WASHINGTON — President Trump’s release last month of “long-secret documents” on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy revealed that “three top CIA officials lied” to investigators about the agency’s awareness of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, according to dogged researchers who have studied the tragedy for decades.
Jefferson Morley — an independent journalist and author whose foundation runs the largest online database of JFK records — testified to members of the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets that the files made public March 18 show the spooks “fooled the Warren Commission.”
Among the documents were nine critical memos on James Jesus Angleton, longtime chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence department, who was one of the trio that obfuscated the agency’s actions before both the 1964 presidential commission and congressional investigators.
Morley, 66, noted that Angleton ran a vast mail interception program out of a New York post office — and then lied about having targeted Oswald as part of the program when questioned by the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Oswald’s letters were intercepted at Angleton’s direction beginning in November 1959, weeks after the future assassin had defected to the Soviet Union.
Richard Helms, a high-ranking CIA official at the time of the assassination who later rose to become agency director, also lied to the Warren Commission when he testified in May 1964 that the agency had “probably minimal” knowledge of Oswald before the assassination, according to Morley.
And George Joannides, a Miami-based undercover CIA officer when Kennedy was shot, claimed to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he had no knowledge of an agency program code-named AMSPELL, which funded a group of anti-Fidel Castro Cuban students who went public after the assassination with claims Oswald shot JFK out of loyalty to — or even at the behest of — the Communist dictator in Havana.
The new memos were “one of the most significant revelations to come out” of the March declassification, according to Morley, who added that remaining releases — particularly the personnel files of Joannides, who died in 1990 — may provide further clues.
“Three makes a pattern,” Morley said, “a pattern of malfeasance [and] of institutional misconduct.”
“The new JFK fact pattern leads to a new conclusion,” he added. “Helms, Angleton, and Joannides were responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”
Gerald Posner, author of the best-selling 1993 book “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” agreed with the assessment of the three CIA officials but disagreed with Morley’s conclusion.
“I have always contended that top CIA officials lied to the Warren Commission as part of a coverup of its own bureaucratic reputation,” Posner posted on X, before adding that “evidence” of a cover-up of any role in Kennedy’s death was “not there.”
“Lost in all of this is Oswald. Those who believe in a grand conspiracy prefer not to talk much about him,” Posner added. “That’s because the more one knows about Oswald, the more likely it is to understand how the assassination was for him simply a once-in-a-lifetime crime of opportunity.”
The House task force hearing also featured Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose 1991 film “JFK” gave conspiracy theories about the assassination fresh cultural purchase and led to the passage of the law under which Trump ordered the unsealing of all remaining records concerned with the killing.
“The Warren Commission of 1964, as it turned out, brought us to second base — with a lot of unknowns,” Stone said in his opening remarks. “And it all got crazier … and what happened that awful day wasn’t clear, as to who the heck did this, killed the president at high noon in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.”
The star power may have blinded Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who mistook the witness for Trump ally Roger Stone.
“Mr. Stone, you wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of, um, President Kennedy,” Boebert said. “Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?”
“No, I didn’t, if you look closely at the film,” Oliver Stone responded, “it accuses the president, Johnson, of being part of a complicit — a cover-up of the case.”
“I think you’re confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone,” Morley corrected. “It’s Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president.”
Roger Stone published “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ” in 2013.
Neither Morley nor Stone said that Oswald was the assassin, with the former calling him “an agent of influence who was manipulated by the CIA” and the latter pointing to purported evidentiary issues with Kennedy’s head wound from the bullet and the rifle that was recovered from the Texas School Book Depository.
“Let us reinvestigate the fingerprints of intelligence all over Lee Harvey Oswald — from 1959 to 1960, his violent death in 1963, and most importantly, this CIA, whose muddy footprints are all over this case,” Stone said.
“There are sincere concerns and discrepancies regarding the Warren Commission pushing forward a narrative without all the facts and according to testimony of various witness, omitting evidence,” added Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who chairs the task force. “I would also further argue that the handling of this investigation has largely contributed to the deep distrust the American people have with the federal government and various intelligence agencies.
“Now, with these newly declassified documents, we can confront the discrepancies — whether it’s inconsistencies in witness accounts, overlooked intelligence, or the troubling indications of interference that investigators are now bringing to light,” she said.
“This is not about rewriting history for the sake of sensation; it’s about honoring our duty to the truth and to the citizens we serve.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel, welcomed the calls for transparency but noted he had yet to see “direct evidence” — even after the recent release of the JFK documents — tying the CIA to Kennedy’s murder.
