Media Reactions to Oswald-CIA Report: Story Reverberates Around the World

It took nine days for Axios' bombshell JFK assassination piece about CIA officer George Joannides to hit the Washington Post

Graphic posted to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s X feed at 8:31 a.m. on July 14, 2025.

Tuesday’s front-page article in the Washington Post represented the culmination of 10 days of mainstream media reports that the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, had ties to the CIA.

Specifically, agents of a CIA program run by psychological warfare officer George Joannides came into contact with Oswald three months before Dallas — and the Agency concealed that from the public for decades, according to files released by the CIA itself to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chair of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

On July 3, as everyone was leaving town for the holiday break, the CIA released the Joannides file in its Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. Two days later, Axios’ Marc Caputo broke the story — “CIA admits shadowy officer monitored Oswald before JFK assassination, new records reveal” — in the middle of the three-day weekend. Few expected the world to be brought to a standstill by a breakthrough in a 62-year-old cold case, even “one of the biggest cold case files in U.S. history,” to quote Luna. But tracing the story’s evolution in media generates a sense that “tier one” organizations allowed it to simmer for a week before one of its outlets (the Post) could no longer ignore the boil.

Here’s a rundown of how the Joannides story reverberated in press around the world — while still failing to gain traction in some of the most important legacy media in the U.S.