For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency has stated that it was unaware of Lee Harvey Oswald before his 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But a bombshell list of records from the CIA, released this month among a tranche of documents from the House Oversight Committee, claims that this was not the case. This marks the first time the CIA has openly admitted that it had prior knowledge of Oswald in the lead-up to Kennedy's death. It could also raise new questions about one of the most longstanding conspiracy theories in American history.
What did the files reveal?
The documents, now available on the agency's website, concern a CIA intelligence officer based in Miami, George Joannides. They show that in 1963, Joannides was "helping finance and oversee a group of Cuban students opposed to the ascension of Fidel Castro" as part of a "covert assignment to manage anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups," said The Washington Post.
The group Joannides led, known as DRE, was "aware of Oswald as he publicly promoted a pro-Castro policy for the U.S.," said the Post, and the group reportedly clashed with Oswald just three months before Kennedy's assassination. Oswald also "debated DRE activists on local TV, providing more media attention to him as a communist," said Axios. It's unclear whether Joannides himself ever met Oswald, but he was known to operate under the alias "Howard." This is despite the fact that the CIA has long "stated that it had no records of anyone named Howard," said The Independent.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
It may be that the CIA was tracking Oswald even before Joannides got involved, especially after he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. At least "35 CIA employees handled reports on Oswald between 1959 and 1963," said Jefferson Morley, a Kennedy researcher, to the Post. This included a "half dozen officers who reported personally" to CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton or Deputy Director Richard Helms.
What does this mean?
The documents show that the CIA "lied for decades about Joannides' role in the Kennedy case," said The Daily Beast. The agency also claimed that it had "nothing to do with" the Cuban students' anti-Castro efforts. The revelation that the CIA appeared to cover up its prior knowledge of Oswald "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," said the Post.
The files were released as part of an effort to "comply with President Donald Trump's executive order to disclose all documents about the former president's death," said The Daily Beast. But experts noted that the original release of documents "didn't include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the 500 IRS records, or the recently discovered FBI files," said The Independent. But this new information on Oswald has some historians wondering aloud.
This is a "breakthrough, and there's more to come," said Morley to the Post. 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." The main "question is what was Joannides doing for the CIA monitoring Oswald?" said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA counterintelligence officer, to the Post. "This looks a hell of a lot like a CIA operation."
