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The Foundation is a non-profit organization engaged in an ongoing effort to bring accessible and interactive history to a new generation of critical thinkers. With a wide topic base including the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and post-Watergate intelligence abuse investigations, the MFF's vast digital archive contains over 1.2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, and hours of multimedia.

The AARC's holding comprise the most extensive collection of records on the JFK assassination in private hands. It has approximately 1,500 books on assassinations, organized crime, covert activities, and a wide variety of other subjects relevant to the study of assassinations and related topics. Its "main files" consist of newspaper and magazine articles, unpublished manuscripts, trial transcripts, photographs, tapes, notes letters and other materials which fill some 36 four-drawer file cabinets. Membership is available. Many of their holdings are available on their website.

At the end of the Cold War and the passage of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, the U.S. government declassified an enormous number of formerly-secret documents. Among the most stunning are those pertaining to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and subsequent investigations. These records contain stark indications of conspiracy, and a great wealth of material concerning the hows and whys of the ensuing coverup. The documents include startling "new" facts about 1960s foreign policy regarding Vietnam, Cuba, and the other front lines of the war against Communism.

Through the generosity of Harold Weisberg (1913-2002), Hood College has obtained the world's largest accessible private collection of government documents and public records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Through the use of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act (FOIAPA), Weisberg acquired from the government some 250,000 pages of documents, largely Warren Commission, FBI, Secret Service, Justice Department, and CIA records. The archive also includes about 85,000 pages of FBI documents on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some material relating to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

The purpose of this website is to make as much of the primary information concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy available to the general public as possible, in a manner that is user friendly and unbiased. A secondary goal is to allow a forum for authors on all sides of the issue to present their views.

The library supports programs designed to inform and educate students, scholars, and the general public on the history of Congress, the legislative process, and the current issues facing both local, state and national governments. The library encourages the preservation of materials that document the work of government, including the papers of U.S. congressional representatives, Texas state legislators, and judges. The Library is located on the Baylor University campus in Waco, Texas. Most of their holdings are on their website.

JFK 50 Years

This is a new website, created by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum, celebrating the legacy of the JFK presidency. You will find timelines, audio clips, photos and easily downloadable resources available for creating your own presentations.

Sixth Floor Museum

Gary Mack (donations, film and photo library) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza chronicles the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy; interprets the Dealey Plaza National Historic Landmark District and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza; and presents contemporary culture within the context of presidential history.

In 1989, and later through City of Dallas Ordinance 92-0438, the Dallas Police Department transferred to the Dallas Municipal Archives, Office of the City Secretary, all police records relating to the assassination. These records have been available to researchers since the transfer. The collection contains 11,406 documents and photographs, including homicide reports, affidavits, witness statements, newspaper clippings and correspondence. The collection is also available on microfilm. The Municipal Archives possesses the original files, except those that have been transferred to the federal government permanently.

John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963. Almost 30 years later, Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The resulting Collection consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records). Most of the records are open for research.

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The Archives has released nearly 1,500 new documents on JFK's assassination

Brian Naylor

President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy ride in the car in a motorcade in Dallas. Jim Altgens/AP hide caption

President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy ride in the car in a motorcade in Dallas.

The National Archives has released the latest trove of government documents relating to President John F. Kennedy's assassination just over 58 years ago.

Nearly 1,500 newly released documents are available on the Archive's website here . They contain many memos from FBI and other officials' meetings with informants, mostly of interest to historians and researchers. But no evidence is expected to emerge that would put in doubt the conclusion of the Warren Commission's report that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas in November 1963.

They were released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, enacted by Congress in 1992, after Oliver Stone's movie JFK raised new interest in Kennedy's killing and launched anew a spate of conspiracy theories that Oswald did not act alone.

New JFK Assassination Documents Delve Into Oswald's Trip To Mexico, Plans To Flee

The entire collection of documents were to be opened by 2017, but then-President Donald Trump delayed the release of many, saying that some agencies told him that "certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns. I have no choice – today – but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation's security."

In October, Biden took similar action, issuing a statement that the Archives should release documents "that agencies have not proposed for continued postponement" this Dec. 15 th , and that the government give agencies another year to review those they wish to continue to hold back. According to the Archives, the pandemic has had a "significant impact" on some agencies' ability to review documents .

It's not clear what national security or other considerations remain nearly six decades after Kennedy's assassination. The archives says some 250,000 records have been made available, constituting 90 percent of its' collection.

• Lee Harvey Oswald
• National Archives
• assassination
• warren commission

JFK’s Assassination and “Doing Your Own Research”

Revelations about secret government programs after Kennedy’s assassination increased the power of conspiracy theories and the fervor of those who set out to expose them.

It’s become a cliché that conspiracy-minded internet users insist they’ve “done their own research.” As historian Kathryn S. Olmsted writes, that’s something people have been saying since the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, and officials’ response to it, helped to shatter many Americans’ faith in the government .

Olmsted writes that, immediately after the assassination , top leaders suspected some kind of conspiracy. Vice President Lyndon Johnson later said he did not believe Oswald acted alone but feared disaster if foreign actors were discovered to be behind the assassination. He convened the Warren Commission to officially put these worries to rest.

And it kind of worked. Between the assassination and the release of the Warren Report in September 1964, the proportion of the public who suspected a conspiracy dropped from 62 percent to 31 percent. But some people remained deeply suspicious. Olmsted describes ordinary women from around the country taking on the job of solving the case. Shirley Martin of Hominy, Oklahoma, packed up her four kids and a dog, traveled to Dallas, and interviewed more than 50 people, including the priest who gave JFK the last rites. In Beverly Hills, Maggie Fields filled her home with file boxes, scrap books, and charts. Lillian Castellano had a map of the Dallas sewer system mailed to her Los Angeles home so she could see whether another gunman might have hidden in a storm drain.

Around the country, regular people like these developed a network to share their findings. As Castellano wrote to a fellow researcher, “there are thousands of little people like you and I—all not satisfied—all wanting the truth.”

In the decade that followed, Olmsted writes, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal fueled more skepticism . In 1975, Senator Frank Church led a major inquiry into secret government operations, revealing information about the CIA’s plots against Castro, the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King Jr., and other nefarious activity . The Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s lent further credence to conspiracy theorists . If top government officials ignored the law, worked with drug smugglers, and sold arms to terrorists, it seemed there was no limit to what they were capable of.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, it was no big stretch for many Americans to buy into the notion that officials had prior knowledge of—or were even behind—the attacks of September 11, 2001 . Like the JFK conspiracy theorists before them, 9-11 truthers conducted their own research and shared their findings. The internet made that easier than ever, just as it facilitated later conspiracies like QAnon .

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Olmsted argues that citizen researchers have performed a service to the country, helping to win the release of documents that reveal secrets about our government. Yet they’ve also played a role in shattering the trust that Americans place in the basic workings of democracy.

“The result is a profoundly weakened polity,” she writes, “With fewer citizens voting and more problems left unaddressed for a future generation that is even more cynical about the possibility of reforms.”

