CIA Historian Admits There Was a 'Cover-Up' Following JFK Assassination

The CIA’s own in-house historian David Robarge concluded that director John A. McCone and Richard Helms engaged in a “benign coverup” that concealed important information from the Warren Commission.

On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration released of thousands of pages of government documents concerning the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The move was prompted by an order by President Trump directing agencies to disclose their JFK files.

So far, The New York Times notes, the release of the documents has offered “few revelations.” Whether that will change remains to be seen.

One of the most prominent conspiracy theories in history is the idea that the CIA played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As Scott Sayare pointed out in a 2023 New York magazine article, the idea of CIA involvement was born almost immediately after the 6.5×52mm Carcano 160 gr copper-jacketed bullet tore through JFK’s skull on Nov. 22, 1963.

The possibility of such a tie had been floated since almost the moment Kennedy was shot. The mutual detestation between Kennedy and the Agency, especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, was widely known in Washington. It is a measure of the paranoia of the era, and also of the Agency’s reputation for lawlessness, that on the afternoon of his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy summoned the director of the CIA to his home to ask “if they” — the CIA — “had killed my brother,” Kennedy later recalled. (The director, John McCone, said they had not.)

Anyone who flirts with the idea that the US security state played a role in JFK’s death risks being branded a conspiracy theorist today, which is likely why so few talk about the possibility publicly—even though the president’s own brother and prominent world leaders had their suspicions.

As Sayare alludes, JFK had famously battled the Agency and promised to “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” after the Bay of Pigs debacle. JFK got as far as firing CIA Director Allen Dulles, a very shady figure, before his life was taken.

One of the reasons it has always been difficult to simply laugh off the possibility the CIA may have been involved in the unthinkable is that the Agency has been deflecting and withholding information for 60 years.

I have noted that the CIA delivered a “non-denial denial” a couple of years ago when a reporter asked point blank if Lee Harvey Oswald had ever been “an agent, asset, source, or contact” of the Agency.

The rambling, bureaucratic non-answer the CIA gave 60 years after JFK’s death is hardly reassuring to those who believe the government has a responsibility to be transparent and forthcoming with the public. But it fits a long CIA pattern.

The Agency’s withholding goes back to the very beginning of the aftermath of the JFK assassination, something even the CIA today admits.

As Politico and other news organizations noted in 2013, the CIA’s own in-house historian concluded that CIA director John A. McCone and future director Richard Helms engaged in what the historian called “a benign coverup.”

“Under McCone's and Helms's direction, CIA supported the Warren Commission in a way that may best be described as passive, reactive, and selective,” wrote the CIA’s in-house historian David Robarge. “The DCI was complicit in keeping incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission's agenda and focusing it on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth': that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”

You can read the documents below for yourself, which I’ve taken the liberty of posting. (You’ll not find them on the CIA’s website. I retrieved them from the George Washington University’s National Security Archive.)

With all due respect to Robarge, there’s no such thing as a “benign” government cover-up, especially one involving the assassination of a sitting US president.

Americans should be deeply troubled that its own spy agency concealed important facts from the Warren Commission and was careful to only present evidence that supported the narrative that Oswald was the killer and acted alone.

I haven’t looked at the latest document release yet, but several people have asked me what I expect to find.

My hunch is that the documents will reveal plenty of more evidence of a “benign conspiracy” (to borrow McCone’s phrase) but little to prove a broader plot or direct involvement by powerful entities.