts say. There has been no new information challenging the official conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman on November 22, 1963. The same has been true so far with the 70,000 RFK files released in April and May.
(This story has been refiled to include additional reporting credit)
Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay. Additional reporting by Erin Banco and Steve Holland. Editing by Don Durfee and Claudia Parsons
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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Phil Stewart has reported from more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and South Sudan. An award-winning Washington-based national security reporter, Phil has appeared on NPR, PBS NewsHour, Fox News and other programs and moderated national security events, including at the Reagan National Defense Forum and the German Marshall Fund. He is a recipient of the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Joe Galloway Award.
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