CIA ‘tacitly’ admits agent had contact with Oswald before JFK assassination: report

A new report revealed the CIA’s relation to Lee Harvey Oswald prior to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination amid federal government plans for a false-flag operation to justify attacking Cuba.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House brought with it aims to fulfill a promise to release all of the files pertaining to the assassination of America’s 35th president. While a congressional committee had been given six months to work through documents marked for declassification, the latest disclosure from the CIA revealed a memo connecting one of its own agents to Oswald before Kennedy was shot.

Saturday, Axios White House reporter Marc Caputo shared his report and detailed, “For the first time since JFK’s assassination nearly 62 years ago,  the CIA tacitly admitted Thursday that an agent specializing in psychological warfare, George Joannides, ran an operation that came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before the killing.”

Highlighted in the documents, a memo from the CIA dated Jan. 17, 1963, showed Joannides, deputy chief of the CIA’s Miami, Florida branch, had an alias as Howard Mark Gebler under which he’d made contact with activists from the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) opposing Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

The agency had long denied association with the group that had published the pro-Castro position of Oswald after Kennedy’s assassination when in fact Joannides, whose responsibilities included overseeing “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare,” had been covertly funding the DRE.

“The cover story for Joannides is officially dead. This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald,” said journalist and author Jefferson Morely.

Further details in the report indicated that on Aug. 21, 1963, less than two weeks after DRE members had been in a scuffle with Oswald in New Orleans, he participated in a televised debate with DRE activists, establishing a public record of his position as a communist.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon had been planning a false-flag attack in America under the title Operation Northwoods to blame Cuba to justify the launch of an attack.

Continuing the apparent coverup, the CIA later named Joannides as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations without disclosing his involvement with the Cuban Student Directorate

Chief counsel Robert Blakely testified in 2014, “Joannides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE,” having asked the agent about “Howard,” “but that he would keep looking.”

Earlier this year, Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R), chair of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, had shared testimony from Morley who said, “We know now that [CIA] Richard Helms, James Angleton and George Joannides were responsible for, or complicit in, the death of the president, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”

He went on to recommend the release of the personnel file of Joannides and for a public statement from the CIA that answered the question, “Why did these three men lie to JFK investigators?” as Luna herself asserted Joannides was “1,000 percent” involved in a CIA coverup.

“We know now that [CIA] Richard Helms, James Angleton and George Joannides were complicit in the death of the president, either by criminal negligence or covert action…

Why did these three men lie to JFK investigators?”

Explosive statement by @JeffersonMorley suggesting 3 CIA… pic.twitter.com/vC5jvQ20Km

— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) April 2, 2025