Everyone interested in conspiracies must have come across the old wives’ tale that the CIA killed John F Kennedy, a person they had sworn to protect by all means. It’s a conspiracy that has prevailed from the moment the fatal shots were fired. But when a person armed with facts confronts these theorists, their theories falter and fall apart quicker than the plots of some 2022 TV shows.
Why on Earth should the CIA kill John F Kennedy? JFK is one of the most beloved presidents of all time, still fondly remembered by many Democrats and Republicans alike. Anyone suggesting that the CIA disposed of JFK is another conspiracy theorist without a solid basis.
After all, both the Warren Commission and the Report of the House Assassination Committee absolved the CIA of any wrongdoing.
Or did they? How far can you trust the Warren Commission and its investigation? If the CIA wasn’t involved with the assassination, why was JFK killed soon after he promised to dismantle the secret organization? And what was Lee Harvey Oswald, a depressed ex-marine and a high-school dropout, doing in the CIA base in Mexico weeks before the assassination?
For the first time, you can safely counter facts with facts without being called a “far-right theorist.” And in this case, the Central Intelligence Agency did indeed push the right buttons to make a depressed man an infamous scapegoat.
JFK Assassination: A Tale of Darkness and Deception
It was evident that the Secret Service made a massive security blunder when the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America, John F Kennedy, was assassinated on November 22, 1963, by covert sniper fire.
(The finest book on the questionable error made by JFK’s guardians is Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy by Vincent Palamara, 2013).
The Central Intelligence Agency, the primary (and lavishly financed) government information body, miserably failed in gathering intelligence about the assassination. The execution of a democratically elected head of state in broad daylight represented a significant intelligence and strategic failure, according to Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post writer who is now a leading expert on the incident.
According to him, “It should not have ever happened; many were handsomely paid to make sure that it never did. Unfortunately, we know how that unfolded.”
President Kennedy Arrives at Dallas on the Morning of the Assassination
However, the CIA could hardly have been ignorant of the claimed assassin, ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, when President Kennedy was shot to death. Oswald must have been a subject of interest to the Agency months before the assassination unless it was plain stupidity.
Oswald had been employed as a radar hand at the Atsugi Naval Air Base in Occupied Japan between 1957 and 1958, which housed a significant CIA facility and from which the Central Intelligence Agency’s U2 scout planes conducted a number of spy missions over the Soviet Union.
The CIA was aware that Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, where he claimed that he “had secrets to give the Soviets” and made an effort to abandon his American citizenship.
Oswald had been under CIA observation since his defection and repeated visits to Soviet and Cuban diplomatic facilities in Mexico City in late September or early October 1963, six weeks before JFK’s assassination. In fact, he planned to return to the Soviet Union and was also interested in visiting Cuba for a prolonged vacation (some suggest he was planning to do both).
Critics have long charged that the CIA withheld information about President Kennedy’s assassination. They claim that the Agency even hid important material from the Warren Commission, which looked into the murder in 1963–1964, and the United States House of Representatives Assassinations Committee (which has reopened and started a reinvestigation into the mysterious assassination in 1976–79).
We now know that these criticisms were correct. What seemed unimaginable for a long time has come to pass.
The CIA hid the truth. The CIA repressed information. The CIA obstructed the official government investigations into the JFK assassination. The Warren Report claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only assassin, whereas the Report of the House Assassinations Committee contended that he was one of several assassins.
The President’s Last Moments
As a result of this Agency misconduct, both investigations were seriously compromised, especially regarding the fundamental questions of whether the assassination resulted from a conspiracy that rose from the ranks of the government.
Numerous questions have been raised about the CIA’s massive intelligence failure and the Agency’s shocking informational secrecy towards the investigators overseeing the assassination of the American president.
Why The CIA Killed John F Kennedy
Two topics will be covered in this article: (1) Whether the CIA was engaged in the assassination, and (2) Whether Lee Harvey Oswald was an employee or contractor of the agency. The next section of this article will look at two recent, shocking disclosures concerning the CIA’s withholding of information about the killing.
On September 16, 2015, there came the first disclosure. The second took place on October 6, 2015. The Agency’s cover-up of its CIA-Mafia murder schemes from the Warren Commission will finally be discussed.
CIA involvement in the assassination may have occurred.
Ever since JFK passed away from his gunshot wounds, there have been rumors that, either formally or informally, directly or indirectly, C.I.A. agents or employees may have been engaged in the assassination.
