Congressional Witness: 3 CIA Officers 'Responsible for, or Complicit in' JFK Death

Government documents show that three high-ranking CIA officers committed perjury in testimony to JFK investigators, a congressional witness testified on Tuesday.

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On April 1, Jefferson Morley testified before the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets: the JFK Files.

Morley, a former Washington Post reporter, owns and operates the Substack JFK Facts, to which I subscribe.

Earlier this week, I saw that Morley would be testifying before Congress, and on Tuesday afternoon I saw his testimony hit my inbox. And it contains a bombshell. Here is how his testimony began.

I am honored to testify before you. It is a solemn responsibility to report on the new revelations emerging from the newest JFK files. It is a grave matter to assert CIA officers were complicit in the death of a U.S. president, so I want [to] describe the firm evidentiary foundation of my claims.

The idea that the CIA may have had its fingerprints on the JFK assassination is not new. As I’ve observed, it’s one of the most prominent conspiracy theories in history, one that was born almost immediately after the 6.5×52mm Carcano 160 gr copper-jacketed bullet tore through JFK’s skull on Nov. 22, 1963.

But Morley provided fresh evidence that shows three top-ranking CIA officials—Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton, and George Joannides—lied about what they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s presumed killer (who alleged he was a “patsy” before he was shot by Jack Ruby).

Morley submitted to the committee the CIA’s complete pre-assassination Oswald file, which was 198 pages.

“…all this information was held in one place,” Morley told the committee, “the second floor office of counterintelligence chief James Angleton at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, not five miles away from the White House where President Kennedy lived and worked.”

Angleton possessed the dossier on Oswald and, as Morley notes, personally ordered mail surveillance on Oswald in 1959. He received reports on Oswald from Reuben Efron, who oversaw the mail spying project.

“Angleton clearly had knowledge that Oswald was the subject of a CIA project, the ‘mail coverage’ project, he himself ran,” Morley writes.

Yet when Angleton was asked if Oswald was ever the subject of any CIA-related project, this is how he testified.

Similarly, Deputy Director Richard Helms gave false testimony to the Warren Commission in May 1964 when he stated under oath that the CIA had only "minimal" knowledge of Oswald before JFK's assassination.

This was untrue.

“The declassified Oswald file shows that the State Department had sent 14 reports about Oswald to the CIA between 1959 and 1963,” Morley pointed out Tuesday. “The FBI had sent another 12—two of which landed on Angleton’s desk in mid-November 1963.”

And then there’s George Joannides.

A lower-level CIA officer, Joannides was tasked with assisting investigators in accessing CIA records and personnel. He was well-acquainted with Oswald. As chief of covert operations at the CIA’s Miami station in 1963, Morley testified, he oversaw a Cuban student group known as the DRE, which was funded through a covert action program code-named AMSPELL. His agents in Miami and New Orleans conducted political operations against Oswald’s pro-Castro activism.

“In response to a direct request from HSCA investigator Dan Hardway, Joannides denied knowing who ran the AMSPELL program in 1963 — when, in fact, he himself had run it,” said Morley.

For Morley, the fact that all three CIA officers lied about their knowledge of Oswald speaks volumes.

“Three makes a pattern, a pattern of malfeasance, of institutional misconduct. If three police officers lie about the defendant in a homicide case, that cannot be called evidence of incompetence. To the contrary, such deception indicates guilty knowledge and legal culpability, either individually and institutionally.

The new JFK fact pattern leads to a new conclusion. We now know what they knew and when they knew it. We now know that Helms, Angleton, and Joannides were responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”

Morley recommended that the Task Force secure and release the personnel file of George Joannides and requested that CIA Director Ratcliffe provide a public statement addressing the question: Why did these three top CIA officers lie to JFK investigators?

For years, I thought people who doubted the official JFK story were kooks or fools. I no longer believe this. The CIA’s own in-house historian has concluded that there was a “cover-up” following the JFK assassination.

I’m not sure we’ll ever get the truth. And I won’t lie—part of me is afraid to find it.