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.

Even more egregiously, the article by Jackman—based largely on interpretations provided to him by conspiracy entrepreneur Jefferson Morley—attempts to back its dramatic assertions by citing new claims from an 86-year-old anti-Castro activist named Jose Antonio Lanuza, who was a leader of the chief exile group overseen by Joannides. The aging Lanuza in his dotage now remembers he saw a letter from Oswald offering to work with the anti-Castro group on “military operations” and that an audio tape of Oswald proclaiming allegiance to the Cuban leader was sent to Joannides prior to the assassination. Had Jackman or Morley bothered to do a little Googling prior to publication, they would have seen these new claims not only don’t hold up: they are quite different and even contradict what Lanuza himself had previously told the FBI and the House Assassinations Committee. As for the supposed Oswald letter, no record of it is known to exist, a rather important fact unmentioned by the Post (and many other media outlets who carelessly echoed the claims).

“It’s astounding — I can’t believe they reported any of this. It’s a complete non-story,” said Fred Litwin, a veteran assassination researcher who is dedicated to debunking the endless parade of conspiracy theories about the Kennedy shooting. The entire exercise, he wrote on his blog this week, amounts to a new “unified theory of nothingness.” Another respected JFK conspiracy debunker, W. Tracy Parnell, offered a deeply detailed, cutting take on the supposed exposé: “As is often the case, much of what Morley said about Joannides may be dismissed because it is not accurate.”

Weak Foundation

A central premise of the Post story, again based largely on Morley’s conspiracy mongering, is that the CIA had Oswald under active “surveillance” ever since he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and that the agency continued to “monitor” him after he returned to the U.S. three years later.  But as was pointed out in SpyTalk when Morley surfaced these claims last April at a hearing convened by MAGA loyalist Rep. Anna Luna (R-Fla), there is much less to this surveillance than meets the eye.

JFK conspiracy entrepreneur Jefferson Morley and Deep State “secrets” hunter Rep. Anna Luna, R-Fla. (JFK Facts photo)

It is of course true that the CIA in 1952 launched a surveillance operation of sorts, codenamed HTLingual, to open the mail of U.S. citizens presumed to be potential security risks. (If Oswald was the impetus for this it would have been quite a feat of prognostication for the CIA. At the time, the future assassin was 13 years old.)

The existence of the program has been known for years, ever since Seymour Hersh exposed it in a New York Times article in late 1974. Over the course of a 20-year period, the CIA opened the mail of about 215,000 Americans who were writing or receiving mail from the Soviet Union. Many of those targeted were antiwar and civil rights activists, which is why HTLingual was indeed viewed as scandalous when Hersh revealed it. 

But in due course, Oswald, an ex-Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist since he was 14 years old, and who surrendered his U.S. citizenship to live in Russia during the height of the Cold War, became at least a semi-legitimate target. (So, too, were three other U.S. defectors whose correspondence got swept up in the program.) 

Still, the opening of Oswald’s mail seems to have been remarkably limited: The only actual record of Oswald’s correspondence being opened is a 1961 letter from his mother asking her wayward son to write home more frequently. As for the “monitoring” of Oswald after he returned to the U.S., this too is wildly exaggerated. It is entirely based on a mundane bureaucratic file that the CIA kept on him, consisting largely of press clippings and FBI reports in which the agency—along with the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Navy—was routinely copied, hardly evidence of pro-active surveillance or monitoring. 

To be sure, the CIA’s files on Oswald expanded and became more detailed when he showed up at the Soviet Embassy and Cuban consulate in Mexico City in October 1963, in an unsuccessful attempt to get a visa to return to Moscow. But this was decidedly not because the CIA had Oswald under surveillance: It had the Soviet and Cuban missions under surveillance—as well they should have, most security professionals would say. Oswald just happened to have wandered into the watchers’ sights.   

