CIA Officials Lied to Warren Commission About Kennedy Assassin
The dramatic release of over 60,000 pages of once-classified JFK assassination files earlier this month has pulled back the veil on long-buried secrets tightly guarded by the CIA.
The Trump administration explained that its decision to declassify the documents related to the 1963 President Kennedy assassination would bring transparency to an agency whose power and autonomy has come to rival that of a state within a state.
The unredacted documents offer a stunning expose of the CIA’s history of fomenting international coups, assassinations, regime changes and other forms of foreign intervention, from the Vatican to Latin America.
From phone-tapping to recruiting crime bosses to crafting stealthy poison plots, the files open a window on a little-known corner of Cold War espionage—at its most secretive and corrupt.
While revealing little new information about JFK’s killer—Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who defected to Russia— the files offer an eye-opening peek into a string of these covert CIA operations and how some of them are linked to the JFK assassination.
In a sense, the real story is not just about who shot JFK. It is about the amoral operations the Agency has been carrying out since the assassination — and even before that.
The same journalists and historians who mocked “conspiracy theories” about CIA meddling in the elections of one country after another are now blinking in disbelief at the declassified documents. Unreal. The CIA really subverted democracy in all these places? Seriously?
The CIA Connection to Oswald
It is now known that top CIA officers lied to the 1964 Warren Commission—a marathon report on the JFK assassination—when they repeatedly claimed the CIA knew almost nothing about Oswald prior to the assassination.
The truth is they had been monitoring Oswald for four years, going through his mail and counteracting his pro-Castro activism, the newly released documents attest.
Why did they lie? What were they hiding?
Those captivated by the saga are poring through the documents and tuning into this week’s hearings conducted by the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, in hopes of resolving these long-lingering tantalizing questions. [See Sidebar]
The JFK documents demonstrate that the Cuban exile community saw their mission to end the Castro government as a sacred duty. Their friends and relatives were being arrested and executed by Castro which galvanized the Cuban exiles to throw themselves behind the 1961 CIA-backed invasion.
These forces likely felt betrayed when JFK withheld military support at a dire moment during the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion operation aimed at toppling the Castro regime, an article in Vanity Fair notes.
That disaster resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Cuban exile soldiers and the capture of more than 1,100 Cuban exile rebels, historians say.
Then, later, after the Soviets moved nuclear bombs into Cuba leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, JFK wanted to cut off funding for further anti-Castro operations, in a bid to de-escalate tensions that threatened to spark a nuclear war.
Eventually, the article contends, President Kennedy “became a roadblock” to the implementation of plans by the CIA-backed Cuban exiles to topple Castro, and the Cuban activists began to view Kennedy with hostility.
In addition, elements within the CIA resented Kennedy for short circuiting the plan to overthrow the Castro regime—a mission into which they had poured enormous funding and resources to train and arm a paramilitary force of exiled Cubans.
The declassified documents portray an intelligence agency whose top agents in the Miami office continued to work outside normal channels with anti-Castro Cubans to remove Fidel Castro from power, despite the president’s order to halt those operations.
Somehow, as evidenced in the JFK archive, these CIA elements intersected with defector Lee Harvey Oswald around the summer of 1963.
The declassified records present a roster of top-secret CIA paramilitary agents, revealing which CIA officers and Cubans working for the agency were in contact with, and reporting on Oswald in the summer of 1963.
Did the CIA ignore what it knew about Oswald’s intentions and warn no one? Did the CIA know what the Cuban exiles might be up to and stand by silently? Or was there more to it?
Overstepping Its Core Mission
Historians and academics who have made preliminary assessments of the JFK files note that they collectively paint a picture of CIA spy operations as having mushroomed in the 1960’s until they reached global dimensions.
At some point in the 1960s or even earlier, the agency overstepped its core mission of intelligence gathering and began intervening in foreign affairs.
The declassified files reveal that this “mission creep” resulted in almost half of the U.S. embassy staff across the world in 1961—about 3,700 people—consisting of CIA agents.
These were undercover CIA spies and intelligence agents engaged in espionage, telephone tapping, deposing dictators and other stealth operations, all the while posing as State Department employees carrying out peaceful diplomacy missions.
According to experts who have reviewed the documents, these covert missions included numerous assassination attempts.
“The documents provide a glimpse of how the CIA worked with foreign agents to assassinate heads of state, and also reveal what it is capable of doing now,” historian Peter Kornbluth elaborated in a media interview.
