Did the CIA Kill JFK? Concealment, the HSCA, and 2025 Releases

Did the CIA kill JFK? No document released in more than sixty years of investigations and declassifications has established that the Central Intelligence Agency organized or carried out the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Every official body that examined the question — the Warren Commission, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations — declined to find that the CIA as an institution was involved.¹ What has kept the theory alive is not direct evidence of agency involvement in the killing. It is the documented, repeated pattern of the CIA hiding relevant information from every one of those investigations.

What the Official Investigations Concluded

The 1964 Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Fifteen years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reached a different conclusion: Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” a finding it based largely on acoustic evidence that it said showed a “high probability that two gunmen fired at President Kennedy.”² The HSCA also called the original Warren Commission and FBI investigations “seriously flawed.”³

The same committee that found a probable conspiracy explicitly stated the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service “were not involved in the assassination.” It also cleared the Soviet government, the Cuban government, anti-Castro Cuban groups, and organized crime as organizations, while noting it could not rule out individual members of anti-Castro or organized crime circles. The committee acknowledged it was “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.”³

The acoustic evidence itself has been undermined. A 1982 National Research Council panel concluded the sounds the HSCA identified as a fourth gunshot were recorded roughly a minute after the shooting. A 2005 study reaffirmed that finding.⁴ Norman Ramsey, who chaired the 1982 panel, said in a 2003 interview that later work vindicated the original conclusion.⁵ The physical case for a second shooter, in other words, has weakened over time even as the HSCA’s headline finding remains on the books.

What the CIA Concealed

The evidence that has fueled suspicion of the CIA is not evidence of shooting. It is evidence of hiding. The concealment spans every major investigation.

Castro Assassination Plots Kept From the Warren Commission

The Church Committee found in 1975-76 that neither the CIA nor the FBI told the Warren Commission the agency had been actively plotting to kill Fidel Castro, sometimes in partnership with organized crime figures.⁶ The Church Committee called these plots “highly relevant,” because they raised the obvious question of whether Kennedy’s murder was Cuban retaliation. A 1967 internal CIA Inspector General report later documented plots involving poisoned cigars, an LSD aerosol spray, a contaminated diving suit, and mob-recruited hit men.⁷

CIA Director John McCone was later found by the Church Committee to have deliberately kept what it called “incendiary and diversionary issues” off the Warren Commission’s agenda.⁸ Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs and who then sat as a Warren commissioner, knew about the early plots involving underworld figures and did not tell his fellow commissioners.⁶ The CIA’s own historian later described the pattern as a “benign cover-up” meant to keep the Commission on Oswald and away from covert operations that might “circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy theories.”

Oswald in Mexico City

In September and October 1963, Oswald visited Mexico City and contacted the Soviet embassy and Cuban consulate seeking visas. CIA intercepts caught someone impersonating him in phone calls and linked him to Valery Kostikov, a known KGB officer.⁹

When the Mexico City station cabled headquarters about Oswald, headquarters replied that it had no recent information on him. Internal documents later showed that several of the agency employees who signed off on that claim had in fact just read recent FBI reports on Oswald. After the assassination, the CIA said its tape recordings of the intercepted calls had been erased before Kennedy was shot. Depositions and documents later contradicted that timeline. The FBI provided cover for the erasure account, though Director J. Edgar Hoover later expressed fury at the CIA’s “double dealing” over the Mexico City trip.⁹ More than ten feet of 16-millimeter surveillance film from a camera trained on the Cuban consulate during Oswald’s visit was reported “disappeared.” A known CIA contact, William Gaudet, was documented standing directly in front of Oswald in line as Oswald applied for a Mexican travel visa on September 17, 1963.⁸

George Joannides and the HSCA

The single most striking example of obstruction involves George Joannides. In 1963, Joannides was a CIA officer running psychological warfare operations out of Miami and serving as case officer for the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, an anti-Castro Cuban exile group that had direct contact with Oswald in the months before the assassination.¹⁰ Within 48 hours of the shooting, DRE members under Joannides’s direction published propaganda naming Oswald and Castro as “the presumed assassins.”¹¹

When the HSCA reopened the case in 1978, the CIA brought Joannides out of retirement to serve as its liaison to the committee. He concealed his prior work with the DRE from the investigators. The CIA later acknowledged in litigation that this liaison assignment was itself a “covert operation.”⁸ In 1979 he was praised internally as “the perfect man” for handling the committee. In 1981 he received the Career Intelligence Medal.¹¹

The CIA repeatedly told both the HSCA and the Assassination Records Review Board that no officer had been assigned to work with the DRE in 1963. It labeled the DRE’s operational files from December 1962 through April 1964 “missing.”⁸ Judge John Tunheim, who led the ARRB, testified in 2025 that the CIA “deliberately misled” the Board about the Joannides file, presenting it as a routine personnel record when it was not.¹²

David Atlee Phillips

David Atlee Phillips, head of CIA anti-Castro covert operations out of Mexico City, gave HSCA testimony that contradicted the documentary record about his whereabouts when Oswald was in Mexico City. Records showed he had been temporarily assigned to CIA headquarters and the Miami station during that period, not absent from Mexico City as he initially claimed. Researchers found that most of the sources for stories linking Oswald to Castro or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the immediate aftermath of the assassination were agents or assets Phillips had personally handled.⁸

