Researchers looking into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy say they have found proof that the CIA was working with Lee Harvey Oswald months before he killed the 35th US president.
At a Tuesday news conference, Jefferson Morley, a journalist and expert on the JFK assassination, told reporters that he and the Mary Ferrell Foundation obtained documents that will shed new light on the CIA’s relationship with Oswald. The documents relate to a still-classified operation and suggest Oswald was being used for intelligence purposes in the weeks before Kennedy was killed.
"The CIA knew far more about the lone gunman than they are admitting even today. So this story deserves the closest possible scrutiny," Morley said.
The document is one of several the foundation and Morley were able to obtain through a lawsuit filed in October. It will precede a larger collection of documents set to be released by the National Archives later this month. The documents were ordered released by US President Joe Biden in a 2021 memo.
The documents do not prove the CIA was involved in the 1963 assassination, but it does show they knew more about Oswald than they let on, and directly conflicts with statements the CIA has given to the public and lawmakers.
It was already known that the CIA was involved with Oswald thanks to documents related to the assassination that were released in 2017 and 2021.
The documents do show Oswald was working with the CIA in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. In a 1975 deposition, CIA Director Richard Helms claimed Oswald was “never used by the CIA,” and that the agency was unable to find any “evidence that Oswald had any connection with the CIA.”
Even today, the government maintains that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy and denies that he had any connection with the CIA. It also denied connections with communist governments or organized crimes, two other entities pointed to as potential collaborators by Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.
Morley says he believes the CIA is still hiding 44 documents in deceased FBI agent George Joannides’ personal file that will shed more light on Oswald’s connections to the federal government. Previous releases show that Joannides directed and funded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil or Student Revolutionary Directorate, a group of Cuban communist revolutionaries that Oswald was in contact with prior to the assassination.
“This body of records has profound implications for the official story of the assassination. Is the undisclosed Oswald operation evidence of CIA complicity in JFK assassination? Is it evidence of incompetence and understanding the threat Oswald posed to the president?” Morley asked at the press conference. “Only full disclosure on December 15 can resolve this question.”