Did a CIA Counterintelligence Clique Kill JFK? The Latest Files Offer Clues

According to some researchers, the latest declassifications confirm the complicity of a CIA cabal in engineering President Kennedy’s death.

The death of a President. The birth of a thousand theories. For over six decades, the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald, a disaffected former Marine with Soviet sympathies could change the course of history by killing U.S. President John F. Kennedy with three rifle shots from a Texas book depository has been too banal to accept. The 888-page report presented by the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, and the subsequent killing of Oswald by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, concluded that Oswald and Ruby had acted alone in their respective crimes. Since then, the report has been met by near-universal incredulity.

So, earlier this week, when the Trump administration declassified 2,182 PDF documents comprising about 63,400 pages pertaining to JFK’s assassination, the million-dollar question was if the a ‘smoking gun’ was found in these records. Was there indeed a second shooter besides Oswald who fired at Kennedy from the infamous grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza?

After all, eyewitnesses at the scene did report hearing shots from multiple directions, and acoustic analyses of police recordings have suggested the possibility of a second gunman.

That said, no declassification would ever give a graphic detail of any such plot. The details will have to be decoded by beaver-like intelligence experts. Jefferson Morley, a former journalist for The Washington Post and one of the most persistent and meticulous investigators of the Kennedy assassination, is emphatic that the latest declassifications move us closer than ever to understanding what really happened on that fateful day in Dallas.

Morley, whose Substack JFK Facts has a dedicated following, has slammed so-called experts who claimed the latest declassifications were a ‘nothing burger.’ According to him, the latest document release is the most significant since the 1990s, offering the strongest evidence yet that Oswald was monitored and manipulated by the CIA, especially the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.

Among the most striking revelations is evidence suggesting that Oswald was considered for recruitment as a CIA source in 1959. Angleton not only monitored Oswald’s movements for a considerable period but that a 180-page dossier on him was lying on his desk just a week before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. His life, his contacts, were rigorously monitored and Oswald was assigned at least six different CIA codenames. That Oswald, a man who had defected to the Soviet Union and contacted a known KGB official, was never deemed a security threat by Angleton and other top CIA officials raises serious questions. Was this sheer incompetence on Angleton’s part, or was Oswald part of a larger intelligence operation run by Angleton?

Recall that immediately after his arrest following the assassination, Oswald had repeatedly denied killing President Kennedy, famously declaring, “I’m just a patsy.” This statement has since become a cornerstone of conspiracy theories suggesting he was ‘set up’ by powerful forces.

One of the most puzzling episodes in the lead-up to the Kennedy assassination is Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in late September and early October 1963. According to CIA surveillance records, Oswald visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies, seeking a visa to defect to Cuba. But the details of this trip are riddled with inconsistencies. Multiple accounts suggest that different ‘Oswalds’ presented themselves at the embassies. The CIA’s own reports describe a man who was taller, stockier and older than the real Oswald. A phone call recording from the Soviet embassy features a man speaking broken Russian, whereas Oswald, having lived in the Soviet Union for over two years, was known to be fluent.

What these latest disclosures confirm is that the CIA knew far more about Oswald than it admitted to the Warren Commission. Oswald, after all, had been a Marine radar operator at an airbase used for U-2 spy missions, had defected to the Soviet Union, then returned to the U.S. under circumstances that should have invited scrutiny.

Another striking detail in these released documents is the ‘Underhill Memo’ dated June 1967. It concerns Gary Underhill, a U.S. Army intelligence officer and former CIA asset who, in the wake of the assassination, told associates that a small clique within the Agency was responsible. Underhill fled Washington in a state of great agitation the day after Kennedy was killed. Six months later, he was found dead.

For long, theories of a sinister conspiracy involving rogue CIA operators, anti-Castro Cubans, the military-industrial complex and the Mob (even Lyndon B. Johnson’s complicity) have flourished and thrived. Portrayals of the JFK assassination in films and literature have reinforced the public scepticism surrounding the ‘lone-nut’ theory.

In fact, the Warren Commission report itself is riddled with contradictions, noting that Oswald as a Marine had barely qualified as a marksman, with a score just above the failing threshold. His rifle - a cheap, unreliable Mannlicher-Carcano - was ill-suited for precision shooting, with misaligned sights and a left-handed scope for a right-handed shooter – a fact that ought to disprove outright his ‘expert’ shooting of President Kennedy.

Films like the low-key but fascinating Executive Action (1973), starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, and Oliver Stone’s bravura JFK (1991) have firmly embedded the idea in public imagination that JFK was the victim of a high-level plot. Stone’s film, in particular, was so controversial and influential that it directly led to the passage of the 1992 JFK Records Act, which mandated the declassification of assassination-related documents.

Stone’s JFK, a postmodern cinematic fever dream that blended several of the facts mentioned above with speculation and gossip, still shapes popular discourse. A key source work for the film was former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins. In JFK, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, is obsessed with a grand conspiracy to kill Kennedy that leads him to challenge the Warren Commission’s conclusions, particularly the ‘magic bullet’ theory which implausibly posited that a single projectile struck both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, causing multiple wounds. To Garrison and his supporters, the notion that one bullet could take such a convoluted trajectory was absurd, reinforcing suspicions of multiple shooters. Stone’s gripping film distils JFK conspiracy lore, depicting the CIA as orchestrating Kennedy’s murder to thwart his détente with the Soviets or as fallout from the botched ‘Operation Mongoose’ against Castro.

Even though many picked holes in JFK’s version of events, the film brilliantly succeeded in evoking the atmosphere of paranoia and distrust between Kennedy and the CIA. The assassination has birthed an entire cottage industry of books ranging from the plausible to the absurd. Mark Lane, who wrote Rush to Judgment (the basis for Executive Action), proposed that Kennedy’s body was altered to falsify autopsy evidence. The Zapruder film, initially withheld from the public, became a Rorschach test for theorists dissecting every frame for inconsistencies.

The event has inspired some of the most compelling fiction of the past half-century. Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) weaves a paranoid, fragmented narrative that blurs history and fiction, portraying Oswald as both a pawn and an enigma in a larger, unknowable plot. Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) reinforces the idea of Oswald as a lonely, resentful drifter rather than a grand conspirator.

For once, latest declassifications may just end up proving the paranoids right - that the shadows were always hiding something after all.