CIA's Link to Lee Harvey Oswald Becoming Clearer With New Docs

A House Oversight Committee task force has uncovered new documents that dispute the official CIA narrative that the agency had little to no knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

The federal government's chief foreign intelligence agency has claimed for more than 60 years that it was not aware of or involved in the plot to murder the nation's 35th president, but the new documents raise additional questions about the CIA's transparency and veracity, according to The Washington Post.

According to the documents, in 1963, George Joannides, a Miami-based CIA agent, was helping to finance and oversee a group of Cuban students who were opposed to the rise of Fidel Castro. Despite the CIA's prohibition on domestic espionage, Joannides' clandestine assignment was to handle anti-Castro propaganda and break up pro-Castro groups.

A CIA-supported group called DRE was aware of Oswald as he promoted a pro-Castro policy for the United States, having clashed with him physically three months before Kennedy's assassination. The Post reported that a DRE member said Oswald offered to help the group, potentially by working as a mole within his own group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was pro-Castro.

In response to President Donald Trump's executive orders that directed government agencies to release assassination files, the House Oversight Committee created a task force on federal secrets.

Following the task force's spring hearings on the Kennedy assassination, Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., reportedly led a push for the CIA to comb through its archives, which yielded new details about Joannides, who had previously been identified as Howard — his alias.

DRE members in Miami had kept the CIA contact known as Howard in the loop on their activities, but the agency had told the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1978 that there was no Howard. The Post reported that the CIA told the Assassination Records Review Board in 1998 that it did not have any records related to Howard and it was possible that the name was "nothing more than a routing indicator."

Earlier this month, documents from Joannides' CIA personnel file were released, which showed he obtained a false driver's license in Washington, D.C., under the name "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 told the Post in an email.

For his overseeing of the Cuban group and also for his role as liaison to the House assassinations committee, the CIA gave Joannides a career commendation medal in 1981, according to the documents. The commendation reportedly listed his assignment in Miami in 1962 as "deputy chief of the psychological warfare branch," and noted he "did particularly well with the handling of exile student and teacher groups."

"It's a breakthrough, and there's more to come," Jefferson Morley, longtime JFK researcher and former Post reporter, told the outlet. "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."

According to the Post, there is no indication in any of the newly released documents that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's murder. In 1964, the Warren Commission declared that the assassination was the work of Oswald alone and the House launched a select committee in 1976 to investigate both Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassinations. The panel concluded that Oswald was part of a "probable conspiracy," but the other members could not be determined.

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