New Batch of Kennedy Assassination Docs Begin Peeling the Onion of CIA Lies

It’s unlikely that the question of how large the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy was will ever be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction. 

Was there no conspiracy at all? Did the Soviets or the Cubans order the hit? Was it the CIA, or Johnson, or the Mob? We all have our theories, and at least most of us intuitively understand that at least some of the fog obscuring a clear view is artificially generated by people and institutions intentionally hiding things. 

Back in March, I wrote about the first tranche of documents that were released, and the big takeaway was that the CIA had ample reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dangerous potential assassin. They had warnings galore, but either failed to follow them up or didn’t care to heed them. 

🚨🇺🇸BOMBSHELL JFK FILES: STATE DEPARTMENT IGNORED WARNING ABOUT OSWALD’S PLAN TO KILL KENNEDY

Newly declassified files reveal the State Department was warned months before JFK’s assassination—and did nothing.

A whistleblower told U.S. officials in July 1963 that Lee Harvey… https://t.co/2CgjSkywoO pic.twitter.com/ufGrmg0HrB

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 19, 2025

After six decades of life, I have become a terrible cynic, but I still don’t believe the CIA actively conspired to kill the president. Still, I am perfectly willing to believe that they conspired to cover up their gross or even criminal negligence in allowing it to happen. I’ve never believed that Johnson had Kennedy killed–no, I am not CERTAIN he didn’t, but it strikes me as vanishingly unlikely–and a CIA conspiracy to kill the president seems way too risky for all involved. Too many potential leaks to risk it, even if they wanted to. 

My personal theory has been that Cuba was behind the assassination. Oswald was a communist, had deep ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union, and even visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico right before he killed the president. 

I still believe that, and as then, I believe the massive cover-up in the United States was directed to hide the fact that all of this was easily prevented because the CIA had all the necessary evidence to do so, had they connected the obvious dots. 

In a new tranche of documents, we learn more about the CIA’s contacts with Oswald and that the agency lied to the Warren Commission, Congress, and everybody else for decades. The CIA was conducting psychological warfare operations, and in the course of those operations, they had very direct contact with Oswald. 

For the first time since JFK’s assassination nearly 62 years ago, the CIA tacitly admitted Thursday that an agent specializing in psychological warfare, George Joannides, ran an operation that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the killing.https://t.co/j7XRGH4OCD

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) July 5, 2025

They lied for decades about their contacts with Oswald. 

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 bottom line: “The cover story for Joannides is officially dead,” said Jefferson Morley, an author and expert on the assassination. “This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald.”

• 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.

The CIA denied there was any “Howard” for decades, and with good reason. If they admitted that a CIA agent was directly involved with Oswald, it would look really bad for them. So they lied. 

Newly declassified documents reveal that a CIA officer had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, contradicting decades of Agency denials.

The documents show that CIA officer George Joannides oversaw a covert anti-Castro group, the… pic.twitter.com/85wvq78LDm

— AF Post (@AFpost) July 5, 2025

Now, “Howard” didn’t commission a hit on Kennedy, or anything quite so sinister. In fact, he was working with a group that was countering Oswald’s and others’ pro-Castro activity. But, of course, in that capacity, he was in a position to evaluate Oswald’s potential danger and utterly failed to do so. 

It’s one more brick in the wall that is coming down. The CIA had been warned about Oswald, was watching him, had direct contact with him, and totally missed that this known wolf was about to kill the president. 

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.

A conspiracy to kill the president would be very hard to pull off, even in an agency famous for assassinating world leaders and keeping secrets. It would be hard to ensure that every person needed to accomplish that task wouldn’t fink–after all, it would only take one person getting cold feet to blow the op and get everybody killed. 

But a conspiracy to hide gross incompetence? That is another day in the office for any bureaucracy. Look at NIAID under Fauci. As is giving out awards to people who engage in coverups. 

It’s no longer debatable that the CIA had every reason to know that Oswald was a dangerous guy, had deep ties to Cuba, and was likely trained as an assassin. The CIA completely blew it, and spent decades covering it up because the alternative was career death for all involved, and likely worse. 

Others had reason to let it happen. If it came out that Cuba aided in or ordered the assassination, nuclear war would have been on the table, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, such a possibility was a very real danger. 

So they cooked up a story–and even blamed it on conservatives, making lemonade out of lemons. For decades, the media pushed the “climate of hate” in Dallas as the real villain. 

Is it possible that there are other explanations? Of course. We will never know for sure. But in my mind the combination of gross incompetence and bureaucrats covering their asses makes the most sense. I will likely die believing that the Cubans coordinated the hit–Castro had more than adequate reason to want Kennedy dead. 

But whatever the truth is, the CIA is exposed as a conspirator dedicated to covering up the truth, whatever it is.