Sixty-odd years. That’s how long we’ve been chewing on the same bone. On November 22, 1963, a president died in Dallas, and almost immediately, the "lone nut" narrative started to feel thin to a lot of people. You’ve probably seen the Oliver Stone movie or stayed up too late reading reddit threads about the "grassy knoll." But if you actually dig into the declassified files—especially the stuff released as recently as 2023 and 2025—the story isn't just about a guy with a rifle. It's about a messy, high-stakes civil war inside the American government.
The theory that JFK was murdered by CIA operatives isn't just for folks in tinfoil hats anymore. It's a topic discussed by serious historians, former senators, and even some federal judges.
Why?
Because the CIA didn't just "fail" to protect Kennedy. They spent the next six decades aggressively hiding what they knew about Lee Harvey Oswald. When an agency built on "plausible deniability" gets caught in a sixty-year lie, people naturally start asking who really pulled the trigger.
The Breaking Point: Why the CIA Hated Kennedy
To understand the motive, you have to look at the vibe in 1961. The Bay of Pigs was a total disaster. Kennedy felt the CIA had lied to him, trying to maneuver him into a full-scale invasion of Cuba that he never wanted.
He was livid.
He famously told his inner circle he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." He didn't just talk, though. He fired the legendary CIA Director Allen Dulles. He started slashing their budget. For the old-guard cold warriors at Langley, Kennedy wasn't just a boss they didn't like; he was a "traitor" who was getting soft on Communism and dismantling their power base.
Imagine being a high-ranking intelligence officer in 1963. You believe JFK is going to pull out of Vietnam, shake hands with Castro, and neuter your agency. In that world, the president looks like a national security threat.
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The George Joannides Revelation
For decades, the CIA told the Warren Commission that they barely knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was before the shooting. They called their interest in him "routine."
That was a lie.
Recent document dumps confirmed that a CIA officer named George Joannides was actually running a program in 1963 that monitored and even funded a group Oswald was tangling with in New Orleans—the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE).
Basically, the CIA was "handling" the very people Oswald was interacting with just months before the assassination. Even weirder? Years later, when Congress formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to find the truth, the CIA appointed Joannides as the liaison to the committee. They didn't tell Congress that Joannides was the guy who actually ran the Oswald-related operations in 1963.
They put the guy they should have been investigating in charge of the investigation.
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and one of the most respected voices on this, points out that this wasn't an accident. It was a deliberate "stonewall." When people talk about JFK murdered by CIA interests, they’re looking at these fingerprints—the constant, systematic destruction and withholding of files that should have been public decades ago.
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Oswald: The "Patsy" or the Project?
"I’m just a patsy."
Oswald shouted that to reporters while being paraded through the Dallas police station. Most people dismiss it as the ramblings of a killer, but historians like Fredrik Logevall and researchers like Gaeton Fonzi have noted that Oswald's biography reads like a CIA "shelf personality."
He was a Marine radar operator at Atsugi Air Base in Japan—a top-secret CIA U-2 spy plane base. Then he "defected" to the Soviet Union and somehow was allowed to just... come back to the U.S. during the height of the Cold War without being tossed in jail? It doesn't add up.
There is also the Mexico City trip. Six weeks before Dallas, Oswald was reportedly in Mexico visiting the Soviet and Cuban embassies. We now know the CIA was watching him there with cameras and wiretaps. Yet, they claimed they didn't see him as a threat.
The Cover-Up is the Evidence
You don't have to find a "smoking gun" memo that says "Kill the President" to see the CIA's involvement. You just have to look at the behavior.
- Allen Dulles, the man JFK fired, was somehow appointed to the Warren Commission to "investigate" the murder.
- The HSCA concluded in 1979 that there was a "probable conspiracy," yet the CIA continued to block the release of over 10,000 documents until the late 2010s and 2020s.
- The "Executive Action" Program: We know the CIA was actively trying to kill foreign leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro using Mafia hitmen at the exact time Kennedy was killed.
If they had the capability, the motive, and the professional assassins on payroll, the leap to "domestic target" isn't as big as the government wants you to think.
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What Happens Now?
Honestly, we might never get a televised confession from a 100-year-old spook. But the "official" story is deader than it's ever been. In early 2025 and 2026, new pushes for full declassification have highlighted that the National Archives still hasn't released everything.
If you want to understand the JFK murdered by CIA theory, don't look for one magic bullet. Look at the institutional resistance. Look at the fact that even in 2026, the government is still arguing that some of these 60-year-old papers are too "sensitive" for you to read.
Actionable Next Steps
If you’re looking to go deeper than the surface-level documentaries, here is how you can actually verify this stuff yourself:
- Search the Mary Ferrell Foundation database: This is the "gold standard" for actual scanned JFK documents. Look up "George Joannides" or "Operation Northwoods."
- Read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James Douglass: It’s widely considered the most balanced look at the motive behind a potential state-sponsored hit.
- Check the National Archives (NARA) JFK Dashboard: They semi-regularly post status updates on which redactions have been lifted.
- Follow the work of Jefferson Morley: His blog, JFK Facts, is the most up-to-date source on the legal battles regarding the final 1% of withheld files.
The truth isn't buried in a swamp; it's buried in a filing cabinet. The more we look at the CIA's actions leading up to that day in Dallas, the harder it is to believe they were just bystanders.