These concerns are not without merit. JFK had dismissed a CIA director in 1961 and was still working to rein in the Agency on the day of his death. He was horrified by the many cases of abuse and extremes carried out by the CIA and was enraged by its attempts to trick and manipulate him.
Kennedy allegedly promised to “shred the Central Intelligence Agency into a thousand pieces and throw it into the winds” after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. To make matters worse, senior CIA personnel hated JFK’s politics and policies.
Therefore, it is not implausible or even far-fetched to speculate that the Central Intelligence Agency, which specializes in trickery, disinformation, and deception of the highest order, and used to act like a clandestine criminal organization, could have killed America’s beloved president.
After all, carrying out political assassinations (“executive actions”) covertly, successfully plotting to topple or destabilize foreign governments, and even conspiring with the Mafia to commit murder is the democratic manifestation of the flawed organization.
A Picture Taken Barely One by Sixth of a Second After The Headshot
Those who think the CIA was somehow involved in the killing reject the idea of a lone assassin and think the murder was the outcome of a spiraling plot involving different agents and government officials. However, they differ regarding whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a conspiracy member. Many believe he was merely the scapegoat who was silenced soon after.
Lee Oswald in the New Orleans: A Case of Conspiracy with the CIA (1967), written by the late Harold Weisberg, was the first book by a credible scholar to raise the possibility of CIA involvement in the JFK murder. Weisberg, one of the generation’s most well-known Warren Commission detractors, wrote nine volumes on the assassination.
Researchers who suspect the CIA may have been involved in the murder often assume that any participation was not official. They assert that the assassins were likely lower or mid-level CIA personnel (or even disgruntled ex-CIA personnel) operating independently and without the knowledge or consent of the CIA leadership.
For instance, Jim Garrison, a former district attorney in New Orleans who conducted his formal inquiry into the assassination, and wrote two essential books on the JFK murder, had this opinion. Unfortunately, Garrison is now long gone.
Garrison also claimed that upper-level CIA officers not participating in the assassination scheme. Still, they deliberately took part in a cover-up to keep the CIA-affiliated killers under wraps. According to this theory, Kennedy was killed because the assassins were right-wing military hawks who despised JFK’s liberal ideas and foreign policy. Especially regarding Vietnam. Also, the soft stance on the Soviet Union made the United States look… bad.
Other researchers who believe the CIA was involved are convinced that the assassination was planned in complete secrecy by a different group of conservative, warmongering CIA workers—a small faction of high-ranking, JFK-hating CIA agents who took action to kill a president they firmly believed posed a grave threat to the country’s security. This viewpoint is held by Mark Lane, author of Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (2011).
Both theories of CIA participation allow the possibility that certain outsiders, like members of organized crime (the mafia), and right-wing extremists, were invited to the conspiracy by the CIA-affiliated plotters.
Of course, strictly speaking, the CIA’s interference in official inquiries into the JFK assassination does not establish that the Agency was responsible for the crime; on the other hand, it does not necessarily absolve the Agency of any crime-doing or negligence, either.
LBJ smiles after Being sworn in
In terms of institutional culture, the CIA enjoys pulling dirty tricks, covert devious actions, secret monitoring, and forced infiltration. It thrives on secrecy, smoke, and mirrors, skillfully employing deception, trickery, and mystification.
Even if CIA employees or agents had killed JFK, there most likely wouldn’t have been any records of it, and if there had been, they would have been long since deleted. Therefore, even if it were true that the Agency was behind JFK’s death, it would be impossible to establish this without sufficient proof from official CIA archives.
Furthermore, if CIA workers knew about the Agency’s participation in the killing, they would not divulge it, even under oath, due to the rule of silence among intelligence officers.
In conclusion, the idea that the CIA was engaged in the JFK murder is not supported by any evidence and is likely impossible to establish. However, allegations of Agency participation are not absurd on the surface; they are genuinely based on the CIA’s track record and can stand independently.
The Curious Case of Lee Harvey Oswald: Was he in the CIA?
It would be helpful to know whether Lee Harvey Oswald worked for or with the CIA, regardless of whether he was a single assassin, a conspirator, or a pawn. But did he?
According to the findings of the two official investigations into the murder, Oswald most certainly did not have any ties with the agency.
“There was nothing to sustain the idea that Oswald was an agent, employee, or informant of the CIA,” the 1964 Warren Report stated. The evidence of the CIA director and deputy director, both of whom testified that “no one linked with the CIA had ever examined Oswald or talked with him in any manner,” was entirely accepted by the court.
