CIA Hid Key Oswald Ties from JFK Investigators, New Docs Confirm

By Tom Jackman | The Washington Post

For more than 60 years, the CIA claimed it had little or no knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. That wasn’t true, new documents unearthed by a House task force prove. The revelation raises further questions about the agency’s awareness of — or involvement in — the plot to murder the president.

The documents confirm that George Joannides, a CIA officer based in Miami in 1963, was helping finance and oversee a group of Cuban students opposed to the ascension of Fidel Castro. Joannides had a covert assignment to manage anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups, even as the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying.

The CIA-backed group known as DRE was aware of Oswald as he publicly promoted a pro-Castro policy for the U.S., and its members physically clashed with him three months before the assassination. And then, a DRE member said, Oswald approached them and offered his help, possibly to work as a mole within his pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The CIA had long denied any involvement with the Cuban group, or any awareness of Oswald’s pro-Cuba advocacy. After the most recent release of documents, the agency did not respond to a request for comment.

The House Oversight Committee created a task force on “federal secrets” to revisit the executive orders by President Trump, in both of his administrations, requiring the release of assassination files by government agencies. After the task force held hearings on the JFK assassination this spring, Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) led a push for the CIA to revisit its archives, which produced some significant discoveries, including new details about Joannides, who had previously only been identified with the alias of Howard.

That’s the name members of the DRE in Miami had for the CIA contact they kept apprised of their actions, but the CIA informed both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that Howard didn’t exist. In 1998, after the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA again said it had no records related to Howard and the name may have been “nothing more than a routing indicator.”

Documents from Joannides’ CIA personnel file were released earlier this month showing he had obtained a phony D.C. driver’s license. The name on it: “Howard Mark Gebler.”

“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,” Luna said in an email.

The documents also show the CIA gave Joannides a career commendation medal in 1981 in part for his handling of the Cuban group and also for his role as a liaison to the House assassinations committee, in which researchers have said that Joannides stonewalled them when they dug deeper into CIA files. The commendation noted his assignment as “Deputy Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch” in Miami in 1962, and said “He did particularly well with the handling of exile student and teacher groups.”

A document declassified by the CIA shows that agent George Joannides obtained a phony D.C. driver’s license in 1963 as “Howard Gebler,” the name he provided to Cuban dissidents he was overseeing from Miami. (National Archives and Records Administration)

“It’s a breakthrough, and there’s more to come,” said Jefferson Morley, a longtime JFK researcher and former Washington Post reporter, who first sued the CIA for their assassination files in 2003. “The burden of proof has shifted. There’s a story here that’s been hidden and avoided, and now it needs to be explored. It’s up to the government to explain.”

There is no indication in any of the files that the CIA was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, which the Warren Commission declared in 1964 was the work of Oswald as a lone gunman. The House in 1976 launched a select committee to investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and concluded that Oswald worked as part of a “probable conspiracy,” but they could not determine who else was in the conspiracy.

Staff members for the committee have said they were making progress on unearthing documents from the CIA in 1978 until a new agency liaison was installed: Joannides, whom they had no idea was at the center of what they were trying to uncover.

“Joannides began to change the way file access was handled,” committee staff member Dan Hardway testified before Luna’s task force in May. “The obstruction of our efforts by Joannides escalated over the summer [of 1978]. … It was clear that CIA had begun to carefully review files before delivering them to us for review.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE WASHINGTON POST