CIA Finally Comes Clean on Lee Harvey Oswald—Sort Of

After six decades of denial, deflection, and outright deception, the CIA is quietly revising its story on what it knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot President John F. Kennedy. For years, the Agency stuck to the line that Oswald was just another name in the crowd—barely on their radar. But newly released documents punch holes in that narrative like buckshot through cheap drywall.

Turns out, the CIA wasn’t flying blind. In fact, they had Oswald pegged as early as 1959, thanks to a mail intercept program run under the watchful eye of counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. That’s right—Uncle Sam was reading Oswald’s mail long before Dealey Plaza became a crime scene.

Even more damning? George Joannides, a CIA psychological warfare specialist, was running an op that directly intersected with Oswald’s orbit. Joannides worked with a group called the Cuban Student Directorate—a group Oswald conveniently had public run-ins with. For decades, the CIA swore on a stack of redacted memos that they had no ties to that organization. Now we know that was a lie.

It gets worse. Angleton, along with fellow senior officials Richard Helms and Joannides, didn’t just hide the ball—they faked the whole damn game. They misled congressional investigators and stonewalled inquiries. Angleton even had a 180-page dossier on Oswald sitting on his desk a week before JFK’s motorcade rolled into Dallas. That’s not “minimal knowledge”—that’s a full-blown surveillance file.

The documents also expose a catastrophic failure—or intentional sabotage—of interagency cooperation. The CIA didn’t loop in the FBI or Secret Service on what they had. And those agencies didn’t bother sharing with each other either. That information vacuum may have directly impacted the President’s security arrangements.

Now, let’s be clear: these revelations don’t flip the official story that Oswald acted alone. But they do shred the decades-long cover story the CIA sold to the American public. Jefferson Morley, one of the few researchers with enough patience to dig through the mountains of classified sludge, said it plainly: “The cover story for Joannides is officially dead.”

He’s right. The CIA has finally, grudgingly admitted it knew far more about Oswald—and had more contact with him—than it ever wanted us to believe. That might not change the official history books, but it sure makes them smell a little more like gasoline.