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Primary Sources: The 1960s: J.F.K. Assassination (1963)

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Online Sources: John F. Kennedy Assassination

• Castro Fidel Speeches on JFK Assassination
• Eyewitness - Lady Bird Johnson more... less... Excerpt from Lady Bird Johnson's diary about the assassination of JFK
• JFK Assassination Air Force One Flight Deck Recording more... less... "This audio recording was donated by the Raab Collection to the National Archives and Records Administration. It is a recording of the Air Force One in-flight radio traffic following the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. "
• JFK Assassination Documents

• The Assassination Archives and Research Center Library (AARC) more... less... "The Assassination Archives and Research Center is the largest private archives in the world which is dedicated to acquiring, preserving, and disseminating information on political assassinations. It includes more than 35,000 pages of scanned documents. Most of these relate to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, and include a mixture of long-published reports and newly declassified transcripts and other documents. Also contained in the Public Library are the reports of the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, which in the 1970s studied abuses of the intelligence agencies. The collection also contains relevant material from federal agencies such as the FBI and CIA. Reports, transcripts, and other documents are constantly being added to the AARC Public Library." Description provided by the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/2004540211/
• New Orleans reacts to John F. Kennedy's Assassination more... less... "President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Moments after the shots were fired, a local reporter went to Canal Street to record interviews with pedestrians. This raw and uncut video footage shows the raw emotion and sense of disbelief from many of the interview subjects."
• President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection more... less... ... consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records). Most of the records are open for research. Description from siteSome items have been digitized.
• Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza more... less... Includes oral histories, the Zapruder film, documents etc.
• Universal Newsreels, Release 78, September 28, 1964 more... less... "President Johnson receives the Warren Commission's Report on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy; New scenic trail in Canada; football: Army vs. Boston College."
• Warren Commission Report more... less... Web version based on Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964. 1 volume, 888 pages. The formatting of this Web version may differ from the original.Description from site
• Weisberg Collection on the JFK Assassination more... less... "Harold Weisberg was an Office of Strategic Services officer during World War II, U.S. Senate staff member, an investigator for the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, a U.S. State Department intelligence analyst, and an investigative reporter. He devoted 40 years of his life to researching and writing about the Kennedy and King assassinations."

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The Biggest Revelations in the Declassified JFK Assassination Files

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: October 12, 2023 | Original: October 26, 2017

In October 2017, the National Archives released more than 2,800 previously classified records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . The documents sparked a feeding frenzy among historians and conspiracy theorists alike.

What’s in the Declassified JFK Assassination Documents?

1) Of the documents that were originally set to be released, some 3,100 had never been seen by the public before. Though few experts expected the final batch of files to offer up a “smoking gun” proving Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the last batch of files were expected to provide more insight into exactly how much U.S. national security agencies knew about Oswald before the assassination, and how much information the CIA and FBI withheld from the official investigation into the assassination, which concluded in 1964.

Among the revelations to emerge from the files were CIA notes on an intercepted telephone call on September 28, 1963, from Lee Harvey Oswald to a KGB agent in Mexico City. There was also evidence that the FBI’s Dallas office received a threat on Oswald’s life on November 23, 1963, the night before Jack Ruby shot him, from a man saying he was a “member of a committee organized to kill Oswald.”

Watch the three-episode documentary event, Kennedy . Available to stream now.

2) Many of the most anticipated remaining files relate to a trip Oswald took to Mexico City in September 1963, just two months before he shot Kennedy. During his visit, Oswald went to the Cuban embassy and met with officials in his attempt to get a visa to travel to Cuba, and then on to the Soviet Union.

3) Many of the files originally set for release reportedly come from the CIA office in Mexico City, and may reveal whether U.S. operatives there knew of Oswald’s plan to kill Kennedy (which he reportedly talked openly about during his trip) and how much they may have withheld from CIA headquarters in Washington.

What the Experts Say

Gerald Posner, an expert on the Kennedy assassination and author of the book Cold Case , speculated  that the revelations contained in the files might have proven embarrassing to some prominent figures: “There may be people who were informing to the CIA at the time who have moved on to careers in politics and business, and the revelation that they were informing will be embarrassing to them.”

Posner also believes the files may contain intriguing items unrelated to the assassination, including a handwritten letter from Jackie Kennedy about her husband’s funeral and a previously classified letter from J. Edgar Hoover.

The files also contain a transcript of a 1976 interview congressional investigators conducted with James Jesus Angleton, director of counterintelligence for the CIA in 1963. Angleton was the main conduit of information between the agency and the Warren Commission , which investigated the assassination.

Will These Declassified Documents Fuel More Conspiracy Theories? 

Despite the commission’s official conclusion in 1964 that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, many people have held fast to the belief that more than one person had to be involved. (It certainly didn’t help that Oswald never stood trial for the crime, having been shot to death by Jack Ruby two days after Kennedy’s assassination.)

Speculation about Oswald’s activities on his Mexico trip have long fueled one of the most popular JFK-related conspiracy theories, which argues that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro plotted to assassinate Kennedy as revenge for the Bay of Pigs invasion . In the 1970s, revelations that the Kennedy administration made various attempts to assassinate Castro fueled the idea that Castro acted first against Kennedy.

In addition to Castro, potential conspirators have included the CIA , Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson , the Mafia, the KGB or some malicious combination thereof. The success of Oliver Stone’s film JFK , which suggested a vast government conspiracy was behind the assassination, helped motivate the U.S. Congress to enact the Records Collection Act in 1992. By its terms, all material related to the assassination would be housed in a single collection at the National Archives.

How Many JFK Assassination Files Have Been Declassified? 

Of the total library of files—which encompasses some 5 million pages—88 percent has been open and available to the public since the late 1990s, according to the National Archives . An additional 11 percent had been released in redacted form, with sensitive portions excised.

Leading up to October 2017, the Archives released a batch of material that July, including a total of 3,810 documents. Some 441 had been withheld in full until that point, and 3,369 previously released in redacted form. Among the released information were 17 audio files of interviews conducted with a KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko, who defected to the United States in early 1964, claimed to have been in charge of a file the KGB kept on Oswald during the time he lived in the Soviet Union (1959-62).

The 1992 law specified that only the president of the United States could choose to block the release of the remaining records past the October deadline. On October 21, 2017, then-President Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he planned to allow their release, reportedly against the advice of some national security agencies. The day before the release, he teased the “long-anticipated” release of the JFK files on Twitter again, calling it “So interesting!”

Gallery: Artifacts of the JFK Assassination

The records were made public under the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which mandated that all material housed at the National Archives about the assassination be made public by October 26, 2017, which is the 25th anniversary of the act. Last-minute concerns by U.S. national security and intelligence agencies led then-President Donald Trump to block the release of thousands of the remaining files just hours before the deadline.

The bulk of the massive collection has been available to the public—either in full or redacted form—already. But tens of thousands of documents had remained classified, presumably because they contained highly sensitive information that the CIA, FBI or other agencies thought might damage national security.

HISTORY Vault: JFK Assassination: The Definitive Guide

Leading experts explore the many theories of what happened on November 22, 1963.

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Jfk in history.

The early 1960s were tumultuous times for the United States and the world. To gain an understanding of this era, these essays provide brief discussions of the significant events that occurred during President Kennedy's years in office, and are intended to give you an overview of the challenges and issues that defined his administration.

John F. Kennedy and African Independence

Alliance for progress (alianza para el progreso), arts and culture in the kennedy white house, the bay of pigs, campaign of 1960, civil rights movement, the cold war, the cold war in berlin, cuban missile crisis, john f. kennedy on the economy and taxes, john f. kennedy and people with intellectual disabilities, john f. kennedy and ireland, jacqueline kennedy in the white house, a brief history of jfk and japan, november 22: death of the president, nuclear test ban treaty, peace corps, physical fitness, john f. kennedy and the press, john f. kennedy and pt 109, john f. kennedy and religion, the space program, john f. kennedy and the student airlift, vietnam, diem, and the buddhist crisis, the white house restoration, the jfk white house tape recordings.

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Thousands of Documents Relating to John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Are Released

Researchers said they were just beginning to comb through the 13,173 documents, hoping they might shed further light on the government’s actions before and after Nov. 22, 1963.

By Michael Levenson and Chris Cameron

The federal government on Thursday released a fresh trove of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a turning point in American history and the subject of persistent conspiracy theories, despite the official government conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot him to death.

