Fact check: The CIA was involved in John F. Kennedy's assassination.
The Biden government fails to release documents that would decide the issue one way or another.
Is this a conspiracy theory?
Is it a ‘conspiracy theory’ to say that more people were involved in John F Kennedy’s assassination than just Lee Harvey Oswald?
The House Select Committee On Assassinations conclusions part 1c:
C. The Committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
It’s not a ‘conspiracy theory’, with all the insinuations the term implies, but a tenable theory that there was indeed a conspiracy.
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part-1c.html
UPDATE
Trump is releasing all the documents… apparently
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release-2025
Gary Underhill apparently revealed that the CIA had been involved, then was found dead under suspicious circumstances a month later; the coroner ruled it was suicide.
He left Washington in a hurry the day after the assassination.
There is quite a lot known about Underhill already — note this extensive article from 2021 on the website “On the Trail of Delusion.”
Also this: claims that Kennedy was in the Klu Klux Klan.
MY EARLIER ARTICLE:
Another incomplete document release begs the question: why?
In 1992 Congress unanimously voted in the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, in which they ordered that all the CIA’s documents relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy must be released by 2017.
The Trump Government, in 2020, reportedly under pressure from CIA director Mike Pompeo, did not release the full set of documents.
The 2025 document release apparently still contains redactions, which is unfortunate.
At the time of writing of this original article, once again, the full set of documents had not been released by the Biden administration.
Records relating to CIA agent George Joannides, who came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald less than four months before JFK’s assassination, are still missing.
According to the official version of events, Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F Kennedy on 11th of November 1963. On November 24th 1963, Oswald was in turn murdered by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner.
The Warren Commission report on November 29th 1963, which conducted interviews with witnesses in private hearings, concluded that there was no CIA involvement in President Kennedy’s death.
However in 2014, a report by CIA historian David Robarge concluded that the CIA Director at the time, John McCone, who died in 1991, ‘was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”’
The continued redactions and incomplete document releases to this date seem to indicate that this might be more than a benign cover-up. Tucker Carlson makes the point that if the CIA was involved in the assassination of a US President, it could bring the whole organisation down, even though this happened 59 years ago.
The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to making history accessible, made this statement about the incomplete document release:
Note on 12/15/2022 JFK Releases: On December 15, the National Archives released online 13,173 documents from the JFK Collection, out of roughly 15,000 remaining. While disclosures are welcome, this release falls short. Unfortunately, in many thousands of cases the new document simply features fewer redactions than previously (and in many cases there is almost no change). This release is much like those in 2017, 2018, and 2021, and is nowhere near the full disclosure required by law. Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, told NBC News "We’re 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed and there’s just no justification for this."
Tucker Carlson Tonight in his episode on 12/15/22 asked a source who had seen these missing documents first-hand, whether the documents showed that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
The answer was yes, he believed the CIA was involved.
16,283 documents still feature redactions, and the index itself also features more than 5,000 redactions, furthermore 3,598 documents have still not been released, 27 Justice Department documents have still not been released, and according to the Mary Ferrell Foundation many documents that the National Archive claims were released have not been released. There are 12 unaccounted-for records as well, whose status is unknown.
Unjustified Redactions
The Mary Ferrell Foundation gave examples of documents for which they believe continued withholding seems excessive:
a. Memorandum to JFK about Reorganizing the CIA after the Bay of Pigs - A June 30, 1961 memorandum from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to President Kennedy about reorganizing the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, NARA Record Number: 176-10030-10422. See pages 9-10 for a page-and-a-half of whiteouts; note that this document is also missing from NARA's central directory.
b. Personnel file of senior counterintelligence officer Birch D. O'Neal who controlled CIA's Lee Oswald file from November 1959 to November 1963 (NARA Record Number 104-10291-10014).
c. Personnel file of senior operations officer David Atlee Phillips who told conflicting stories about Oswald's Sept. 1963 visit to Mexico City (NARA Record Number 104-10194-10026).
