CIA has spent decades saying it knew little of Oswald before he killed JFK. New docs show that isn't true
For the first time since JFK 's 1963 assassination, newly released files reveal that a surveillance officer ran a group that had contact with Oswald before the killing – something the agency had long denied.
The disclosure was buried in a batch of 40 documents, which were unearthed by the House Oversight Committee 's 'federal secrets' task force earlier this month. It's the latest revelation that undermines the CIA's longstanding claims and lends new weight to theories of a broader cover-up.
The release confirmed that CIA officer George Joannides had led U.S. efforts to infiltrate anti-communist Cuban student groups opposed to Fidel Castro in the months before JFK was shot dead riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.
Joannides, who directed 'all aspects of political action and psychological warfare' at the CIA's Miami branch, ran a covert operation to disseminate anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups.
It included funding and directing the Cuban student group, commonly referred to as DRE.
Members of the group reportedly clashed with Oswald, who publicly promoted pro-Castro policy for the U.S., about three months before JFK's assassination in August 1963.
A DRE member later claimed that Oswald approached the group with an offer of support, possibly intending to double-cross his own organization, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
A CIA memo from January 1963 revealed Joannides was directed to use an alias and a fake driver's license bearing the name 'Howard Mark Gebler.'
The DRE members in Miami used the name Howard for the CIA officer they kept updated on their activities. But the CIA told investigators in 1964 and again in 1978 that no such person existed.
In 1998, the agency stated that it had no records of anyone named Howard and suggested the name might have been 'nothing more than a routing indicator.'
Despite concealing his involvement, the CIA honored Joannides in 1981 with the Career Intelligence Medal.
Investigators later testified that Joannides withheld critical information about his role in 1963, effectively stonewalling their efforts.
'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,' said Anna Paulina Luna, overseeing the House committee examining the newly released JFK document, in an email to the Washington Post.
The newly released documents don't reveal any additional details on JFK's shooting or settle the controversy over whether Oswald acted alone.
In March, the Trump administration released thousands of classified documents related to the JFK assassination.
On his third day in office, Trump ordered a 'full and complete release of all John F. Kennedy assassination records,' with researchers anticipating some 3,500 documents that had never been shared with the public.
While experts noted that it was an 'encouraging start,' they said that the release didn't include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the 500 IRS records, or the recently discovered FBI files.
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Telegraph
18 minutes ago
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How America let Iran slip into the clutches of fundamentalism
In 1980 I was invited along with a cohort of historians to attend a conference at Harvard on 'Knowing Your Enemies'. We soon discovered that it was funded by the CIA, who wanted to see if they could learn from history why they had failed entirely to anticipate the fall the previous year, in the Iranian revolution, of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the succession of a fundamentalist Islamic state. At the end of three days of discussion, a senior CIA official addressed us. They had learnt very little, he claimed, from listening to historians. They were working instead with interesting research on the brains of guerrillas, which seemed much more promising. It is exactly this question of American failure that Scott Anderson pursues in King of Kings, his excellent narrative account of the two tumultuous years that resulted in the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the creation of an Islamic republic. 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Anderson is unsparing in his description of just how rapidly the revolution unfolded, and with what vengeful violence against anyone accused of pro-American or anti-Islamic sentiment. All revolutions produce a hanging judge, and none was more enthusiastic than the Ayatollah's chosen hangman, Sadegh Khalkhali. Since the Ayatollah believed that those contaminated by Satan had no right to live, thousands were killed in the first weeks. American diplomats seized as hostages might have joined the list of the dead, but were released a year or so later. Not surprisingly perhaps, the plebiscite to confirm the new Islamic Republic won 98.2 per cent of the vote. Iran today is still an authoritarian, theocratic state, surviving more than forty years of the West's hostility. Anderson finds fault in many ways with the American response, but it is worth asking what alternative there was for the Shah and the survival of American interests. 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The Independent
13 hours ago
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