Historians and researchers said they were just beginning to comb through the 13,173 documents containing newly released information , hoping they might shed further light on one of the most closely scrutinized murders in recent history and on the government’s actions before and after it.

The documents included records relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City several weeks before Kennedy’s assassination in 1963; Oswald’s trip to Finland in 1959 , the year he defected to the Soviet Union; and images of his Cuban visa application . Some of the documents — including one about Operation Mongoose , a covert government campaign to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro — included redactions.

Many of the documents had been released previously but now have fewer redactions or none at all, researchers said. Many were scrambling to find out what new information had been revealed.

Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer who has handled Freedom of Information Act cases related to the Kennedy assassination and has pushed for more documents to be released, said, “There’s not going to be any smoking guns. There’s not going to be anything that pushes the needle one way or the other.”

“For someone who has just an interest in the Kennedy assassination, I dare say they will not find anything that will make them gasp,” Mr. Zaid said as he began poring through the records. “The value in these documents is going to be for the die-hard researchers and academics who will now spend months digesting each and every page.”

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The Secrets of the JFK Assassination Archive

How a dogged journalist proved that the cia lied about oswald and cuba — and spent decades covering it up..

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In 1988, in an elevator at a film festival in Havana, the director Oliver Stone was handed a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins , a newly published account of the murder of President John F. Kennedy . Stone admired Kennedy with an almost spiritual intensity and viewed his death on November 22, 1963 — 60 years ago this month — as a hard line in American history: the “before” hopeful and good; the “after” catastrophic. Yet he had never given much thought to the particulars of the assassination. “I believed that Lee Oswald shot the president,” he said. “I had no problem with that.” On the Trail of the Assassins , written by the Louisiana appellate judge Jim Garrison, proposed something darker. In 1963, Garrison had been district attorney of New Orleans, Oswald’s home in the months before the killing. He began an investigation and had soon traced the contours of a vast government conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA; Oswald was the “patsy” he famously claimed to be. Stone read Garrison’s book three times, bought the film rights, and took them to Warner Bros. “I was hot at the time,” Stone told me. “I could write my own ticket, within reason.” The studio gave him $40 million to make a movie.

The resulting film, JFK , was a scandal well before it came anywhere near a theater. “Some insults to intelligence and decency rise (sink?) far enough to warrant objection,” the Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis wrote just as shooting began. “Such an insult now looms. It is JFK .” Newsweek called the film “a work of propaganda,” as did Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who specifically likened Stone to the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. “It could spoil a generation of American politics,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in the Washington Post .

Critics objected in particular to Stone’s ennoblement of Garrison, whose investigation was widely viewed, including by many conspiracy theorists, as a farce. And yet some of the response to the film looked an awful lot like a form of repression, a slightly desperate refusal to acknowledge that the official version of the Kennedy assassination had never been especially convincing. One week after the assassination and five days after Oswald himself was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, President Lyndon Johnson convened a panel of seven “very distinguished citizens,” led by Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court, to investigate. Ten months later, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, firing three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, had killed Kennedy entirely on his own for reasons impossible to state. Notwithstanding JFK ’s distortions — “It’s a Hollywood movie,” Stone pointed out — the film noted quite accurately that the Warren Commission seemed to be contradicted by its own evidence.

In a famous courtroom scene, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, showed the Zapruder film, the long-suppressed footage of the shooting, rewinding it for the jury as he narrated the movement of Kennedy’s exploding cranium — “Back, and to the left; back, and to the left” — which suggested a shot not from behind, where Oswald was, but from the front right, in the direction of the so-called Grassy Knoll, where numerous witnesses testified to having seen, heard, and even smelled gunshots. (Stone had offered the role of Garrison to Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson, who both passed, but Costner, the very symbol of wholesome Americana, was actually the more subversive choice.) In another courtroom scene, Garrison appeared to dismantle the “single-bullet theory,” according to which the same round had been responsible for seven entry and exit wounds in Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally — an improbable scenario made all the more so by the alleged bullet itself, which was recovered in near-pristine condition. The simplest explanation would have been that all those wounds were caused by more than one bullet, but this would have meant either that Oswald had fired, reloaded, and again fired his bolt-action rifle in less than the 2.3 seconds required to do so or, more realistically, that there was a second shooter.

Three of the seven members of the Warren Commission eventually disavowed its findings, as did President Johnson. In 1979, after a thoroughgoing reinvestigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” But such findings seemed not to penetrate. “In view of the overwhelming evidence that Oswald could not have acted alone (if he acted at all), the most remarkable feature of the assassination is not the abundance of conspiracy theories,” Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, remarked in Harper’s , “but the rejection of a conspiracy theory by the ‘best and brightest.’” For complex reasons of history, psychology, and politics, within the American Establishment it remained inadvisable to speak of conspiracy unless you did not mind being labeled a kook.

Stone ended his film in the style of a documentary, with a written text scrolling beneath John Williams’s high-patriotic arrangement for string and horns, that deplored the official secrecy that still surrounded the assassination. Large portions of the Warren Report, Kennedy’s full autopsy records, and much of the evidence collected by the HSCA had never been cleared for public release. When JFK came out in December 1991, this ongoing secrecy quickly supplanted the movie itself as a subject of public scandal. Within a month, the New York Times was editorializing, if begrudgingly, in Stone’s defense. (“The public’s right to information does not depend on the integrity or good faith of those who seek it.”) By May 1992, congressional hearings about a declassification bill were underway. Stone, invited to testify before the House, declared, “The stone wall must come down.” CIA director Robert Gates pledged to disclose, or at least submit for review, “every relevant scrap of paper in CIA’s possession.” “The only thing more horrifying to me than the assassination itself,” Gates said, “is the insidious, perverse notion that elements of the American government, that my own agency had some part in it.”

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that “all Government records related to the assassination” be provided to the National Archives and made available to the public. The historian Steven M. Gillon has called it the “most ambitious declassification effort in American history.” It has done little to refute Gates’s “insidious, perverse notion.” On the contrary, for those with the inclination to look and the expertise to interpret what they find, the records now in the public realm are terrifically damning to the Warren Commission and to the CIA.

Among the first visitors to the JFK Assassination Records Collection was Jefferson Morley, then a 34-year-old editor from the Washington Post . Morley had made a name for himself in magazines in the 1980s. He helped break the Iran-Contra scandal for The New Republic and wrote a much-discussed gonzo essay about the War on Drugs for which he’d spent an evening smoking crack cocaine. By that time, he’d become Washington editor of The Nation . He drank with Christopher Hitchens, with whom he was once deported, after a gathering with some Czech dissidents, by that country’s secret police. “He was a little out there,” a colleague at the Post recalled. “But you want some people like that in the newsroom.” Morley had read about the Kennedy assassination for years as a hobby, but it never occurred to him that he might report on it himself. “I never thought I had anything to add,” he told me. “Until 1992.”

I visited Morley in Washington in September. He is now 65 and somewhat more demure than his younger self, if still combative, with a sweep of gray hair, a high brow, and a sharp nose that together lend him a vaguely avian aspect, an impression heightened by his tendency to cock his head quizzically, like an owl, and speak into the middle distance. We met at the brick rowhouse that he still shares with his second wife, with whom he is in the midst of a divorce. She will keep the house, and Morley was not yet certain where he would go, but they agreed that he could stay through “the coming JFK season,” as he put it. His small office is there, as is his personal file collection, three decades of once-classified records culled from the National Archives and stored in worn banker’s boxes, tens of thousands of photocopy sheets arranged chronologically and, in duplicate form, by subject matter. “If you use what we’ve learned since the ’90s to evaluate the government’s case,” he told me, “the government’s case disintegrates.”

