CIA Acknowledges Ties to Operative Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, Shaking Foundations of Official JFK Assassination Narrative

By: Fern Sidman

In a bombshell revelation long buried under layers of deception and denial, the Central Intelligence Agency has, for the first time, tacitly acknowledged that one of its officers specializing in psychological warfare — George Joannides — ran an operation that came into direct contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

As Axios.com reported on Saturday in its sweeping coverage of the newly released documents, this admission — concealed within a batch of 40 records pertaining to Joannides — confirms what skeptics of the Warren Commission have argued for decades: the CIA actively lied to the American public, to multiple congressional investigations, and to the Kennedy family itself about Joannides’ role in the events leading up to and following the assassination.

“This is a big deal,” Jefferson Morley, one of the nation’s foremost researchers on the Kennedy assassination, told Axios.com. “The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The documents, released under the long-delayed provisions of the JFK Records Act of 1992, include a classified CIA memo dated January 17, 1963. The memo reveals that Joannides was instructed to operate under the alias “Howard Gebler,” complete with a fake driver’s license — a detail the agency had denied for decades. “Howard” was, according to multiple sources, the officer of record responsible for managing the anti-Castro exile group known as the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE).

That group, which received covert CIA funding and direction under Joannides’ oversight, played a critical role in broadcasting Oswald’s pro-Castro affiliations to the American public after the assassination. According to the information provided in the Axios.com report, the DRE’s rapid post-assassination identification of Oswald as a communist sympathizer helped frame the national narrative within hours — if not minutes — of Kennedy’s death.

The CIA had long denied any institutional link to the DRE, asserting to the Warren Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that the Directorate acted independently. The Joannides documents now prove otherwise.

In August 1963, just over three months before Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald was involved in two highly publicized confrontations with DRE operatives in New Orleans. On August 9, four members of the group confronted Oswald as he handed out “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” pamphlets — an altercation that led to his arrest and a televised court appearance.

On August 21, Oswald debated DRE representatives on local television, further amplifying his profile as a radical communist. The spectacle was not incidental. As the Axios.com report noted, Joannides’ role in directing the DRE during this period suggests that the CIA was fully aware of Oswald’s activities — and, at a minimum, facilitated the public spotlight that would later cast Oswald as a Castro-aligned assassin.

Perhaps more disturbing than Joannides’ pre-assassination ties to Oswald are his actions in the years that followed. In a staggering breach of ethical transparency, Joannides was appointed by the CIA as its liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 — a committee charged with investigating Kennedy’s murder and the possible existence of a broader conspiracy.

According to the information contained in the Axios.com report, Joannides never disclosed his own direct involvement with the DRE to the committee, nor his prior contacts with Oswald. Instead, he stonewalled investigators, slow-walked document releases, and deflected inquiries about his own past — all while masquerading as a disinterested bureaucrat.

In 2014, HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey testified that he asked Joannides directly about “Howard” and the CIA’s relationship with the DRE. Joannides lied. “He assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE,” Blakey said. Dan Hardway, a former committee investigator, more recently testified that Joannides was running a “covert operation to actively sabotage the investigation.”

Despite this, in 1981, Joannides was awarded the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal. He died in 1990 without ever having faced public scrutiny.

In a carefully worded statement to Axios.com, a CIA spokesperson insisted the agency had “fully complied and provided all documents — without redactions — related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy to NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] consistent with President Trump’s direction in an unprecedented act of transparency.”

Yet, as the Axios.com report has noted, the timing and content of the release raise further questions. Why was the agency’s deception allowed to persist for so long — across multiple presidential administrations and oversight bodies? Why did it take an executive order from President Trump to force these documents into daylight? And why, even now, has the CIA not offered a full accounting of Joannides’ actions?

“It’s vintage CIA,” said author Gerald Posner, a lone-gunman theorist interviewed by Axios.com. “They never provide transparency. They don’t tell the truth. They obscure. They obfuscate. And when the documents come out, they look bad.”

Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who is currently leading a House oversight committee investigating the CIA’s conduct, was blunt in her assessment: “Joannides was 1,000 percent involved in a CIA cover-up.” She joins Morley and others in demanding further declassification and testimony under oath from surviving agency officials.

President Trump’s decision to enforce the JFK Records Act — long ignored by his predecessors — has been credited with prying loose this new tranche of documents. The report at Axios.com emphasized the role of Trump-era intelligence leaders like former CIA Director John Ratcliffe and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in breaking the logjam.

Still, experts agree that we are far from closure. The new documents do not definitively resolve whether Oswald acted alone, nor do they implicate Joannides directly in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. What they do confirm, however, is that the CIA consistently lied to the American people, to elected representatives, and to the historical record.

More than six decades after that fateful day in Dealey Plaza, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a wound that refuses to heal. With every drip of new information — every declassified memo, every contradiction in the official narrative — confidence in the story Americans were told in 1964 erodes further.