“The CIA, in its own investigation of some of the agency’s malfeasance, counts 16 serious assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, using explosive seashells, exploding cigars, sniper rifles and other methods,” he said.
The CIA’s exploits were often conducted without oversight by the State Department, with the intelligence agency planning and executing operations autonomously.
For example, a declassified report by the CIA’s inspector general disclosed the agency’s 1967 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo — including the names of all the CIA agents involved in the plot. The scheme was said to be carried out without the knowledge of the FBI, and only minimal knowledge of the president.
Other documents revealed CIA efforts to interfere in elections in Finland, Peru and Somalia—talk of which had previously been mocked as conspiracy theories.
There was also new information about CIA’s involvement in failed and successful coups in Brazil, Haiti and what is now Guyana.
Other revelations in the JFK files described clandestine operations so secretive, not even a whisper or rumor ever surfaced, until CIA records of these operations were declassified with heavy redactions in 1999—and now without redactions in March 2025.
CIA Weighed Biological Attacks Against Cuba
In an eye-opening discovery, the newly disclosed JFK files included a batch of never-before-seen documents related to Operation Mongoose, which the CIA launched soon after its 1961 “Bay of Pigs” invasion of mainland Cuba.
In a document titled, “Minutes of the Meeting of the Special Group on Mongoose 6 Sep 1962,” detailed plans are recorded about biological attacks against Cuba, then ruled by communist dictator Fidel Castro.
The plot aimed at destabilizing Cuba through sabotage, economic warfare, assassination attempts, covert paramilitary operations, and illegal false flags (operations orchestrated to appear as if committed by the opposition.)
Much has been written about Operation Mongoose but to see actual CIA records, without redactions, that expose the agency’s readiness to team up with mobsters to kill off enemy heads of state with lethal agents like poison pills, is astounding.
One entry to this effect, quoted in Vanity Fair, is an April 21, 1962 document that reads: “[CIA agent] Harvey passes the pills to ROSELLI [John Roselli, a Chicago mobster] in Florida. Roselli was to give the pills to Varona [a Cuban exile leader in Miami], who had a contact in Cuba with access to Castro’s restaurant.”
In short, the plan, which did not come to fruition, was to poison Castro.
Plot to Cause Mass Starvation
Another plot involved a much more ambitious scheme to cause starvation to the Cuban population by introducing “crop failure.”
Quoting from the declassified documents: “The group then turned to a discussion of agricultural sabotage. General Carter emphasized the extreme sensitivity of the proposed operation and the disastrous results that would flow from something going wrong, particularly if there were obvious attribution to the United States.”
Gen. Carter was worried somebody would find out about the crime of “agricultural sabotage,” a euphemism for causing mass starvation. But he reassured those in the room that “it would be possible to accomplish this devastation by “methods more subtle” than those indicated in the paper.
“He [Carter] mentioned specifically the possibility of introducing crop failure by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin,” the document reads.
A “Mr. Bundy” then offered additional encouragement, according to the minutes of the meeting. “[Bundy] remarkably said he had “no worries about any such sabotage, which could clearly be attributed” to somebody else, like “the locals,” i.e. the Cubans themselves.
Mr. Bundy cautioned that the CIA should avoid obvious things like chemical releases. That is, “unless they could be completely covered up.”
Strikingly, the minutes record no debate over the morality of forced starvation through secret biological warfare. It seems that those present were only worried about how it would look if their role in the evil scheme were exposed.
Another memo in CIA documents dump, this one dated 1973, discusses the same theme of sabotaging crops to cause mass hunger in Cuba and North Vietnam.
Paragraph four of the memo describes two operations, without clarifying whether the operations had only been planned or were actually carried out.
“One involved chemical warfare operations against the rice crops in both Cuba and North Vietnam,” the memo reads. “A second involved a paramilitary strike against the Chi-Com nuclear installation.”
Targeting food supplies which would have caused severe humanitarian fallout would have violated international law which requires nations to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
Even more shocking is the plan to deploy a military strike against these nation’s nuclear installations which would probably have unleashed a full-out global nuclear war.
JFK Alarmed at CIA Mission Creep
The failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 and the ruthless planning behind Operation Mongoose the same year convinced Kennedy that the CIA had vastly overstepped its authority and needed to be reorganized and greatly downsized, historians say.