Plot Thickens

The gist of the Post story revolves around a series of incidents in August, 1963 when Oswald was handing out pamphlets for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and got into a scuffle with some anti-Castro activists, one of whom, Carlos Bringuier, was affiliated with the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate (DRE by its Spanish initials), the same group that was being funded by Joannides’ program out of the CIA station in Miami. (There’s the “connection” for you.) A little over a week later, Bringuier debated Oswald on a local radio station and was given an audio tape of the event.  

There is, of course, nothing new about any of this. Oswald’s pro-Castro activism in New Orleans was first investigated by the Warren Commission in the 1960s and the House Assassinations Committee in the 1970s, neither of which found evidence of any CIA involvement.  But Jackman and Morley believe the new material reveals a CIA cover up—and that Joannides orchestrated it to conceal that he was some sort of hidden hand behind the events in New Orleans (for what conceivable purpose is hardly clear.) 

Let’s start with the supposed cover up. It is true that 15 years later, Joannides was selected by the CIA to be the agency’s liaison with the House Assassination Committee.  Given his role in funding and directing the anti-Castro DRE, he was clearly not the best choice for this job—indeed, an obvious conflict of interest should have disqualified him. When he was in Miami, trying to get rid of Castro, Joannides used the cover name of Howard; that’s how DRE activists knew him.  Some staffers from the assassination panel now say they were deceived because the agency never revealed who “Howard” was and they never suspected it might be Joannides himself.  The new files show that Joannides did in fact use that alias. He had been issued a phony driver’s  license with the name of Howard Mark Gebler. At a minimum, this old school operative failed to volunteer arguably relevant information about his own role in the CIA’s ties to the DRE, although at least one researcher argues it's not clear he was ever asked.

George Joannides (CIA photo via FOIA)

But if this was a cover up, what was its purpose? At least the Post article quotes J. Barry Harrelson, the CIA officer who wrote a later memo to the Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB), set up as an independent agency in 1992, asserting the agency had no record showing who Howard Gebler was– evidence now being cited by the conspiracy buffs as prime evidence of the CIA “lying” about the Kennedy assassination. Harrelson acknowledges his memo was “incorrect” but that his mistake “wasn’t deliberate.” Harrelson explained that he had searched one CIA database under the name the ARRB had given him to look for: Howard Guebler (a misspelling of the name on Joannides’ driver’s license) and nothing popped up.  He apparently was never given or asked to see Joannides personnel file in a separate database that did record the “Howard Gebler” driver’s license.  

Was the agency being dodgy, or was this a bureaucratic screwup by a spy agency with multiple, highly classified and compartmented data bases designed to zealously protect its secrets, especially involving the cover names for its operatives? Much of the answer likely depends on how one interprets the murky events involving Oswald and the anti-Castro Cubans in  New Orleans. And here is where Jackman and Morley go off the rails. 

Trail Mix

Jackman quotes an old source of Morley, the aforementioned Lanuza, as saying that Oswald approached one of his DRE members in New Orleans and, notwithstanding his pro-Castro activism, volunteered to help the anti-Castro group “in helping us train for military operations.”  That happened, but to Morley it suggests that Oswald’s Marxism was a phony  intelligence “legend” to mislead the world about his real sympathies, a somewhat preposterous idea given that his Marxism dates back to his young teenage years. Yet this seems to be Lanuza’s point. He claims Oswald followed up his verbal offer with a  two page handwritten letter offering to go to Miami to help the DRE out— “a ranting thing,” Lanuza is quoted as saying, that looked like he was “all building up a legend” for the CIA so he could help the anti-Castro Cubans spy on the pro-Castro Cubans. “Oswald was trying to get in the good graces of the CIA,” said Lanuza. 

