The JFK Assassination “Smoking Gun” That Wasn’t
The evidence still shows that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, not with the CIA, says independent investigative journalist Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed
Serious questions remain around the question of who killed President John F. Kennedy. In February, Public published a podcast with investigative journalist Jefferson Morley, author of the critically acclaimed 2018 book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton. Since then, the Trump administration released evidence that a CIA agent named George Joannides was monitoring Kennedy’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Axios published a lengthy article by Marc Caputo on Friday, which quotes Morley. "The cover story for Joannides is officially dead," Morley told Caputo. "This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald."
Not so fast, says Gerald Posner, an American investigative journalist and author of another critically-acclaimed book, the 1993 Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. The evidence of CIA monitoring Oswald is hardly proof that the CIA killed Kennedy. We are delighted to publish Posner’s response to Morley and Caputo here.
This is an important debate, and Public is pleased to publish the best thinking on it, including from Morley, who says there are still more revelations to come. “Caputo’s article captures some of the main revelations in the Joannides file, but there is much, much more to the story.”
We grant our spying and intelligence services extraordinary powers, and they have abused them, repeatedly, for decades, starting with hiding information from the public and Congress, which is unconstitutional.
Indeed, as we were going to press, the Trump administration announced, essentially, that there is nothing to reveal or prosecute concerning the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, even though Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said in late April, “There are tens of thousands of videos, and it's all with little kids, so they have to go through every one,” and on May 7 said that “There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.”
It’s clear we still don’t have transparency on Epstein, the JFK assassination, Russiagate, Covid origins, the Hunter Biden laptop, UAPs, and much else.
As such, readers of Public can expect to hear more from us on this topic.
— Michael
The JFK Assassination “Smoking Gun” That Wasn’t
By Gerald Posner
A July 5 Axios headline made waves with the provocative claim: “CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination.”
That headline fed a familiar narrative. For decades, public opinion polls have shown that most Americans believe the CIA not only monitored Lee Harvey Oswald but may have played a direct role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I understand the skepticism. In 1993, on the 30th anniversary of JFK’s murder, I published Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, a national bestseller and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. In that book, I concluded, after exhaustive research, that Oswald acted alone. I also tackled many of the enduring mysteries surrounding the assassination, including those that skeptics claimed could never be convincingly explained.
To be sure, there are good reasons to doubt the official story — not just about the JFK assassination, but more broadly about government transparency.
I was in the fourth grade in San Francisco when Kennedy was killed. Since then, I lived through the lies about Vietnam, the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., the power grab of Watergate, the arms for Contra scandal, the fictions surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the web of deceit swirling around Covid. I understand the erosion of public trust.
And, as an investigative journalist who has written extensively about 9/11, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican’s finances, and the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, I not only know that real conspiracies do happen, I’ve helped to uncover them.
In fact, when it comes to the JFK assassination, I think there were plenty of conspiracies brewing against Kennedy. The list of those who wanted him dead is long. The mafia hated him because his brother, Bobby Kennedy, was breaking apart organized crime. Hardliners in the CIA feared that he would break up the agency. Anti-Castro Cuban exiles condemned JFK as a traitor for having failed to send air support for the 1961 Bay Of Pigs invasion. Castro wanted JFK dead because he knew that the Kennedy brothers were trying to kill him. Even the KGB was on a short list after Kennedy had humiliated Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And yet, years of research led me to a different conclusion: Oswald, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, Marxist, and self-styled revolutionary with a fractured sense of identity, acted on his own. He was ideologically driven, impulsive, and seeking a kind of historical immortality. In a dark twist, he beat the conspirators to it. Had he not pulled the trigger on November 22, 1963, someone else might have. But he did it alone—and not on behalf of the mafia, the CIA, Castro, or any other shadowy cabal.
This is, understandably, not satisfying to a generation raised and fed conspiracies. But it is true.
One of the enduring reasons conspiracy theories around JFK continue to thrive is the mishandling of the investigation by the very government charged with finding the truth. The Warren Commission—the blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to determine what happened—was heavily reliant on the FBI and CIA. Both agencies, we now know, lied to the Commission.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was eager to avoid scrutiny over the Bureau’s prior knowledge of Oswald. The FBI had maintained a file on Oswald since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959, yet failed to flag him as a threat. One Dallas-based FBI agent even destroyed a handwritten note Oswald had delivered to the field office prior to the assassination. Meanwhile, the CIA also concealed critical information from the Commission. One of the Commission’s own members, former CIA Director Allen Dulles—whom Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs debacle—was aware that the agency was withholding information about its collaboration with the mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same agency later misled Congress, hid financial arrangements, and obscured its role in multiple anti-Castro operations.