Why the Concealment Matters: The Castro Context

The concealment matters because of what the CIA was doing in 1963. Under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the agency ran an aggressive covert campaign against Castro’s government. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed in April 1961, and Kennedy fired Dulles.¹³ The administration then launched Operation Mongoose, a sabotage and destabilization program that contemplated killing Castro.¹⁴

The AMLASH operation, involving Cuban military officer Rolando Cubela, was active through the fall of 1963. On November 22, 1963, at the very hour Kennedy was shot in Dallas, a CIA officer was handing Cubela a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle containing poison, meant for use against Castro.¹⁵ A U.S. government committee had acknowledged in September 1963 a “strong likelihood” that Castro would retaliate for these operations.⁶ Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had overseen the secret war against Castro, privately feared exactly that.¹³ Had the Warren Commission known any of this, it would have been forced to investigate whether the shooting was retaliation. It did not know.

The CIA’s Own Position

The CIA has categorically denied any role in the assassination. Its 2001 in-house retrospective, “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” traces the theory to stories planted in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera in the 1960s and describes it as the product of Soviet-bloc influence operations.¹ The agency also points to the findings of every official investigation that examined and rejected institutional CIA involvement.

The 2025 Releases and Where Things Stand

The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required all assassination-related records to be made public within 25 years, but successive administrations used national security certifications to delay full release. On January 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14176 directing “full and complete release” of the remaining records and declaring continued withholding “not consistent with the public interest.”¹⁶ A March 17, 2025 directive followed, and the National Archives released tens of thousands of pages in tranches through early 2026.¹⁷

Historians who reviewed the releases said they added significant detail about Cold War intelligence operations and pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald but did not point to a conspiracy. Author Philip Shenon said the documents do not reveal a second gunman and suggested the government’s secrecy more likely hid “incompetence and laziness” than a plot. Columbia University professor Timothy Naftali called the releases a “boon to historians of the Cold War.”¹⁸

The most consequential single release was the full personnel file of George Joannides, obtained by the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. In July 2025, Luna said the file confirmed the CIA had “actively concealed its involvement and knowledge regarding JFK’s assassination for more than six decades” and stated: “We just learned definitively that the CIA has been lying for 62 years about the assassination of an American President.”¹⁰ That is Luna’s characterization. The released files established Joannides’s role and his concealment of CIA ties to Oswald-connected groups; they did not establish CIA participation in the shooting itself.

Congressional hearings in 2025 collected further testimony. Dan Hardway, a former HSCA staffer, said the CIA “stonewalled” the Church Committee, was not forthcoming with the Rockefeller Commission, and “misled and slow-walked” the ARRB.¹² Journalist Jefferson Morley, who spent 15 years litigating a FOIA lawsuit for the Joannides records, testified that three senior CIA officers are “known to have lied under oath” about their knowledge of Oswald: James Angleton, Richard Helms, and Joannides.¹⁹

Cover-Up or Guilt?

The evidence that the CIA concealed relevant information from investigators is extensive and largely undisputed. The agency hid its plots against Castro, misrepresented what it knew about Oswald, lost or destroyed surveillance materials, sent an officer connected to Oswald-linked operations to serve as its liaison to the very committee investigating the killing, and fought in court for decades to keep related records secret. A 2013 CIA internal report acknowledged that the Johnson administration and the agency shared an interest in suppressing information about covert operations to avoid the implication that those operations may have provoked the assassination.¹³

Whether that pattern reflects institutional guilt or institutional embarrassment is the question that remains open. The Church Committee drew the line in 1976: its findings “do not lead to a conclusion that the CIA conspired to assassinate President Kennedy,” but the evidence “impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions” and provided information to investigators.⁶ After more than sixty years of secrecy and incremental disclosure, no released document has shown that the CIA organized or directed the killing of the president. The agency’s own conduct is what has made the answer impossible to close.

1
CIA. The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination
2
National Archives. Summary of Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations
3
National Archives. Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations – Part 1C
4
PubMed. Synchronization of the Acoustic Evidence in the Assassination of President Kennedy
5
PBS. Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald – Cases For and Against
6
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy – Performance of the Intelligence Agencies
7
National Security Archive. CIA Inspector General Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
8
House Oversight Committee. Hardway Written Testimony
9
PBS. Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City
10
U.S. House of Representatives. Declassification Task Force Secures George Joannides CIA File
11
Just Security. JFK Records Suit Tests CIA Secrecy on Assassination
12
House Oversight Committee. Task Force Examines Newly Released JFK Files
13
Politico. What the CIA Hid From the Warren Commission
14
JFK Library. The Bay of Pigs
15
Office of the Historian. Foreign Relations of the United States – Document 315
16
White House. Fact Sheet on Declassification of JFK, RFK, and MLK Assassination Files
17
National Archives. JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Release
18
Associated Press. Newly Released JFK Assassination Files Reveal More About CIA but Don’t Yet Point to Conspiracies
19
U.S. Congress. Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets Hearing