Morley, the author of three books on the CIA and the editor of a Substack blog of modest but impassioned following called JFK Facts, has made a name for himself among assassination researchers by attempting to approach Kennedy’s murder as if it were any other subject. “Journalists never report the JFK story journalistically,” he said. Early on, when Morley was still at the Post , editors would frequently ask, “What does this tell us about who shot JFK?” “I have no idea!” he responded. “I have to have a fucking conspiracy theory?”

He did not set out to make a career of the JFK Act, but the declassification process has taken longer than expected. At the urging of the CIA and other agencies, President Donald Trump twice extended the original 2017 deadline. In 2021, President Joe Biden pushed it to 2022 before extending it once again. At least 320,000 “assassination-related” documents have been released; by one estimate, some 4,000 remain withheld or redacted, the majority belonging to the CIA.

Morley’s serious interest in the assassination had begun in the early 1980s, prompted by Christopher Lasch’s attack on the conspiracy taboo in Harper’s . (He’d helped edit the essay.) He began to read the available literature. Some of the “conspiracy” books were highly suppositious, in his view, but some he found to be impressively thoughtful, documented, even restrained. Sylvia Meagher’s 1967 critique of the Warren Commission, Accessories After the Fact, based on a close reading of the commission’s report and its appendices, was particularly influential. The report “didn’t hang together,” Morley said, “didn’t make sense on its own terms.”

In 1992, during passage of the JFK Act, he was hired by the Washington Post to work for “Outlook,” the paper’s Sunday opinion section, an outpost of impertinence and boundary-testing in an otherwise buttoned-down newsroom. By Morley’s recollection, he pitched a piece about the JFK archive during his job interview. “They didn’t realize all these records were coming out, they weren’t really paying attention, and I was on the ball,” Morley said.

Morley visited the new archive after work, prospecting for stories, and began contacting researchers of the assassination to ask for guidance. Among them was John Newman, a U.S. Army major who had spent 20 years in Army intelligence and written a widely praised history of Kennedy and Vietnam. Newman, who also served as a consultant on JFK , was then at work on a book about Oswald and his connections to the CIA.

The possibility of such a tie had been floated since almost the moment Kennedy was shot. The mutual detestation between Kennedy and the Agency, especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, was widely known in Washington. It is a measure of the paranoia of the era, and also of the Agency’s reputation for lawlessness, that on the afternoon of his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy summoned the director of the CIA to his home to ask “if they” — the CIA — “had killed my brother,” Kennedy later recalled. (The director, John McCone, said they had not.) The Agency assured the Warren Commission that, prior to the assassination, it had had no particular interest in Oswald and almost no information on him whatsoever. This had always seemed implausible. Oswald was only 24 when he died, but his life had been eventful. He had served as a radar operator in the Marine Corps, stationed at an air base in Japan from which the CIA flew U-2 spy missions over Russia; had then defected to Moscow, where he told American diplomats that he planned to tell the Soviets everything he knew; had been closely watched, if not recruited, by Soviet intelligence services; and had then, in 1962, after more than two and a half years in the USSR, returned, Russian wife in tow, to the United States. One would think the CIA might have taken somewhat more than a passing interest.

Early on, Newman had photocopied the entirety of Oswald’s pre-assassination CIA file at the archive and brought it home. Morley came often to study it. “I had read something that said, you know, they only had five documents on him,” Morley said. “And it was like, ‘No, there were 42. ’”

Whatever mystique may attach to it, the CIA is also a highly articulated bureaucracy. Newman encouraged Morley to focus less on the documents themselves than on the attached routing slips. “When you start getting into spy services, everybody lies,” Newman told me. “And so how do you know anything?” The answer was “traffic analysis.” Even if the information contained in an intelligence file was false, Newman believed an account of how that information flowed — who received it, in what form, from whom, when — could be a reliable source of insight.

Via cryptic acronyms, the Agency’s routing slips recorded precisely who had been receiving information on Oswald in the period leading up to the assassination. “It was, when you saw it, a lot of people,” Morley recalled. “I just remember being in John’s basement and thinking, Oh my God .” A large number of senior CIA officers at the Agency’s headquarters had evidently been tracking Oswald, and tracking him closely, since well before November 22, 1963. “The idea that this guy came out of nowhere was self-evidently not true,” Morley said. “That was a door swinging open for me.”

Oswald’s file contained press clippings, State Department archives, and FBI reports detailing his activities in Fort Worth, Dallas, and New Orleans, where he’d been arrested in the summer of 1963 and interviewed at length, in jail, by an agent of the bureau . Of particular interest to Morley, however, was a series of CIA cables from October 1963, the month before the assassination, pertaining to a trip Oswald took to Mexico City.

By the Warren Commission’s determination, Oswald arrived in Mexico City on September 27. Before his return to the U.S. six days later, he seemed to have made several visits to the embassies of both the Soviet Union and Cuba. But there were problems with the evidence. The Warren Commission could not definitively establish that the man who presented himself at the embassies as Oswald was, in all instances, Oswald. A surveillance photograph of a man outside the Soviet Embassy, purportedly of Oswald, was clearly not. This “Mexico Mystery Man” has never been positively identified; no photographs of Oswald in Mexico City have ever surfaced. A CIA wiretap had also picked up someone presenting himself to the Soviets as “Lee Oswald,” but those who later heard the recording, including FBI agents and staff lawyers for the Warren Commission, reported that the caller was not him.

In the file, Morley found a cable from the CIA’s Mexico City station to headquarters in Langley reporting the phone call. “AMERICAN MALE WHO SPOKE BROKEN RUSSIAN SAID HIS NAME LEE OSWALD,” it read. Headquarters responded in a cable dated October 10, recounting Oswald’s defection and his time as a factory worker in Minsk. But it seemed to indicate that the CIA had lost track of him. “LATEST HDQS INFO” was a State Department report from May 1962 before Oswald had returned to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, the cable said. Having seen the CIA file, Morley knew this was not true: The CIA held extensive information on Oswald’s activities in the U.S. from as recently as just a few weeks earlier, including his arrest in New Orleans. Had CIA headquarters acted intentionally, Morley wondered, when it misled the Agency’s people in Mexico City about the man who six weeks later would be accused of killing the president?

He and Newman checked the routing slips. The October 10 cable had received the sign-off of several notably senior officials, including the No. 2 in the Agency’s covert-operations branch. But of particular note was a lesser-known signatory, Jane Roman, a top aide to James Jesus Angleton, the Agency’s famous counterintelligence chief. Just days before approving the October 10 cable, Roman had, in her own hand, signed for FBI reports that placed Oswald unequivocally in the U.S.

Morley and Newman found Roman’s address and visited her at her ivied bungalow in Cleveland Park, a tony D.C. neighborhood favored by CIA officials. Roman, then 78, was reserved but cordial, “a correct, smart, Wasp woman,” Morley said. She seated her visitors at a dining table beneath the dour portrait of a forebear.

Newman asked most of the questions. (Newman and Morley are still friendly, but each has a tendency to present himself as the central protagonist in the story of Jane Roman. Roman died in 2007.) He spread documents on the table and walked Roman through them, beginning with a routing slip from shortly after Oswald’s return from the USSR. It had been signed by officials of the Soviet Realities branch, of counterintelligence, of covert operations, and elsewhere. Newman asked, “Is this the mark of a person’s file who’s dull and uninteresting?” “No, we’re really trying to zero in on somebody here,” Roman said. Newman showed her the FBI report on Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans, for which Roman had signed on October 4, 1963. Newman then produced the October 10 cable, according to which the Agency had received no information on Oswald in over a year.

“Jane,” Newman said, “you read this file just a couple of days before you released this message. So you knew that’s not true.”

Roman protested that she had “a thousand of these things” to handle. But she soon conceded, “Yeah, I mean, I’m signing off on something that I know isn’t true.” Newman asked if this suggested “some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file.”

