The Washington Post Runs Two Corrections on its CIA-JFK Story—And Still Doesn't Get it Right

The capital’s paper of record only partially claws back a conspiracy monger’s baseless allegations of CIA "involvement" in the murder of President Kennedy.

Last week The Washington Post chose the front page of its print edition to trumpet what purported to be a major new discovery in the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963: that the Central Intelligence Agency had a “connection with JFK’s assassin,”  Lee Harvey Oswald. The story virtually implicated the CIA in Kennedy’s murder—a venerable trope among many fringe assassination researchers.

The story, by Post criminal justice reporter, Tom Jackman, claimed that "new documents" declassified by the Trump administration 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.”

It was an astonishing, even bone-chilling claim, one that certainly deserved such prominent placement and implicit endorsement by The Post—had it been true. But it was entirely false. On closer examination, the story turned out to be an unfiltered, unchecked transmission of willful document misinterpretations purveyed by a longtime JFK murder conspiracies peddler. 

We at SpyTalk immediately recognized the distortions—well, let’s call them lies— generated by JFK researcher Jefferson Morley, a former Post reporter himself and author of a well received biography of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary Cold War-era CIA counterintelligence chief who went mad seeing Russian moles everywhere in the agency. Within hours of the Post’s piece we published a sharp critique detailing how Morley, and ultimately The Post, went grievously wrong, essentially resuscitating the tantalizing, but evidence-free conspiracy theory of CIA  involvement in JFK’s murder. 

“A close reading of the new documents suggests the entire Post article is sleight-of-hand misdirection,” wrote SpyTalk Contributing Editors Michael Isikoff and Gus Russo on July 15. “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.”

And so on and so forth, in detail. (Do read their full dissection of the falsehoods in the Morley-Jackman work here.)

Stealth Rewording

Days later, meanwhile, we learned that The Post had softened some of the language in the lead paragraph of its story—without any notice to readers. The reference to possible agency "involvement" in Kennedy's murder had been removed from the online version. It now stated merely that the new material "adds fuel to the long-simmering questions around what the agency knew about the plot to murder the president, and what else it may be hiding." That was a critical retreat from the story’s main, sensational accusation of CIA entanglement with Oswald, but one that was surely missed by the vast majority of Post readers, not to mention other online news sites and commentators that had uncritically circulated the original story.

George Joannides (CIA photo)

Mike Iskoff fired off an inquiry about the wording change to Karen Pensiero, The Post’s standards (i.e. corrections) editor. “That's a major change,” he noted in his July 17 email, “especially in a high profile front page story, yet I don't see any notice or clarification to readers, either in the paper or online, alerting them to the alteration.” The next day Pensiero responded that she would look into it. Days passed. Meanwhile, we learned that the  Post had appended a “corfrebrection” [sic] in small type at the bottom of its piece.

“Recently disclosed documents,” it said, “raised additional questions about what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald and his plans to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. A previous version of this article incorrectly said the documents raised more questions about whether the CIA was involved in the assassination of Kennedy.”

That was it. It failed to address any of our fact-based challenges to the article’s key conspiracy assertions.

On July 22 Pensiero finally got back to Isikoff, apologized for the delay, and told him, “We’ve published corrections for print and online,” adding, “You’re right to expect better from us, and I’m glad you’re holding us to appropriately high standards. All the best, and thanks again for reaching out.”

What we discovered, however, was that the Post had changed the wording of its correction—but only in its print edition (a small fraction of its online readership.) And without explanation for the change (itself buried in a narrow column near the bottom of Page Two), the Post now said:

A July 15 Page One article about the recent disclosure of documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination incorrectly said that the documents raised more questions about whether the CIA was involved in the assassination. The documents raised additional questions about what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald, and his plans to assassinate Kennedy.”  

Dropped was the earlier phrase about “whether the CIA was involved  in the assassination of Kennedy.” It amounted to a non-retraction retraction.

But again, that was it. Our challenge to the Post’s interpretation of the documents, apparently based entirely on Morley’s version, went unaddressed. At the bottom of the online version of the piece, meanwhile, the correction remained unchanged. Now there were two versions of the correction.

The problem for us, of course, was that the Post’s non-correction corrections, while absolving the CIA of indirect involvement with Oswald in the assassinaton, still had the agency more entwined with the assassin than had previously been known. And that’s a falsehood that the Post has allowed to stand.  The old saw that “a lie is halfway ‘round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” seems to be in play here.

The Facts

The new document releases do not raise more questions about the CIA’s alleged knowledge of Oswald’s assassination plans—not even remotely. Only Tom Jackman’s main—and virtually unquestioned—source, Jefferson Morley, and his followers, draw that conclusion. Nonetheless, Morley continues to insist, as he did in a special congressional hearing in April chaired by Rep. Anna Luna (R-Fla) that not just the CIA, but the Pentagon, were “probably”  “the intellectual authors of the assassination,” implying even more strongly that the agency as a whole and treasonous leaders of the Department of Defense in 1963—not just the Joannides character—instigated a plot to kill Kennedy. Morley’s mythical  “Operation Oswald” is a complete fiction—one that Jackman and his editors swallowed whole.

Jefferson Morley and Rep. Anna Luna, who chaired the Task Force on Declassification. “I’m impressed by her commitment to ‘full and complete’ JFK disclosure, as ordered by President Trump,” Morley says. (JFK Facts photo)

Let’s break it down further. 

