A shadowy CIA operative specializing in psychological warfare interacted with Lee Harvey Oswald ahead of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — and then ran interference against congressional investigators probing whether the US spy agency was connected to the killing, newly disclosed documents show.
CIA officer George Joannides assumed the alias “Howard Gleber” in January 1963, and led an American effort to infiltrate anti-communist Cuban student groups in the year leading up to JFK’s killing that November, according to government documents released Thursday and reviewed by Axios.
Oswald, 23 at the time, got into a fight with members of one of those student groups — the DRE, an organization vehemently-opposed to dictator Fidel Castro’s rule over Cuba — while he was handing out pro-communist leaflets in New Orleans nearly four months before the JFK assassination in Texas.
That fight publicly exposed Oswald as a Castro-sympathizer — with news outlets covering a hearing that followed, and the soon-to-be killer later debating DRE members on a local television broadcast, according to Axios.
A year before that exposure, the Pentagon was looking for excuses to attack Cuba — including plotting a false flag plan known as Operation Northwoods, which drew-up a fake assault on the US that would be blamed on the communist nation.
Joannides was in charge of “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare” at a Miami CIA office that funded the DRE when it encountered Oswald, and the name of a shadowy operative named “Howard” who worked with the group has circulated in JFK assassination conspiracy theories and investigations for decades.
But until Thursday’s disclosure, the CIA has always maintained “Howard” was not one of theirs — and Joannides himself even denied it point-blank until the day he died in 1990 after earning a Career Intelligence Medal.
Joannides was assigned to be the CIA’s liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations as it probed the president’s murder in 1976, and he openly lied about the identity of “Howard” when questioned.
“Joannides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE, but that he would keep looking,” the House Committees chief counsel Robert Blakely testified in 2014, according to Axios.
And a former investigator with the committee, Dan Hardway, testified in June that Joannides was behind a “covert operation” to throw Congress off the CIA’s trail.
“The cover story for Joannides is officially dead,” author and JFK assassination’ expert Jefferson Morley told Axios. “This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Thursday’s release is just the latest trove of information to emerge as the government works through a mandated disclosure of its files related to JFK’s killing.
The 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act decreed that all files would be released by 2017, but by 2018 there were still tens of thousands of documents withheld. President Biden released more in 2022, and in March President Trump released another trove.
Previous releases have indicated the CIA knew more about Oswald than they told the public after the shooting, with documents disclosed in March showing “three top CIA officials lied” to investigators about their knowledge of the assassin beforehand.
The files on Joannides don’t indicate why the CIA lied about his involvement with the DRE.
“[The CIA] has fully complied and provided all documents — without redactions — related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy to NARA consistent with President Trump’s direction in an unprecedented act of transparency by the agency,” a spokesperson for the agency told Axios.
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