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After almost 62 years, there is still more information that the United States government has not told the public with regard to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We know this because the CIA recently released more new documents which discuss one of their operatives monitoring and interacting with JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, months before the President was shot and killed.
According to these newly-released government documents, George Joannides, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Miami branch who oversaw “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare,” utilized the alias “Howard Gleber,” complete with fake driver’s license, to conceal his identity. Joannides did this in an effort to infiltrate the anti-communist Cuban student group DRE and it was during this time that he came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Axios notes that this disclosure is important because it “indicates the CIA lied for decades about his role in the Kennedy case before and after the assassination, according to experts on JFK’s slaying.”
“The cover story for Joannides is officially dead,” said Jefferson Morley, an author and expert on the assassination, told the media outlet. “This is a big deal. The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald.”
The CIA still hasn’t revealed everything
Among the revelations made in the newly-declassified CIA documents, Joannides not only knew of Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinated President Kennedy, he also deceived the House Select Committee on Assassinations after the murder.
As part of that deception, the CIA appointed Joannides to be its liaison to the committee, hiding the fact that he had been involved with DRE and his knowledge of Oswald. In fact, the committee’s chief counsel, Robert Blakey, testified in 2014 that “Joannides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to DRE, but that he would keep looking.” Why the CIA kept Joannides’ role a secret from that committee has still yet to be revealed.
These newly declassified government documents, along with others released over the past several years, come well after 2017 – the date which the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act decreed that all files relating to the President’s assassination would be revealed to the public.
Despite that, a CIA spokesperson claimed to Axios that they have now “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.”
In other words, they are finally doing what they were supposed to have done by 2017 anyway.