JFK was vocal about his disapproval of the CIA’s “mission creep,” to the point where mutual animosity and distrust began to define the relationship between himself and the spy agency.
Kennedy’s intent to curtail the agency’s power and reach has long been seen as a possible motive for the CIA’s complicity in the assassination, if not for having orchestrated it outright.
Given the shocking, often illicit exploits of the spy agency revealed in the JFK files, the possibility that rogue elements in the CIA wanted JFK out of the picture no longer sounds like the stuff of kooky anti-CIA conspiracy theories.
Could the unprecedented spilling of secrets from the JFK assassination file be President Trump’s method of cushioning the nation for a radical restructuring of an agency that many believe went off the rails a long time ago?
Is it possible that the real goal of the disclosures isn’t to identify JFK’s killer, but to carry out, 6 decades later, JFK’s stated intention to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds?”
A declassified 1961 memo written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of Kennedy’s top aides, warned President Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, about the growing power of the CIA and the need to reorganize it.
Kennedy never acted on Schlesinger’s advice, heeding instead the counsel of other senior aides who urged him to leave the Agency intact with only minor tweaks.
He was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
To those convinced of CIA complicity, the explosive new documents—and Trump’s promised shake-up of the agency—signal the wheels of justice finally catching up after decades of rigid secrecy.
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The Lies They Told
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla, who leads the new task force charged with declassifying federal materials, began hearings on the JFK files this week.
A key witness at the hearing, journalist Jefferson Morley, after reviewing the latest documents released, now believes that there is sufficient evidence to conclude definitively that the CIA had a role in JFK’s murder.
“Three top CIA officers lied under oath about JFK’s assassination,” Morley testified at the hearing. “Such prevarication indicates guilty knowledge and legal culpability.”
“CIA Deputy director Richard Helms lied to the Warren Commission in May 1964 when he said, under oath, the CIA had only quote “minimal” knowledge of Oswald before JFK was killed,” the journalist stated.
“Yet, the record now shows that the FBI had sent 12 reports on Oswald to the CIA between 1960 and 1963.”
“At the time President Kennedy landed in Dallas on that fateful day of Nov. 22, a top CIA official had in his possession a 180-plus page dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald, the man about to gun down JFK,” Morley said.
He also accused CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton of having lied under oath, citing a January 1958 FBI memo that reported the Bureau had uncovered a secret operation of the CIA.
This was a massive “mail intercept” program run out of a New York post office facility, which opened, read, and copied the mail of thousands of Americans.
James Angleton ran this program for two decades, Morley told the hearing, citing a newly released document in the JFK File.
This illicit spying (which had not been approved the Congress, the courts or the president) was known deceptively as “Mail Coverage.”
The declassified memo shows that Angleton not only created the “Mail coverage” program and ran it from 1953 on. He himself ordered mail surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1959.
Yet, asked under oath by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978 if Oswald was ever the subject of any CIA project, Angleton replied “no.”
At that same hearing, undercover CIA agent George Joannides denied under questioning that he knew who ran a CIA covert operation named AMSPELL that had monitored Oswald, when declassified documents show he himself ran it.
The pattern of lying revealed by these top CIA officials points to the likelihood “that they themselves–Helms, Angleton, and Joannides—were responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action,” Morley summed up.
He urged the Task Force to ask Director Ratcliffe to provide a public statement answering the question: Why did these three top CIA officers lie to JFK investigators?
“The answers,” he emphasized, “will help fulfill the Task Force’s goal of ‘full and complete’ JFK disclosure.
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Deep State, Exposed
With the revelations gleaned about the CIA from a preliminary analysis of the JFK files, it’s no longer baffling why the CIA was a key player in the dead-end negotiations over an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire as Biden’s term was drawing to a close.
The ceasefire, as some may recall, was being brokered by CIA —not the State Department— which harbored its own agenda just as it has for decades.
Two days before Trump took office, the NY Times ran a headline that should have had readers scratching their heads: “US Spy Chief Took on Role of Negotiator in Gaza War.”
“As CIA Director, William Burns was deeply focused on China and Russia when the Middle East conflict plunged him back into his old life,” the NY Times article said.
Why was former CIA Director Burns doing the job of the State Department—which the Times refers to as his “old life”?
For some, the answer is simple: The State Department is doing diplomacy on the record. But the CIA is running world affairs behind the scenes. And sometimes even from center stage.
That, in a nutshell, is the deep state, exposed.