“Well, to me, it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis,” Roman said. She speculated that there had been an “operational reason” to withhold information about him from Mexico City, though she herself had not been read into whatever “hanky-panky” may have been taking place.

After the interview, Morley and Newman stopped their recorders, thanked Roman, and stepped outside. “John and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh my fucking God,’” Morley told me. They had coaxed from a highly placed former CIA official, on tape and on the record, an acknowledgment that top CIA officers in Washington had been keenly interested in Oswald before the assassination, so much so that they had intentionally misled their colleagues in Mexico about him for reasons apparently related to an operation of some kind.

Later, Morley spoke with Edward Lopez, a former researcher for the HSCA, where he had been tasked with investigating the CIA. Lopez said, “What this tells people is that somehow the Agency had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination and that they are covering it up.” At the Post , Morley brought the story not to “Outlook” but to the more prestigious “National” section. “And naïve as I was, I thought, This is a great fucking story, and they’re going to love it! ” Morley told me.

“National” editors did spend several months working with him, but it was decided that the story could not run in the paper’s news section. There was no explicit prohibition on Kennedy-assassination stories, an editor told me, but if ‘National” was going to publish something “on such an explosive topic,” the paper’s leadership “would’ve wanted it nailed down real tight.”

Morley took the piece to “Outlook,” “an implicit downgrading” in his view. It ran in the spring of 1995. A senior editor took him aside afterward to say, “Jeff, this isn’t good for your career.” “And to me,” Morley recalled, “that was like, ‘Wow, this really is a good story!’”

One of the more damning revelations of the past few decades is that the Warren Commission very likely reached its lone-gunman verdict, or rather received it from on high, before it had begun its investigation. This conclusion emerged from later statements by the commissioners; from recordings of the phone calls of President Johnson, in which he made clear that it was of paramount importance to show that Oswald had no ties to either the Soviets or their Cuban allies, so as to avoid “a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour”; and, most famously, from a declassified memo prepared for the White House by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach on November 25, one day after Oswald’s death.

“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial,” Katzenbach wrote. “Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists.” This evidence certainly does not prove that the Warren Commission was a fraud, or that its conclusions were necessarily wrong, but it does suggest quite strongly that, at its highest levels, the commission was not interested in discovering anything other than Oswald’s sole and apolitical responsibility for the assassination.

Likewise, the Senate’s Church Committee, convened in 1975 to study abuses by the intelligence services, found that the Warren Commission had not received the honest cooperation of the FBI or CIA, which withheld “facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation.” The CIA in particular avoided mention of its various plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, one of which had involved a Cuban high official who had, in a meeting in Paris on the very day of Kennedy’s killing, received from a CIA handler the poison pen with which he was supposed to carry out his task. These activities were, in addition to being closely held secrets, patently illegal, and it is understandable that the CIA would not want to disclose them. But it is just as obvious that a thorough investigation of the assassination would have required their disclosure. Castro had stated publicly, for instance, that he would retaliate if he ever discovered that the U.S. was trying to have him killed; the fact that the Agency had been doing precisely this at the time of the assassination would have been a clear investigative lead.

Allen Dulles, a former director of the CIA who sat on the Warren Commission, could have informed his fellow commissioners of the plots. He elected not to. Dulles hated Kennedy, whom he considered a pinko and an interloper and who had unceremoniously fired him as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs. Arlen Specter, who became a senator 15 years after serving on the Warren Commission, used to tell a story about Dulles, which was recounted to me by Carl Feldbaum, Specter’s Senate chief of staff. The commissioners were at one point solemnly passing round Kennedy’s bloodied necktie from November 22; a bullet hole was clearly visible. When the garment came to him, Dulles, puffing on his pipe, examined it for a moment and then, passing it along, remarked, “I didn’t know Jack wore store-bought ties.”

In addition to the Castro plots, the Church Committee was particularly severe with the CIA for its lack of curiosity over “the significance of Oswald’s contacts with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups for the many months before the assassination.” Oswald’s behavior in the summer of 1963 looked to many critics like that of some sort of spy or agent provocateur. Senator Richard Schweiker, who chaired the Church subcommittee on the Kennedy assassination, said of Oswald, “Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

The HSCA investigation, begun in 1977, took a special interest in Oswald’s Cuban contacts, and in particular his interactions with an anti-Castro group known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, or DRE. The Warren Commission had reported on the DRE but had never been informed that the group was founded, funded, and closely managed by the CIA.

Prior to the investigation, the HSCA’s lead counsel, G. Robert Blakey, obtained a formal agreement for extensive access to the Agency’s files. “They agreed to give us everything,” Blakey, who is now professor emeritus at Notre Dame, recalled recently. “At some stage, they decided that that was not a good idea.” In 1978, after the HSCA had begun seeking information about the DRE, the CIA named a new liaison to the committee, a notably severe, sharp-dressing senior officer named George Joannides. “He kind of gave the impression of brooking no lightheartedness,” Dan Hardway, a lawyer who dealt extensively with Joannides as an HSCA researcher, told me. Hardway recalled seeing Joannides smile only once, when he brought out a record that was almost entirely redacted. Hardway was furious. “And George was just bouncing,” he said, “just bouncing on his toes.”

Joannides was presented as a “facilitator,” but his actual function seemed to be to “give as little as possible, as slow as possible, and basically wait us out,” Blakey said; the committee’s investigation into the DRE in particular was “frustrated.” “Not ‘frustrated’ because we didn’t get what we wanted,” Blakey said. “We didn’t get anything .” “Joannides screwed us,” Hardway told me.

Joannides’s stonewalling has never been explained by the CIA. It may be instructive to note, however, that not long ago the Agency admitted, albeit not publicly, that it intentionally misled the Warren Commission. A report prepared in 2005 by CIA chief historian David Robarge and declassified in 2014 claimed that Agency officials engaged in a “benign cover-up” in order to prevent the discovery of the Castro plots. It is entirely possible that the CIA’s apparent efforts to keep the HSCA away from the DRE were similarly “benign.” But the purpose would not have been to cover up the Castro plots: The Castro plots had by then been publicly acknowledged. If the CIA was using Joannides to prevent the discovery of some damaging secret, it was evidently something else.

Before meeting Jane Roman, Morley was “still kind of in lone-gunman-land,” he told me. But the story of the October 10 cable convinced him that the Agency had perhaps been using Oswald in some way and that it might bear some responsibility for the assassination, though whether by design or mistake — “complicity” or “incompetence,” in Morley’s words — he could not say. He began to look into Oswald’s connections to the DRE.

In the early 1960s, the CIA supported a number of Cuban exile groups, helping them to conduct psychological warfare, gather intelligence, and run paramilitary operations in Cuba. The DRE, based in Miami, was among the largest and most influential; at one point, it was receiving $51,000 from the Agency every month, the equivalent of about half a million dollars today. Its leaders were profiled in Life .

In 1962, the CIA’s deputy director for operations, Richard Helms, summoned the DRE’s young secretary-general, Luis Fernandez-Rocha, to his office in Langley. “You, Mr. Rocha, are a responsible man,” Helms said, according to a memo released under the JFK Act. “I am a responsible man. Let’s do business in a mature manner.” Helms assured Fernandez-Rocha of his “personal interest in this relationship” and said he would be appointing a new case officer for the DRE, a capable man who would report directly to him.