Oswald was never directly or indirectly affiliated with the CIA, according to the director’s signed statement, which said that “Oswald had never been an agent, employee, or even an informant of the Central Intelligence Agency, that the Agency never corresponded with him in any fashion, or supplied him with any remuneration.”
The Warren Commission testimony of the two senior CIA officers was “confirmed” in the 1979 Report of the House Assassinations Committee.
The Report concluded that there was “no evidence in Oswald’s CIA file that he had ever been in contact with the Agency” and that “taken in its entirety, the circumstantial evidence that the committee had selected for investigation as possibly indicative of an intelligence association did not support the allegation that Oswald had a relationship with an intelligence agency.”
The interior of the presidential limousine as seen soon after JFKs assassination
Given that they are primarily dependent on the CIA’s denials, the findings drawn from both the infamous Warren Report and the special investigation by the House Assassinations Committee Report that Lee Harvey Oswald was in no way connected to the CIA may be incorrect.
As mentioned above and further demonstrated below, the Agency misled the Warren Commission and the House Assassinations Committee over its interactions with Oswald.
Furthermore, “there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Oswald was (a CIA) agent,” as professor Philip H. Melanson, who passed away in 2006, noted in his book Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and United States Intelligence (1990). Melanson was an internationally recognized expert on political violence and shady government operatives, having investigated dozens of cases.
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Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA
Between 1959 and 1963, Oswald regularly hung around with people who had connections to the CIA. These range from people who have been confirmed to people who are suspected to be agents. In Melanson’s words, Oswald was “shadowed by personnel with evident or plausible CIA links.” Let us look into these allegations further:
Oswald developed an odd close association with the roughly 30 years older, Russian-born, erudite, aristocratic, and mysterious George De Mohrenschildt when he was residing in Texas in 1962–1963. Unquestionably connected to the CIA, De Mohrenschildt has appropriately been referred to as one of Oswald’s “spookiest” friends.
George De Mohrenschildt in a File Photo
De Mohrenschildt, who often traveled abroad, and knew many languages, had a Ph.D. from the University of Liège in Belgium and a master’s from the University of Texas; Mohrenschildt’s CIA assigned cover that was extensively worked up was that he was a “petroleum geologist.”
Jim Garrison famously mocked: “Here you have a rich, sophisticated White Russian émigré who travels in the highest social circles—he was a close friend of Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy’s mother—suddenly having an intimate connection with a destitute ex-Marine like Lee Oswald. What were they talking about, the Biarritz season from the previous year or how to cheat the casino in Monte Carlo?”
Connecting the Dots
The most plausible explanation for De Mohrenschildt’s strange odd-couple relationship with high school dropout Lee Harvey Oswald is that he served as Oswald’s CIA “babysitter” (in the intelligence community, a “babysitter” is an agent tasked with protecting or observing another agent or a person of interest (POI) to a secret agency).
Before meeting Oswald, De Mohrenschildt had a lengthy history of spying. He was arrested in Texas in 1941 by FBI investigators who thought he was working as an Axis spy after they saw him taking pictures or making sketches of a Coast Guard station. He was expelled from Yugoslavia in 1957 due to allegations that he was a spy.
De Mohrenschildt gave a thorough interview before the Warren Commission.
However, he committed suicide on March 29, 1977, just before the House Assassinations Committee could interrogate him. Sounds suspicious? Well, read the circumstances of his death yourself. De Mohrenschildt returned to the United States on March 16, 1977. His daughter had a lengthy conversation with him and discovered him to be quite troubled about a few things.
In an interview with author Edward Jay Epstein on March 29 (the day of his death), De Mohrenschildt said that Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore and one of Moore’s accomplices had given him Lee Harvey Oswald’s location in neighboring Fort Worth in 1962 and then indicated that De Mohrenschildt may want to see him.
If Moore had not approved it, De Mohrenschildt says that he would have “never in a million years” gotten in touch with Oswald. There was too much at risk. De Mohrenschildt got a business card from Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, on the same day as the Epstein interview, inviting him to meet with him.
He was seen as a “crucial witness” by the HSCA. De Mohrenschildt was discovered dead that afternoon at a residence where he was living in Manalapan, Florida, following a self-inflicted shotgun gunshot to the head. Though suicide was determined to be the cause of death by the coroner, hundreds of thousands believe that he was yet another man who was silenced.