Layered atop this web of institutional deceit was the decision to seal millions of pages of investigative documents. Some, such as the autopsy materials, were restricted at the request of the Kennedy family, who feared they would become fodder for grotesque public fascination. But the majority were sealed at the insistence of the agencies that produced them. The Warren Commission also sealed millions of pages of documents. Even after Congress passed a law in 1992, in response to the historical inaccuracies in Oliver Stone’s JFK film, the politicians gave the government 25 years to turn over all the JFK files. When that date came in 2017, President Trump was in his first term, and he acceded to CIA requests to keep some files sealed. Biden did the same during his administration. It took until the second Trump administration for the government to finally release the last of the JFK files at the National Archives.
"They must be hiding something!" I hear that refrain constantly. On my Substack, Just the Facts, I’ve written extensively about what’s actually been withheld—and why.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the classified JFK records were not directly related to the assassination itself. Many were kept secret by the CIA because they contained incidental references to still-living intelligence assets from decades past. More often, though, the files were withheld because they revealed embarrassing details about failed or illicit operations—material that could tarnish the agency’s reputation rather than compromise national security.
Time and again, the CIA prioritized institutional self-preservation over transparency. In the JFK case, that instinct for secrecy—however bureaucratically rationalized—created fertile ground for conspiracy theories to thrive. The agency, along with other major intelligence bodies, lied, stonewalled, and obfuscated after the assassination. But crucially, not to conceal a role in the murder of a sitting president. Rather, their cover-ups were rooted in a misguided effort to protect the agency’s image.
That misplaced instinct has had lasting consequences.
Importantly, it’s not just the JFK files at the National Archives that have failed to support conspiracy allegations. Vast disclosures of classified material in recent decades—The Pentagon Papers, the Panama Papers, WikiLeaks, the Snowden files—have exposed extensive government misconduct and corporate malfeasance. Yet among the millions of leaked documents, there is not a single credible mention of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy.
The absence speaks volumes. Not because it proves a negative, but because after all this time, with all the investigative muscle brought to bear and all the secrets spilled, no evidence has emerged that substantiates the long-running theories of a hidden hand behind Oswald.
Now, let’s return to that eye-catching July 5 Axios headline about the CIA having monitored Oswald before the assassination. What makes the claim noteworthy is its source: “new records” released by the CIA just last week. These documents—several dozen in total—come from the personnel file of George Joannides, a covert CIA officer who served as chief of psychological warfare at the agency’s Miami station in 1963. In that role, Joannides oversaw and funded the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles operating out of Miami.
The Axios article rehashes a familiar storyline that has become one of the most persistent conspiracies of the past two decades: Joannides, who supervised the Miami DRE, allegedly crossed paths with Oswald before JFK’s murder in Dallas. The implication is that this contact, long denied by the CIA, somehow ties Joannides—and by extension, the agency itself—to the assassination of the president.
Twenty-two-years ago, in 2003, JFK researcher Jefferson Morley, and I, along with Norman Mailer, Anthony Summers, G. Robert Blakey, Don DeLillo, and others, signed an open letter to the CIA and DOD requesting “all relevant records” on Joannides. I never knew what the Joannides files might show but I have always been in favor of transparency from the government. I am a vocal critic of government secrecy in the JFK assassination and have long argued against the retention of files. The secrecy surrounding Joannides has been particularly frustrating. As we noted in our 2003 open letter, “In 1978, Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the agency’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal to the Congress his role in the events of 1963, compromising the committee’s investigation.”
Why did the CIA fail to disclose Joannides’ background? Was it simply a case of institutional reluctance to reveal the past activities of retired covert officers? Or, as Morley has long contended, was it because Joannides was centrally involved in a secret operation that had direct or indirect contact with Oswald?
Jefferson Morley argues that George Joannides led or was involved in a CIA plot connected to the assassination of President Kennedy. At a December 2022 press conference, Morley claimed the CIA was “hiding 44 documents known to exist in Joannides’ personnel file that will shed light on... a CIA operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald that has never been disclosed.”
During the same national event, Morley acknowledged his aversion to the phrase “smoking gun”—calling it a cliché not typically used by investigative reporters—but added: “I think in this case it is appropriate. We’re talking about smoking gun proof of a CIA operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald that the CIA is still concealing.”
In a Substack post published that same month, Morley wrote: “In mid-1963, senior Agency officials approved a covert operation that used Lee Harvey Oswald for intelligence purposes.” He emphasized that “the explosive story is told in 44 JFK records” found in Joannides’ personnel file.
Then, in April 2024, testifying before the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Morley escalated his claim: “[CIA Directors Richard] Helms, [James Jesus] Angleton, and Joannides were responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”
And now? With the release of the long-sought Joannides files, what have we learned?
The documents do not support Morley’s theory. In fact, they directly undermine it. There is no mention of Lee Harvey Oswald—no evidence that Joannides knew who Oswald was before November 22, 1963. The files contain no reference to surveillance, no “Operation Oswald,” and no indication of any covert action targeting Kennedy. There is no suggestion—implicit or explicit—of a rogue CIA kill team. The records simply don’t bear out the dramatic claims.
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