CIA Slow-Walks Trump’s Order on JFK Assassination Files
The Agency declines to produce five assassination-related documents for the House Task Force on Declassification
The Central Intelligence Agency hid the story from the Warren Commission via the deceptive testimony of Deputy Director Richard Helms in May 1964.
The CIA hid the same story from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) via the personal, and possibly felonious, stonewalling of Miami undercover officer George Joannides in June 1978.
The highly classified story concerned a secret operation that Joannides, a decorated undercover officer, ran in the summer of 1963 involving ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald and his pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter three months before Oswald allegedly killed President Kennedy.
The CIA hid the story from the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) in January 1998, with this wholly inaccurate memo falsely disavowing any knowledge of Joannides’ actions in 1963.
The CIA hid the story from me in August 2008, saying “national security” considerations required withholding of the most sensitive portions of Joannides’ personnel file from my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The CIA’s “national security” argument was upheld in July 2017 by federal judge Brett Kavanaugh in his last decision before he ascended to the Supreme Court.
The CIA hid the story from Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the ARRB, who called in vain for release of Joannides’ personnel file in a letter to President Joe Biden in December 2022.
The CIA hid the story from President Donald Trump in January 2025 by not responding to Executive Order 14176 calling for “full and complete” disclosure of JFK records in the government’s possession.
And now, in May 2025, a CIA official has informed Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, that the agency will not produce Joannides’ personnel file or four other JFK-related records she has demanded for another several weeks — and maybe not at all.
Luna’s Task Force is holding a hearing today (May 20) to hear from living witnesses to the JFK coverup, including Dan Hardway, former HSCA investigator who Joannides stonewalled in 1978, and federal judge Tunheim. (Watch it here.)
“We will address the documents that haven’t been disclosed at the hearing and hear from witnesses, and then do a follow-up once we find the remaining documents,” Luna told JFK Facts last week.
The still-classified story in the Joannides file is devastating to the Agency’s claim that it had only “minimal” information about Oswald before President John F. Kennedy was killed. Based in Miami, Joannides served as chief of the covert action branch of the CIA’s Miami station in 1963, while maintaining a residence in New Orleans. He was cleared into a CIA operation in early 1963 that involved Oswald, a supporter of Castro, and was run by Joannides at the behest of still-unidentified senior officers.
The purpose of Joannides’ operation may have been to penetrate the Cuban government.
The new JFK files shed new light on the story.
A newly declassified document shows the CIA plotted in the summer of 1963 to use the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) — a New York-based, Castro-friendly organization with which Oswald corresponded— to mount “controlled front penetrations” of Castro’s government. This covert program was code-named AMSANTA.
As of last year, an August 1963 memo from the CIA officer working on the AMSANTA program still concealed its purpose, a secret the CIA intended to keep forever.
Only in March 2025, 62 years after the memo was written, was the redaction lifted, on orders from Trump. It revealed the Agency in August 1963 had a worldwide program to “send controlled CP [Communist Party] and front penetrations” on missions to Cuba.
Why censor that bit of intelligence lingo for 62 years? Because it shows that the CIA launched a top-secret program to penetrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in August 1963, the same month that Joannides’ anti-Castro agents in New Orleans were publicizing Oswald’s one-man chapter of the FPCC and two months before Oswald attempted to travel to Cuba with fake FPCC credentials.
The redaction served to conceal the CIA’s targeting of the FPCC in 1963 from public view. It served to conceal the CIA’s hidden hand in the events leading to Kennedy’s murder.
And the continued withholding of the Joannides file has the same purpose: to conceal the CIA’s hidden hand around Oswald, the accused assassin who said he was “a patsy” for others.
The details of Joannides’ operations in the summer and fall of 1963 are still top secret, despite Trump’s order. The code names, false identities, and intelligence methods that Joannides used when his Cuban agents generated propaganda about Oswald and the FPCC are still “denied in full.”
It’s hard not to reach the conclusion that the CIA is slow-walking the Joannides file because its contents are too embarrassing or explosive to release.
The End Game
While the long-running debate about the causes of JFK’s assassination is sure to continue, 2025 marks an inflection point in terms of transparency and public understanding.
The historical record of JFK’s assassination is, for the first time in 62 years, reasonably complete. Thanks to Oliver Stone, the JFK Records Act, and Trump’s executive order, almost all “assassination-related” documents collected by the JFK review board in the 1990s are in the public record for the first time. Thanks to the internet, these documents are increasingly available to scholars and students worldwide.
Yes, there are important JFK records (besides the Joannides file) that are still outstanding, most notably material held by the estranged cousins, JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and JFK’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Also, as JFK Facts reported Friday, Rep. Luna demanded four other JFK files in her letter to Ratcliffe.
a 1979 report from the CIA Inspector General’s office about Congress’ JFK investigation which, a whistleblower told JFK Facts last October, showed an "intent to deceive JFK investigators.”
The travel records of William K. Harvey, chief of the CIA’s assassination program who reportedly visited Dallas in November 1963.
Any additional records about the AMSANTA program which ran “controlled front penetrations” of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at the time of Oswald’s involvement in the group
The CIA file of Herminio Diaz, a Cuban gunman whose associates came to believe was involved in JFK’s assassination. In a newly released document, an FBI informant said four days after JFK’s murder that Diaz was working for the CIA.
A Note on JFK Files
What can these ancient government records actually tell us? The answer is, a lot.
Yes, many important JFK records have been destroyed. No, the new JFK files do not provide smoking-gun proof of a criminal conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Nor do the files contain smoking-gun proof of Oswald’s sole guilt. In fact, new documents and testimony collected in the last 25 years refute the theory of a “lone gunman” in multiple ways (starting with this 2013 interview with Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the doctors who tried to save JFK’s life).
When viewed without theoretical preconceptions, the new JFK files disclose a fact pattern of high-level malfeasance around Kennedy’s assassination. They provide proof of the existence of a CIA operation involving Oswald, run by a decorated officer (Joannides), the details of which the CIA refuses to surrender 62 years after the crime, even under a direct order from the Commander-in-Chief.
And so the decades-long process of declassification of JFK files has now reached a decisive moment. The CIA’s slow walking of Rep. Luna’s request raises fundamental questions about the Agency’s compliance with EO 14176.
Can CIA Director John Ratcliffe compel the agency’s Directorate of Operations to comply with Trump’s order on JFK files?
Can the CIA sustain its defiance of Trump’s order by “slow-walking” the release of the Joannides file?
Was Oswald a “controlled front penetration” asset or agent for the CIA?
The CIA’s actions on the Joannides file will answer these questions in the coming weeks.
I feared that they would not release these key documents or other files related to David Morales and others out of the Miami JM WAVE unit. While it may not be a "smoking gun" it will provied key pieces of the puzzle that will prove that Oswald was CIA and that Morales and Phiilips were running the operation that killed JFK. If Trump and Radcliffe don't step in, it shows that the Deep State CIA still has the power.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in CIA headquarters right now. Are there factions for and against disclosure? How hard is Radcliffe pushing? How much power does he really have? Is permanent defacement of sections of the documents on the table? How much of the delay pertains to prepping a PR strategy? Who is really calling the shots, the CIA or the military? The whole thing feels rather combustible. I'm glad to see JFK Facts continue to hold their feet to the fire.