Oswald encountered the DRE the following year in New Orleans. His behavior during that period was, as the Church Committee noted, perplexing. He presented himself publicly as a member of the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a controversial pro-Castro group, carrying a membership card signed by the branch president, A.J. Hidell. And yet no such branch existed, nor any such person. (When he was arrested in Dallas, Oswald carried a forged identification card bearing his picture and the name of “Alek James Hidell.”) At the same time, he seemed to be in contact with various opponents of the Castro regime. In August, Oswald approached a man named Carlos Bringuier, presenting himself as a fellow anti-Communist and offering his military expertise to help train rebel Cuban fighters. Bringuier was the DRE’s delegate in New Orleans.

A few days later, a friend told Bringuier that Oswald was nearby, on Canal Street, handing out pro-Castro leaflets (“HANDS OFF CUBA!”). Bringuier went to confront Oswald; the men were arrested for fighting. Before his release from jail, Oswald asked to speak with an FBI agent, to whom he took pains to explain that he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In a radio appearance shortly thereafter, Oswald debated Bringuier on the topic of Kennedy’s Cuba policy. Following the debate, a coalition of anti-Castro groups issued an “open letter to the people of New Orleans” warning that Oswald was a dangerous subversive.

Three months later, the DRE distinguished itself as the source of the Kennedy assassination’s very first conspiracy theory. On November 22, DRE operatives called their contacts in the media to report that they knew the alleged assassin and that he was quite obviously an agent of the Cuban regime. Bringuier made the front page of the next morning’s Washington Post .

At the archive, Morley found monthly progress reports on the DRE that spanned the full era of CIA backing, from 1960 until 1966, except for a conspicuous 17-month gap around the assassination. Morley did find a DRE memo from the missing period, however. It was addressed simply “To Howard.” He assumed this referred to the DRE’s case officer. “So I thought, Well, this guy Howard, if he’s around like Jane Roman was around, that would be a really good story, ” Morley said. Morley was able to convince the Post ’s investigations editor, Rick Atkinson, to send him to Miami, where he hoped to ask the former leaders of the DRE who Howard was. He flew down from Washington in the fall of 1997.

The DRE men remembered Howard distinctly. He dressed in tailored suits, wore a pinkie ring, and was memorably uncongenial. Fernandez-Rocha, the DRE’s former secretary-general, recalled meeting him as frequently as a few times a week for coffee at a Howard Johnson’s. The group’s previous case officer had been a lovely man, “but he was a sergeant,” Rocha told Morley. “When I was dealing with this guy Howard, I was talking to a colonel.”

When Morley returned to Washington, he brought the question of Howard to the Assassination Records Review Board. The JFK Act had created the ARRB, an independent commission with a staff of about 30 lawyers and researchers, to oversee the initial phase of declassification. The board’s primary task was to identify all assassination-related records in the possession of the CIA, FBI, and other government entities. To the displeasure of some of those bodies, its interpretation of “assassination-related” proved to be sweeping. “We didn’t just dabble in records,” John Tunheim, who chaired the review board until its conclusion in 1998, told me. “We tried to answer as many questions as we could.” The ARRB had in fact already been pressing the CIA for information about the DRE for a year; it added Howard to its request in 1997, asking that the CIA identify him.

In a memo, the Agency responded that the “missing” reports had likely never existed, and that “Howard” was neither a known pseudonym, nor a “registered alias,” nor the true name of any DRE case officer. “The use of ‘To Howard’ might have been nothing more than a routing indicator,” the Agency suggested.

Morley found this explanation wanting. (“A routing indicator with a pinkie ring!” he joked to me.) The ARRB soon issued its final report and disbanded. Shortly thereafter, however, Morley got a call from T. Jeremy Gunn, the board’s lead investigator and chief counsel. An ARRB analyst had apparently managed to identify Howard by reviewing the personnel file of an operations officer known by the pseudonym Walter D. Newby. Newby had become the DRE’s handler in December 1962 and served for 17 months — precisely the period of the missing records. Five of Newby’s job evaluations, or “fitness reports,” had been declassified. The National Archives faxed them to Morley.

The man in the reports certainly seemed to correspond with the “Howard” described by Fernandez-Rocha and the other DRE men. One evaluation from 1963 made note of his “firmness” and his ability “to render a decision without waste of motion.” A later report commended Newby’s “distinct flair for political action operations” — he was by then chief of the covert-action branch at the CIA’s Miami station — but acknowledged a “tendency to be abrupt with subordinates.” Of most interest to Morley, however, was an evaluation from many years after the Kennedy assassination when Newby had been called out of retirement for an assignment of a different sort under his real name. In 1978 and 1979, this report indicated, Newby had served as liaison to the HSCA, where he was lauded for “the cool efficacy with which he handled an unusual special assignment.” His true name was George Joannides.

At the HSCA, Joannides had been specifically assigned to handle queries about the DRE and its relations with the CIA. The Agency had assured the committee that he had no connection whatsoever to the matters under investigation; that, in fact, he was merely an Agency lawyer and had not been “operational” in 1963. These assurances were self-evidently false. At one point, Joannides informed the committee that the identity of the DRE’s case officer at the time of the Kennedy assassination — Joannides himself — could not be determined.

Morley called Blakey, the committee’s chief counsel and lead investigator. “He went ballistic,” Morley recalled. “They flat-out lied to me about who he was and what he was up to,” Blakey told me. “I would have put him under subpoena and put him in a hearing and talked to him under oath.” Blakey released a written statement arguing that Joannides and his superiors were guilty of obstruction of justice. “I no longer believe,” it said, “that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald.”

Twenty years after the CIA lied about Joannides to the HSCA, the Agency seemed to have done the same to the ARRB. I asked Tunheim, the board’s chair, if he believed that the Historical Review Group, the CIA office assigned to work with the ARRB, had taken part in the deception. “I think they were very truthful with us on what they knew,” he said. “But whether they knew the whole story or were told the whole story, or were even misled by people within the Agency, I can’t answer that.”

Morley brought the Joannides story to the Post but had no luck. I asked Rick Atkinson, the editor who paid for his trip to Miami, if he remembered anything about it. “I vaguely recall Jeff having an interest in the assassination,” Atkinson, a three-time Pulitzer winner, wrote in an email. “Frankly it bored me.” Morley’s career at the Post had begun to stagnate. He became a metro reporter and then a web editor at a time when newspaper websites were widely viewed by newspaper employees as hopeless backwaters. He eventually managed to publish a piece on Joannides in the Miami New Times , a South Florida alt-weekly.

In his spare time, Morley continued his reporting. Joannides had died in 1990. (His obituary in the Post claimed he was a “retired lawyer at the Defense Department.”) But Morley was able to reach several of his aging former colleagues. They recalled a self-possessed and cultivated gentleman operator, with connections at the highest levels of the Agency, “not one of the wild men,” in the words of Warren Frank, who knew Joannides in Miami. There, Joannides managed an annual budget of $2.4 million, the equivalent of ten times that today.

In July 2003, Morley sent the CIA a request, under the Freedom of Information Act, for all records pertaining to Joannides. “The public has the right to know what he knew,” he wrote. The CIA responded with a letter encouraging him to contact the National Archives. With the help of the FOIA lawyer James Lesar, Morley sued.

The 500 pages of documents that ultimately emerged from Morley v. CIA went well beyond the scope of the five fitness reports released under the JFK Act. Morley was given the Agency’s personnel photograph of Joannides — a menacingly well-kempt man of middle age, dark eyes recessed in shadow, jaw set in an ambiguous glower — as well as documents suggesting that he had spent time in New Orleans and that he had been granted access to a particularly sensitive intelligence stream in June 1963. Many of the documents were heavily redacted; the Agency also acknowledged the existence of 44 documents on Joannides from the years 1963, 1978, and 1979 that it refused to release in any form. “The CIA is saying very clearly, ‘This is top secret, please go away,’” Morley told me. “So that’s where the story is, right? I mean, they’re telling me what’s important, and I believe them.”