Oswald hung out in New Orleans in 1963 with CIA agent Clay Shaw (the only person ever charged with conspiring to kill JFK), Guy Banister (an ex-FBI agent and naval intelligence officer who was a rabid anti-communist and founder of the “Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean”), and professional pilot David Ferrie (who flew for both the CIA and the Mafia).
Clay Shaw At His Trial For The JFK Assassination
When Oswald requested a visa on September 17, 1963, at the Mexican embassy in New Orleans, the visa that preceded his one in numerical order belonged to William Gaudet, a “former” CIA employee.
Many publications and articles written by renowned academics or trustworthy researchers opine that Oswald was either a CIA operative or a contract agent. Oswald’s numerous and unique encounters with CIA agents and activities are examined in depth in Melanson’s Spy Saga, concluding that Oswald was a “U.S. intelligence agent-provocateur.”
In addition to proving that Oswald had to be a member of the US intelligence community, Melanson’s book makes a compelling case that “Oswald’s linkages to CIA-related individuals, initiatives, and situations look significantly stronger than do those to any other U.S. intelligence organization.”
Oswald and the CIA (1995; updated 2008), written by university professor and former military intelligence officer John Newman, is another essential book. It offers substantial evidence indicating that the CIA had a great operational interest in Oswald before the killing.
Oswald’s unexplained journey to Mexico City only weeks before the murder “may have had some relation to the CIA,” according to Newman.
Jefferson Morley describes the CIA’s intensive surveillance and tracking of Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions in his work Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden Past of the Central Intelligence Agency and several other publications.
Morley’s considerable investigation has led him to conclude that “it is no longer inconceivable to think that senior CIA counterintelligence officers were managing a carefully controlled operation involving Oswald in the weeks before the killing.”
According to Morley, the CIA may have had a relationship with Oswald that it was attempting to protect. He wrote of a cable dispatched from the CIA’s headquarters to the CIA’s Mexico City office on October 10, 1963. It is necessary to understand that this was barely six weeks before the assassination. The line falsely withheld requested information about Oswald and claimed absurdly that Oswald was “maturing.”
Many Files Have Since Released That Say Oswald Was Framed
The line, which Morley refers to as showing “a considerable CIA interest in Oswald,” had arrived from the special affairs staff of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret operations department and was signed by four counterintelligence or clandestine operations personnel. Morley had learned that on the same day before the cable was sent, “six top CIA personnel in the Counterintelligence Staff,” whose “main job was managing covert activities,” spoke about Oswald.
Morley credibly asserts that “Oswald was part of a secret [CIA] operation” because “six senior operations officials” were intrigued by the purportedly “lowly, sad… ex-Marine.”
Oswald may have been engaged in CIA operations, but neither Newman nor Morley have been able to determine that Oswald took part in any of them or was even aware of them.
From the CIA Themselves
An extraordinary breach of the intelligence community’s code of silence occurred in 1978 when a former CIA finance officer testified before the House Assassinations Committee that he thought Lee Harvey Oswald had always been a “regular employee” of the intelligence agency and that he believed that Oswald was being paid “a full-time wage for the covert data gathering and other CIA authorized operational work.”
Additionally, he said in his testimony that a different agency employee had informed him that CIA funds had been used for “the Oswald project or for Oswald.” The Assassinations Committee determined not to trust his evidence in light of disagreement from other Agency workers it had questioned.
Another US President Shot dead
It seems unlikely that any CIA documents proving that Oswald worked for the organization would still exist or, if they do, would ever be made public.
Therefore, it is probable but unconfirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald ever worked for the CIA, and it is probably impossible to provide convincing evidence either way. But one can certainly use their brain and connect the dots successfully to come to the inevitable conclusion.
The Oswald-was-the-lone-assassin thesis cannot hold up if Oswald did work for the CIA. Justyn Dillingham observes that the hypothesis is predicated “on the premise that Oswald was a dissatisfied loner.” Hence, Dillingham argues that evidence implicating “Oswald as any form of an intelligence operative” would “irreparably destroy” the single-assassin idea.
In the end, despite the number of assassins, the fact remains that the POTUS was taken down in broad daylight while surrounded by the CIA. Rest in Peace, John.
Feeling inspired to read more? Well, how about The Khamar Daban Incident: Horror On The Mountain Slopes Of Soviet Russia or perhaps, The Bizarre Disappearance Of Dennis Martin? Happy reading!
