Gary Underhill Memo in JFK Files Causes Stir

Yahoo

19-03-2025

A memo about an alleged CIA agent named Gary Underhill is causing a stir online after thousands of pages of documents were newly released in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His full name was John Garrett Underhill Jr.
The memo was widely shared online after the White House released thousands of pages of documents never before seen by the public.
It is available on the government's archival website. Underhill has been mentioned before in books relating to the assassination, though, and the accusations in the memo remain unproven. Still, it is being described as one of the "bombshells" in the trove of documents, which were released on May 18, 2025.
Gary Underhill's "chilling story is hardly implausible. As a spy apparatus the CIA is honeycombed with self-contained cliques operating without any real central control," the memo alleges.
The memo's subject is listed as Ramparts: John Garrett Underhill Jr., Samuel George Cummings, and Interarmco. Ramparts was a magazine in that era that did investigative exposes relating to the CIA.
According to the memo, June 1967 documents say that 'the day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening he showed up at the home of friends in New Jersey. He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it suicide.'
J. Garrett Underhill "had been an intelligence agent during World War II and was a recognized authority on limited warfare and small arms. A researcher and writer on military affairs, he was on a first-name basis with many of the top brass in the Pentagon," the memo says.
"He was also on intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CIA officials – he was one of the Agency's 'un-people' who perform special assignments. At one time he had been a friend of Samuel Cummings of Interarmco, the arms broker that numbers among its customers the CIA and, ironically, Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago, from whence the mail order Carcano allegedly was purchased by Oswald.'
Oswald is a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin and governmental described lone gunman in the death of Kennedy.
The memo contains details of Underhill's death.
"The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband and manipulating political intrigue to serve its own ends," the memo alleges.
"Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could 'blow the whistle on it.' Although the friends had always known Underhill to be perfectly rational and objective they at first didn't take his account seriously. 'I think the main reason was,' explains the husband, 'that we couldn't believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless – and more efficient – as the mafia.'"
The verdict of suicide "in Underhill's death is by no means convincing. His body was found by a writing collaborator, Asher Brynes of the New Republic," the memo continues. "He had been shot behind the left ear, and an automatic pistol was under his left side. Odd, says Brynes, because Underhill was right-handed. Brynes thinks the pistol was fitted with a silencer, and occupants of the apartment building could not recall hearing a shot. Underhill obviously had been dead several days."
A check of Agency records yielded information about John Garrett Underhill Jr.
He was born Aug. 7, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, attended high school in Brooklyn and graduated from Harvard in 1937 and died on May 8, 1964, the memo says.
He worked as a pictorial journalist for Life Magazine from 1938 through 1942.
He served in World War II as a second lieutenant, working on technical and photographic headings, evaluation of intelligence and enemy uniforms, insignia, and weapons.
A CIA memo found that there was interest by the New York Office in 'using subject as a contact for foreign intelligence.'
He was advised that contact should be developed with caution.
A UP article written by Underhill for Esquire stated that the U.S. Army was shockingly weak and that Underhill served in military intelligence in World War II and Korea.
He had contacts with a man named Herman Axelbank who was trying to sell photographs of Soviet military subjects, the memo alleges.
Cummings was described in the memo as an alleged member of the CIA who traveled abroad extensively buying foreign weapons.
The arms were being bought for the CIA and 'intended for resistance elements behind the Iron Curtain," it accuses, saying that Cummings was the principal agent of a CIA owned companies.
It was noted that Underhill, Cummings, and Interarmco had not appeared to date in any press or classified reports of the Garrison investigation in New Orleans into the Kennedy assassination "with the tenuous exception of the Ramparts article cited at the outset of this memorandum."