d. Personnel file of senior Dallas-based operations officer James Walton Moore who was informed about Oswald's return to Texas in 1962 who allegedly told a CIA asset Oswald was "harmless"(NARA Record Number 1993.07.22.17:13:03:960590).
e. February 1962 Defense Department Northwoods plan for a "false-flag" operation to stage a violent incident in U.S. and blame it on Cuba (NARA Record Number: 202-10002-10104).
f. File on CIA-funded group DRE/AMSPELL which publicized Oswald's pro-Castro activities in August 1963 and sought to blame JFK's assassination on Cuba in November 1963 (NARA Record Number 104-10170-10121).
g. June 25, 1975 testimony of William K. Harvey (CIA chief in charge of the ZR-RIFLE Castro assassination program) to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (NARA Record Number 157-10002-10106).
h. A JFK document removed from the security file of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt (NARA Record Number 1993.07.24.08:37:38:680310).
i. Identity of "the infiltration team with mission of assassinating" Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, listed in attachment to September 10, 1964 report on "activities of AMWORLD." (NARA Record Number: 104-10308-10086).
Furthermore there are many records which apparently have been destroyed or could not be found.
The JFK assassination saga is replete with stories of records which have been destroyed, such as Secret Service records from the fall of 1963, or are otherwise missing, including large numbers of Church Committee transcripts. The National Archives in the last few years announced that some of the records it intended to release could not be found, including audiotapes of Rockefeller Commission interviews.
And there are other records known to exist which should be among the documents up for review but which are not:
Records of George Joannides. Joannides ran the DRE student Cuban exile group during the time of their interactions with Lee Oswald in New Orleans in 1963, and was later brought in to serve document requests from the HSCA. When HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey later found out about Joannides' earlier role, he said "Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath...". Former ARRB members agree that Joannides records should be in the JFK Collection.
Surveillance tapes of Carlos Marcello. Tapes of Marcello discussing involvement in the assassination should be made public.
Other records. Documents have continued to make their way into the JFK Collection since the ARRB closed up shop in 1998, including the so-called Yeltsin documents, the strange records surrounding the disposition of the "Dallas casket", a less-redacted copy of the Air Force One tape from General Clifton's attic, and more. The National Archives should not certify a "complete" collection without further searches, however. As one example, there are many documents which were released by the CIA Historical Review Program in 1993 which never were assigned 13-digit RIF numbers and scheduled for full declassification, including items (d) and (h) in the previous section's list.
Impossible to rule out.
Everyone involved in the whole affair has died. How could there be any fallout from this affair that harms current CIA operations, or operatives?
Due to the repeatedly incomplete document release despite the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the claims of Tucker Carlson’s shadowy source only add to the continued griminess of the whole affair of the CIA’s involvement in this - one of the most tragic events in US history - and if the CIA wasn’t involved (and we know they were at least tangentially because of Joannides’ interactions with Lee Oswald in New Orleans in 1963) - why the continued secrecy?
It can only mean that the allegations are at least partly true, and that the CIA fears the outrage of the American people.
What other reason can there be for continuing to hide the facts, at this late stage?
Therefore, CIA involvement in Kennedy’s assassination is impossible to rule out.
Addendum i - 17 Dec 2022:
As I was reading through my article again, I noticed this one — a particularly creepy non-release — using Section 6(1)c of the JFK Act as the excuse for not unredacting certain sections of documents:
e. February 1962 Defense Department Northwoods plan for a "false-flag" operation to stage a violent incident in U.S. and blame it on Cuba (NARA Record Number: 202-10002-10104).
The idea of a false flag operation was definitely raised - here is my article.
Addendum ii - 18 Dec 2022 - why do people think the CIA was involved?
The new (2022) release, as far as my cursory examination goes, contains no more information supporting the idea that the CIA was involved.
The death bed confession of CIA assett Antonio Veciano, founder of the Cuban exile group Alpha 66, that his CIA handler, Maurice Bishop, had in fact been CIA operative David Atlee Phillips, whom he had inadvertently seen meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald just two months before JFK was assassinated.