Until recently, if asked what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 — the “cosmic question,” as he once put it — Morley deflected. In his writing, he tended to address it only obliquely and declined to articulate an overarching theory, except to say the Warren Commission got it wrong. Over the years, he had made all manner of damning discoveries; what they added up to, beyond a cover-up, Morley professed not to know.

Increasingly, though, he has been willing to theorize. Last year, he published an article on JFK Facts under the headline, “Yes, There Is a JFK Smoking Gun.” “Now, after 28 years of reporting and reflection, I am ready to advance the story,” he wrote. “Jane Roman was correct. A small group of CIA officers was keenly interested in Oswald in the fall of 1963. They were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year. One of the officers supporting this operation was George Joannides.”

Morley believes Oswald was an “agent of influence,” he told me, or, as at least one CIA officer put it at the time, a “useful idiot” of the Agency. In New Orleans, perhaps he’d been encouraged to prove his leftist bona fides by claiming to be a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The trip to Mexico seems to have been part of “some kind of probing intelligence operation,” Morley said. But why go to all this trouble? Why hide the operation for so long? Why Oswald?

The parsimonious explanation, Morley believes, is that a “public legend” was being constructed: Someone in the Agency was setting Oswald up to take the fall for the coming assassination. Morley’s suspicion falls most heavily on Angleton, whose office controlled Oswald’s file from the moment it was opened. “Was Angleton running Oswald as an agent as part of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy?” Morley wondered in The Ghost , his 2018 biography of Angleton. “He certainly abetted those who did. Whoever killed JFK, Angleton protected them.” Morley told me he wonders about Bill Harvey, the Agency’s assassinations chief, as well as David Atlee Phillips, who helped found the DRE and was allegedly once seen in Dallas with Oswald. Joannides would have been an “unwitting co-conspirator,” Morley believes, oblivious to what his superiors were doing with him until the moment Kennedy was shot, and then brought in as the cleanup man.

This is all possible but also extremely speculative. Why risk speaking it aloud? Certainly he has been criticized for it. In a review of The Ghost , the author and intelligence historian Thomas Powers submitted that Morley had “suffered a kind of mid-life onset of intellectual hubris,” convincing himself that he knew the truth of the assassination even if the evidence had yet to materialize. A number of Morley’s friends and fellow researchers expressed some version of this concern to me as well. “Sometimes I worry for Jeff,” said the journalist Anthony Summers, the author of a respected assassination book called Not in Your Lifetime . “Commitment to a story is a virtue. But sometimes, I think, his writing goes beyond what the facts justify. He surprises me with his certainties.” The assassination has been known to drive people to unreason. “They tend to be smart people who are wide readers and trust their ability to figure things out,” Powers, the intelligence historian, told me. “It’s a subject that people get lost in. And sometimes they’re seen again, and sometimes not.”

Morley’s rigor has unquestionably eroded a bit in recent years. In August, he published a short post on JFK Facts about a Kennedy-administration memo proposing a “drastic” reorganization of the CIA. He’d just discovered the document; 60 years after the fact, it was still partially redacted. Why? “To protect the CIA’s impunity,” Morley declared. Fred Litwin, an anti-conspiracist assassination buff and blogger, pointed out that Morley’s new document was merely an alternate copy of a famous memo by Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Will Jefferson Morley correct this error?” Litwin wondered. He never did.

A few weeks earlier, Morley had convinced Peter Baker, the prolific New York Times White House correspondent, to write about Ruben Efron, a CIA officer who had once been tasked, as part of an illegal program run by Angleton, with reading Oswald’s mail. Efron’s name seemed to have been the sole remaining redaction in Oswald’s pre-assassination CIA file, but it had just been released. “People say there’s nothing significant in these files?” Morley told Baker. “Bingo! Here’s the guy who was reading Oswald’s mail, a detail they failed to share until now. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to think it’s suspicious.” (“I keep a very open mind,” Baker told me.) But Efron’s name had in fact been released a few times over the years in documents elsewhere. Paul Hoch, who is widely viewed as the doyen of serious assassination research, saw no meaning in the new release. “Knowing his name doesn’t add anything,” Hoch told me. Certain colleagues have begun referring to “good Jeff” from the first 25-odd years and “bad Jeff” from more recently.

On the one hand, Morley’s new willingness to speculate strikes me as a natural and reasonable evolution. Like all investigations, his has always been driven by hypothesis, and he has now been improving and refining his theory of CIA involvement for three decades. On the other, advancing a theory of the Kennedy assassination is what the nuts do. When I asked him what had caused the change in approach, he grew testy. “The evidence,” he said.

We were drinking coffee on the back porch of the house he would soon have to leave. “Do my critics have another explanation for what Joannides was doing and who he was working for?” he asked. “People bitch about my interpretation. I brought new facts to the table which they can’t explain, or have not explained, and those facts are indisputable.” The twinkly music of an ice-cream truck floated up from somewhere. “People will wonder, ‘Why did you devote all this time and effort to it?’” Morley said. “I was very careful because I’ve seen it drive so many people crazy. This is not going to drive me crazy.”

Despite his best efforts, since 2008 he has not extracted any further documentation on Joannides from the CIA. His FOIA lawsuit came to an end in 2018, when then–Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and a colleague ruled that his attorney, Lesar, would not have his fees paid by the CIA. The Agency and a lower court deserved “deference piled on deference,” the judges held. (On the same day, Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.) There are scarcely any CIA officers from Joannides’s time left to talk to. The DRE men have begun to die.

This summer, President Biden endorsed “Transparency Plans” proposed by the CIA and a handful of other agencies, effectively delegating oversight of any additional declassification to the agencies themselves. “He’s washing his hands of it,” Tunheim, the ARRB chair, told me. No clear mechanism exists to compel the release of any further documents, ever.

In its executive session of January 27, 1964, the Warren Commission took up a rumor, passed on by the attorney general of Texas, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been working undercover for the FBI or perhaps the CIA. The commissioners did not seem to take the claim very seriously, but they did wonder how one might verify such a thing. Having on hand a former director of the CIA, the group naturally sought his insights. Allen Dulles told his fellow commissioners, to their apparent disbelief, that one could not expect an intelligence service to be knowledgeable in such matters or truthful if it were.

The recruiting officer would of course know of an agent’s recruitment, Dulles said, but he might be the only one, and “he wouldn’t tell.”

“Wouldn’t tell it under oath?” asked Justice Warren.

“I wouldn’t think he would tell it under oath, no,” Dulles responded. “He ought not tell it under oath.” Nor could one expect to find any written record of such an agent. “The record might not be on paper,” Dulles said, or might consist of “hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant.” He clarified later, “You can’t prove what the facts are.”

The impulse to try may be stronger than reason. I asked the CIA if Oswald had ever been “an agent, asset, source, or contact” of the Agency. A spokesperson replied, in writing: “CIA believes all of its information known to be directly related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 has already been released. Likewise, we are not aware of any documents known to be directly related to Oswald that have not already been made part of the Collection.” I confess to finding it striking that the Agency did not say, “To the best of our knowledge, no.” Morley would call this, to use the Post ’s famous Watergate phrase, a “non-denial denial.” He would no doubt apply the same term to the Agency’s “decline to comment”s on my questions about why Joannides had concealed his role in 1963 from Congress and about whether the CIA had “cooperated fully and faithfully” with the Warren Commission, with the HSCA, or with the ARRB. But then, why take the Agency at its word, whatever it may be?

