New JFK Evidence: The 17-Month Gap

in the CIA assassination files, a deceptive memo and a telling hole in the official story.

The arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, November 22, 1963.

Those who claim there’s nothing new in the JFK assassination files have probably not seen two CIA operational files, released on June 27, that yield a clue about how the American clandestine service monitored (and possibly manipulated) accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The story, while buried deeply for 60 years, has come into the public record thanks to the 1992 JFK Records Act and the work of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. The documentation can now be accessed by anyone on the Mary Ferrell Foundation web site. News organizations, podcasters, and fact-checkers can document the story independently.

The story of the 17 month gap adds new detail to the stories, I told earlier this month n “Northwoods and November 22,” and “Oswald and AMSPELL: a CIA Story.”

The former shows how the Agency’s interest in the obscure Oswald coincided with Pentagon planning for a false flag operations against Cuba. The latter shows how the CIA resists full disclosure around these events in 2023

These two operational files add new insight into the CIA’s pre-assassination interest in Oswald, the itinerant ex-Marine who denied killing President Kennedy and was killed in police custody. They illuminate a 17 month gap in the CIA’s JFK files that is obscured by official secrecy and false statements.

The 17 month gap echoes the famous “18 minute gap” found in a White House audio tape made by President Richard Nixon during the Watergate affair. In the 1970s, the erasure of a more than quarter of hour of conversation between Nixon and his aides three days after the Watergate burglary (and a comically inept effort to explain it) was considered strong evidence of a cover-up of presidential involvement.

Likewise, the 17 month gap can be seen as strong evidence of a CIA cover-up in the JFK assassination investigation.

Of course, as any law professor will tell you, the absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. That is reliably true—but not always. In the case of CIA operational files, the absence of reporting on Oswald is, paradoxically enough, evidence of CIA interest in him. And the proof is that the relevant AMSPELL files are still shrouded in official secrecy as the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches next fall.