This Independent article about Veciano is very interesting:
An excerpt:
As Fonzi relates in his breathless, page-turning account The Last Investigation, Veciana unburdened himself to Fonzi, revealing that his CIA handler went by the code name of Maurice Bishop. He had even witnessed an extraordinary meeting in Dallas in September 1963, two months before the assassination of President Kennedy.
Veciana had turned up early for the meeting with Bishop at the towering Southland Centre. He saw Bishop with a pale young man, who was introduced as Lee – although this man did not utter a single word. It was only two months later that he recognised the television and newspaper pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald – the alleged assassin – as the man he had met with Bishop.
Veciana realised it would be prudent not to speak of what he had seen. Throughout this revelatory conversation, Fonzi tried hard to act nonchalant – but he later admitted that in his mind he fell off his chair. Veciana was essentially confirming long-held suspicions directly linking the CIA to the JFK assassination.
Fonzi now dedicated his mission to unmasking the true identity of Maurice Bishop, enlisting a professional police artist to sketch a portrait of Bishop based on Veciana’s description. By chance, one of Fonzi’s committee colleagues, Senator Richard Schweiker, suggested that the picture had an unerring resemblance to CIA operative David Atlee Phillips, who had been running anti-Castro operations and would later rise to the illustrious position of the CIA’s head of the Western Hemisphere division. Fonzi eventually arranged a surprise meeting in an attempt to confirm this. He took Veciana along to a meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers – a lobbying group Phillips had founded after retiring in 1975.
When confronted, Phillips denied any knowledge of having ever met Veciana, in spite of his high-profile status as the leader of a major Cuban exile group. In turn, Veciana denied that Bishop was Phillips – but their body language betrayed a different story. Veciana could not take his eyes off Phillips, whilst Phillips was nervous and shaken. The HSCA compelled both Phillips and Veciana to testify.
Veciana already suspected Bishop as being behind the trumped-up charges which landed him in jail on bogus narcotics charges, in order to curtail the former’s unsanctioned operations. Fonzi would eventually resolve that Veciana was using the HSCA in an effort to protect himself from the CIA, making it clear that he was capable of damaging exposures.
The final HSCA report, published in 1979, would conclude that there was a probable conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy partially based on acoustic analysis of Dictabelt recordings revealing two gunmen. This contradicted the Warren Commission version of a lone gunman, but did not confirm the identity of any supposed conspirators.
A few months later, Veciana was shot in the head and left for dead – but somehow survived. He remains unsure of the perpetrators, but was aware that he was now a liability in the aftermath of the HSCA investigation. However, he also suspected that Castro’s G2 intelligence was working its way through a hit-list of state enemies.
Addendum iii - 18 Dec 2022 - George Joannides release
George Joannides is the CIA operative who had been meeting with the DRE Cuban student group, when Oswald was involved in them.
The only release in the new documents concerning George Joannides as far as I can tell is his fitness reports: a fairly contemptuous response, one feels.
Addendum iv - 18 Dec 2022:
The Mary Ferrell Foundation believes the CIA records concerning Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in the Cuban exile community three months before the assassination are crucial to understanding exactly what the CIA involvement was.
The HSCA report, released after the 1992 JFK act, contains some very interesting accounts by those who claimed to have seen Lee Harvey Oswald where and when he was not present according to the official accounts; the story of Silvia Odio is particularly suggestive, reprinted below, and seems to describe a genuine encounter with Oswald when he was supposed to be in Mexico.
The HSCA report concluded there was a second gunman and that there was a conspiracy involved in the assassination; however it rules out the FBI, CIA, Cuban government, and the USSR.
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1212#relPageId=1
Change Log
A day or two after doing the post - Added the Addendums
Added the little bit at the start about “conspiracy theories” — this was partly spurred by el gato malo’s excellent satirical piece:
Supposedly President Kennedy was inclined to dismantle the CIA bc it was getting out of hand. Too bad it stills exists; with the latest politicization & corruption by both the CIA & FBI, one can see why JFK might want to end its operation.
Did they release a document that indicates Lee Harvey Oswald's participation in past CIA ops?