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that the CIA did generate a record of Agency activity around Oswald, and that this record was faithful, would it be reasonable to hope to one day find it? Though he has spent most of his adult life in precisely this pursuit, Morley told me he does not believe it would. During the 17-month gap in reporting on the DRE, for instance, he suspects Joannides produced regular reports and that those reports mentioned Oswald; he suspects the reports were sent directly to Helms at headquarters; and he suspects Helms destroyed them in 1973, when he left the Agency. There are in fact numerous instances of ostensibly “assassination-related” documents being irregularly destroyed. I find this devastating myself. Burning records is not an especially subtle method of concealing the past, but the bluntness is what is so distressing. If this is the way the CIA has been playing, the game has been all but hopeless from the start.

And yet the archive pulls at you, irresistible, irrational, a form of gravity upon the mind. I visited the National Archives in September. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection is held in a glassy modern building in the woods beyond the University of Maryland in College Park. The collection now holds about 6 million pages, kept in gray, five-inch, acid-free paperboard Hollinger boxes, maintained at constant temperature and humidity in stacks accessible only to archivists with the requisite security clearance. I sat in the airy reading room, afternoon sun streaming in over the treetops, and leafed through the CIA’s pre-assassination file on Oswald.

I found the October 10 cable, bearing Jane Roman’s name and reporting, falsely, that “LATEST HDQS INFO” was from May 1962. I found a small photograph of the Mexico Mystery Man. I found a typewritten letter addressed to Allen Dulles, dated November 11, 1963, from a man who wished to infiltrate the American Communist Party for the CIA; it was accompanied by a slip marked “FOR MR. ANGLETON” with a handwritten note reading, “Some useful ideas here — you will have many more,” and signed, “Allen.” I found, on paper gone gauzy and translucent with time, a memorandum to the Warren Commission from the CIA about redactions. There were things in the files sent over by the Agency that, in the Agency’s estimation, the commission did not need to know. “We have taken the liberty,” Richard Helms advised, “of blocking out these items.”

Earl Warren, born in the 19th century, died trusting in the good faith of men such as Helms, Angleton, and Dulles and of institutions such as theirs. “To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom.” Warren evidently found the idea of a plot of any sort too monstrous to contemplate. Dulles, of all people, had once tried to make him understand that the world wasn’t quite as honest as he thought. The proof was there, if only one could see it.

Correction: Brett Kavanaugh was a circuit judge in 2018. A previous version of this story misstated his role.

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Teaching the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s Assassination

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This Friday, Nov. 22, marks the 5 0th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . Because Kennedy’s life and death remain such a deep source of public fascination—and because he was such a central figure in 20th-century political history—many educators are viewing this as a significant teaching moment .

“Sometimes these opportunities are moments that can suddenly spark a student’s deep interest in learning about the historical past,” Gorman Lee, the social studies director in the Braintree, Mass., school district , told a local news service.

Some schools are going to impressive lengths to commemorate the historical significance of the day. Easton Middle School in Brockton, Mass., for example, is planning to start the school day with a moment of silence —after which students will read from some of Kennedy’s speeches over the school intercom. The Fort Worth school district in Texas, meanwhile, has already produced its own short documentary on the assassination featuring the recollections of former students, teachers, and administrators. (Kennedy had made a stop in Fort Worth on the day he was killed.)

Other, perhaps less elaborate teaching ideas include having students take a virtual tour of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas (the site from which Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have fired the shots that killed Kennedy) or watch portions of PBS’s recent American Experience documentary on Kennedy .

Some high school teachers say showing students the famous raw footage of the shooting can have a powerful impact. “It’s so graphic you can see the kids almost express anger,” Londaryl Perry, a history teacher at Northeast Academy for Health Sciences and Engineering in Oklahoma City, Okla., told NewsOK . “They’re trying to grasp why someone would do that to the president. ... They become more sensitive to what really has taken place and knowing that it’s real.”

Having students examine the evidence and various conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death can also generate engagement and critical thinking about the historical record. A history teacher at Bismark High School in North Dakota, for example, told the Bismark Tribune that he has his students write research papers defending their own theories on what happened .

Another teacher at the same school recommended the idea of posing “what if” scenarios about Kennedy’s presidency. For example, would the United States have become so deeply embroiled in Vietnam if Kennedy had lived? (That question remains hotly debated among historians .)

Teachers looking to give students a more personal sense of the historical moment might point to the reflections of Americans who were themselves in school on the day of the assassination , which took place right around lunch time on a Friday. One example from a 62-year-old Central New York man who was in 7th grade in a Catholic school at the time: “I remember kids crying. Not just quiet sobs kept to oneself, but weeping. I saw Dominican nuns break into tears. It deeply unnerved me. ... It felt as if the world had turned upside down.”

Photo: President Kennedy and the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy receive an enthusiastic welcome as they arrive at Love Field in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963. Later that day the president was assassinated as his motorcade moved through the city. —AP-File

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.

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Articles on JFK

Displaying 1 - 20 of 34 articles.

RFK Jr could act as a disrupter in the presidential election – taking votes from both sides

Thomas Gift , UCL

JFK’s unfinished legacy of peacemaking, a dream during the Cold War

Philip A. Goduti, Jr. , Quinnipiac University

Did Biden really steal the election? Students learn how to debunk conspiracy theories in this course

David Cason , University of North Dakota

JFK’s death 60 years on: what Australian condolence letters reveal about us

Jennifer Clark , University of Adelaide

JFK assassination 60 years on: seven experts on what to watch, see and read to understand the event and its consequences

Mark White , Queen Mary University of London ; Adam Koper , Cardiff University ; Emma Long , University of East Anglia ; Kaeten Mistry , University of East Anglia ; Oliver Gruner , University of Portsmouth ; Peter Ling , University of Nottingham , and Robert Cook , University of Sussex

JFK 60 years on: his leadership style and the reality behind the myths

Leo McCann , University of York and Simon Mollan , University of York

Good profits from bad news: How the Kennedy assassination helped make network TV news wealthy

Michael J. Socolow , University of Maine

The luck of the Irish might surface on St. Patrick’s Day, but it evades the Kennedy family, America’s best-known Irish dynasty

Mary Burke , University of Connecticut

JFK conspiracy theory is debunked in Mexico 57 years after Kennedy assassination

Gonzalo Soltero , Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

The great movie scenes: in JFK’s opening montage, Oliver Stone gets creative with history

Bruce Isaacs , University of Sydney

Don’t blame social media for conspiracy theories – they would still flourish without it

Joseph E Uscinski , University of Miami and Adam M Enders , University of Louisville

How the US government sold the Peace Corps to the American public

Wendy Melillo , American University School of Communication

Five films that explore what it feels like to truly grieve

Jimmy Hay , University of Bristol

Bob Dylan brings links between JFK assassination and coronavirus into stark relief

Aniko Bodroghkozy , University of Virginia

Consumer rights are worthless without enforcement

Anne Fleming , Georgetown University

Why women still earn a lot less than men

Michele Gilman , University of Baltimore

Invoking noble coal miners is a mainstay of American politics

Lou Martin , Chatham University

What better forensic science can reveal about the JFK assassination

Clifford Spiegelman , Texas A&M University

Can withering public trust in government be traced back to the JFK assassination?

Ryan Kellus Turner , St. Edward's University

Final JFK assassination files due for release – it will be a bumper year for conspiracy theorists

Ken Drinkwater , Manchester Metropolitan University and Neil Dagnall , Manchester Metropolitan University

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JFK Assassination Records

JFK Assassination Records - 2021 Additional Documents Release

Have a question about JFK Assassination Records?

Ask it on historyhub.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is processing previously withheld John F. Kennedy assassination-related records to comply with President Joe Biden’s Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on the Temporary Certification Regarding Disclosure of Information in Certain Records Related to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy , requiring disclosure of releasable records by December 15, 2021. The National Archives has posted records online to comply with these requirements.

Accessing the Release Files

The table below displays metadata about all the released documents. You can also  download the spreadsheet as an Excel file  (262 KB).