The problem with all this? Aside from the fact that no such letter has been found in any CIA or FBI files, Lanuza was interviewed multiple times over the years by the FBI and later the House Assassination Committee and never said anything along these lines. When first questioned by the FBI about Oswald in late 1963 and 1964, he said nothing about directly encountering him or seeing any letter he had written.  Questioned again by the FBI in 1967,  Lanuza denied knowing anything about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans prior to the assassination other than what Bringuier had told him about their scuffle. And when he was interviewed yet again by the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, Lanuza told an entirely different story about what he knew about Oswald than the one he apparently related in recent days to Jackman: He was at a Miami Beach hotel with other DRE members on November 22, 1963 and he first heard the name Oswald as the person arrested for shooting the president. 

“Lanusa [the committee spelled his name with an “s” rather than a “z”] recalled the name as that of someone who had something to do with one of the DRE delegates” so he and his colleagues  rushed to the Miami office of the DRE to rifle through their files. There, they found Carlos Bringuier’s report from New Orleans about his encounter with Oswald, a Fair Play for Cuba leaflet, and a tape of the radio debate. “With this discovery,” the committee wrote in its write up of its Lanuza interview, “someone immediately called the DRE’s case officer at the Miami CIA station.” 

Again, nothing about Lanuza’s supposed pre-assassination encounter with Oswald and nothing about the mythical Oswald letter. And most importantly, contrary to the claims in the Post article, it is only after the assassination that the Miami CIA station is told about the tape,  not contemporaneously prior to the assassination. 

The night of the assassination, with the country in shock, Bringuier, put out a DRE press release in New Orleans linking Kennedy’s murder to an avowed Marxist and Castro supporter.  To Morley, this has long been evidence that the CIA was manipulating the DRE all along to smear Oswald as a Communist—something he’d been so fervent about since his teen years that he’d defected to the USSR.  But the fact is Carlos Bringuier didn’t have to be persuaded by the CIA or anyone else to implicate the pro-Communist Oswald after the assassination. Indeed, three months earlier, right after he got into his infamous street fracas with the Castro acolyte. Bringuier called for Congress to undertake “a full investigation on Lee H. Oswald, a confessed Marxist.”  

Was all this part of some covert CIA “Oswald Operation” (as Morley dubs it)? For what it’s worth, Bringuier himself as adamantly and consistently denied that he was so used. In a 2013 self-published book Crime Without Punishment, he wrote:  

“I was just a Delegate in New Orleans of the DRE. I was not receiving instructions or orders from the CIA, I never received any money from the CIA, if others in the DRE at the Miami office were receiving money from the CIA that was not my case…. That is the historical truth.” In a later 2007 email to one of the authors of this piece (Gus Russo) he added that while he may have visited the Miami  DRE office a few times, “I never met George Joannides.”

Dots and Dots

So what exactly does all this add up to? Connecting these dots of minutia, Rep. Anna Luna, the MAGA loyalist who is chair of the Deep State “secrets” task force,  and has been taking credit for dislodging these new documents, is quoted by Jackman as seeing a sinister conspiracy. “There was a rogue element that operated within the CIA” that “knowingly engaged in a cover up of the JFK assassination” because they viewed Kennedy as a “radical” and “did not like his foreign policy” so they justified “turning a blind eye to his assassination and those involved,” she says. To help get to the bottom of all this, she has also said she wants to get the Warren Commission members to testify, apparently not deterred by the fact that her potential witnesses are all dead. 

What all this new round of conspiracy mongering about a 62-year-old case overlooks is the mountain of real evidence that overwhelmingly shows Oswald‘s guilt—and his alone. Oswald bought the rifle that was used to shoot the president. The rifle was found at his workplace on the 6th floor of the school depository building with his palm and finger prints on it. When the police rushed to the building, after witnesses heard gunfire and a man holding the rifle on the 6th floor, Oswald was the only employee that fled the scene. When he was approached that afternoon by Dallas police officer JD Tippit, he shot and killed him. 

Considering all this, we’ll go with Litwin’s take: The “new” evidence about Kennedy’s assassination is a giant ball of nothingness.

Michael Isikoff was a reporter at The Washington Post from 1981 to 1994. Gus Russo is the author or co-author of 10 books, three of which deal with the Kennedy years.