• The new file releases add some detail to CIA officer George Joannides’ liaison relationship with Cuban exile activists in Miami in the 1960s, but those activists had nothing to do with Oswald, who lived in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. The Miami exiles’ only knowledge of Oswald was via a tape recording they acquired of him defending Fidel Castro on a New Orleans radio station. There is no evidence they shared it with Joannides, who first heard of Oswald when the rest of America did. The New Orleans anti-Castro exiles interacted with Oswald three times in the months before the assassination, not because of the CIA, but by sheer chance, when he was encountered handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street.  There is no new evidence that suggests otherwise. Perhaps, and most importantly (and here’s where Morley’s prestidigitation occurs): the New Orleans exiles had almost no contact with the Miami exiles, according to the evidence, and absolutely no contact with any CIA employees, prior to the assassination. We stated as much in our original, July 15 critique of The Post’s story.

• The radio debate between Oswald and a New Orleans Cuban exile named Carlos Bringuier happened by chance, according to longtime conspiracies debunker Fred Litwin, when WDSU host Bill Stuckey ran into Bringuier in a bank by accident and they discussed the pro-Castro leafleteer Oswald, who had scuffled with Bringuier on the street. Stuckey, not anyone in Miami—neither the Cuban exiles there nor Joannides—suggested they debate. So much for this important event in the CIA’s “Operation Oswald.” But Bringuier did send a copy of the taped show to his Miami brethren to alert them to this new pro-Castro activist.

• The only topic that seems new in Morley’s version of events is the recent contention of former Miami exile leader Tony Lanuza, now 86, that Oswald contacted him via a two-page letter before the assassination. Problem: There is no evidence of such a letter. Lanuza, moreover, never mentioned such a letter in sworn testimony decades ago. More troublesome for the new Morley scenario can be found on page 205 of his own book on Oswald several years ago, Our Man in Mexico, where he quotes Lanuza as saying that on the night of the assassination, after Oswald had been arrested, he called Joannides to inform him that he had heard of Oswald before (from the tape Bringuier had sent). Question: If Joannides was supposedly involved with Lanuza in Morley’s fictional “Operation Oswald,” why would Lanuza have to inform him of an operation that he was supposedly running?

• The rabbit hole: Morley reads into all this “new evidence” a convoluted theory: the CIA wanted Oswald to appear to be anti-Castro when he really wasn’t. Problem: there is zero evidence to his contention that the CIA “generated intelligence, political action, and propaganda about Oswald before JFK was killed.” The fact is that Bringuier, on his own volition, merely put out a press release about Oswald after their radio debate. There is no evidence that the CIA, or anyone, commanded him to do it. 

SpyTalk’s Gus Russo has known Bringuier for over 30 years and says “there is no way anyone had to convince him to spread the word about a pro-Castro looney on the streets of New Orleans.”

• Lastly, and most importantly, the very idea that Oswald was anything but pro-Castro is eviscerated by the known history of his erratic peregrinations, much in sworn testimony by people who knew him well. In their Warren Commission appearances, Oswald’s junior high school classmates William Wulf and Edward Voebel said they noticed the teen’s general bitterness about life, as well as his interest in both communism and violence; they said he wanted a weapon so badly that he plotted to steal a pistol as a 14-year-old. At 16, Oswald wrote to the Socialist Party of America, stating that he had “been a Marxist…for well over fifteen months.” 

And there’s this: In his sworn Warren Commission testimony, Charles “Dutz” Murret, Oswald’s uncle in  New Orleans, recounted how he visited Lee and Marina Oswald’s drab Magazine Street apartment in May of 1963. He mentioned many oddities about Lee, but one that stuck out was that there was just one framed photo on their wall: that of Fidel Castro.  And the person who knew Oswald best at the time, his brutalized Russian wife Marina, told her biographer Priscilla Johnson McMillan how the couple had had a furious row when she became pregnant because Lee had demanded that, if a boy arrived, his name would be “Fidel.” Marina, an exile from the Soviet Union, said she bellowed, “There will be no Fidel Oswald in this house!”

The “first draft of history” got it right.

Morley has a heavy lift in theorizing that sometime in the summer and fall of 1963,  the CIA somehow managed to create a new identity for Oswald as an anti-Castro activist. Indeed, there is no evidence for any of that—as The Post could’ve quickly determined had it fact-checked Morley’s sensational “new evidence.”  Nothing we raised last week is difficult to find online. 

What’s its excuse now for failing to retract its entire story? (Standards Editor Karen Pensiero has not responded yet to our further inquiries.) It’s worth noting, by the way, that In 2018, reporter Tom Jackman likewise channelled Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s baseless allegation that someone other than Sirhan Sirhan murdered his father in 1968. Experts took exception.

And why is all this important? The most extreme political elements of this polarized country cite the “JFK conspiracy” as the origin of the Deep State, a supposed cabal of intelligence and military officials—Democrats, mostly, in the current iteration—who have been pulling the strings of U.S. national security policies since World War Two. Candidate and now President Trump and his minions rode wild Deep State allegations into office, but in the Jeffrey Epstein case, they’re finding that conspiracy theories can bite both ways.  

Bottom Line: Two massive investigations, including an independent bipartisan congressional probe, correctly concluded that a longtime professed Marxist (and onetime defector to the USSR) named Lee Harvery Oswald fired the only shots that killed JFK and Dallas Police Officer JD Tippit. Jefferson Morley’s contemporary followers have probably never read either—all the more reason that the Washington Post, still one of the world’s most influential opinion makers, should not help conspiracy entrepreneurs muddy the waters. It’s poison.