More CIA-JFK Assassination Conspiracy Nonsense

Supposed ‘revelations’ in newly declassified documents twisted into a bizarre, baseless take on Oswald and the CIA, amplified by a careless Washington Post and others who should know better

You know who. Many things, but not a CIA patsy. (Washington Post illustration)

IN THIS CONSPIRACY-OBSESSED AGE, the front page headline in Tuesday’s  Washington Post was pure catnip: “Documents Show CIA had connection with JFK’s assassin,” it read. The article, by staff reporter Tom Jackman, went on to claim that "new documents" revealed how a shadowy CIA covert officer oversaw an "operation" that "interacted" with Oswald before the assassination, raising “further questions about the agency’s awareness— or involvement in—the plot to murder the president.”

Oh really? What “plot” are we exactly talking about here? It’s no surprise that explosive claims like that—echoed by many other media outlets—would break through even while the MAGA base was tearing itself apart over the latest Jeffrey Epstein madness. But anybody wondering what this new material actually shows about the assassination of John F. Kennedy is likely to be sorely disappointed. A close reading of the new documents suggests the entire Post article is sleight-of-hand misdirection: There is no evidence of an actual CIA “connection” to Oswald, much less an “operation,” to direct or manipulate him before he alone indisputably shot the president from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Indeed, it is not even clear that the covert CIA operative at the center of this bogus story—George Joannides, who managed Cuban exile groups as part of the Kennedy White House’s directive to get rid of Fidel Castro and was supposedly the director of this non-existent “operation”—was even aware of Oswald’s existence prior to the assassination.