Former Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley dropped a bombshell today. The author of numerous books and articles on secret histories of the CIA, revealed:
“The CIA is hiding something terribly embarrassing, if not incriminating, about its role in the JFK story. In mid-1963, senior Agency officials approved a covert operation that used Lee Harvey Oswald for intelligence purposes, three months before Oswald allegedly shot and killed the president in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The CIA hid this operation from the Warren Commission in 1964, from the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, and from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1998. The explosive story is told in 44 JFK records that the CIA has “denied in full” to the public.
…I will explain what we know—and do not know—about the undisclosed Oswald operation at a press conference at the National Press Club tomorrow, Tuesday December 6.”
Over the years Morley has been at the forefront of new research into the Kennedy assassination. He has sued the CIA many times–trying to pry out of “the Agency” still-classified records on the assassination through Freedom of Information Act requests–but to little avail. Time and again, the courts have sided with the CIA, saying disclosing such information would endager “national security.”
Reminder: this is an event that happened 59 years ago. What could possibly be so explosive that they would need to protect “national security,” surrounding the assassination, this many decades later?
Now it looks as though Morley has found some hard answers, stumbling upon 44 records that show the CIA employing or using President Kennedy’s assassin in some intelligence operation, months before the assassin would go on to murder Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
For many years I, like Morley, have dived into the black hole that is the Kennedy assassination, looking for answers that still elude the American public. In 2015 I wrote an article The Oswald Files: What American Intelligence Knew About Kennedy’s Assassin where I demonstrated that American intelligence agencies had been tracking Lee Harvey Oswald for months leading up to Dallas. I also hinted at ties between Oswald and various individuals that wanted to see Kennedy dead–individuals connected to organized crime, anti-Castro Cuban militant organizations, and, yes, even individuals associated with the CIA.
So what could be this intelligence operation that Morley will reveal tomorrow? According to my research, there are two distinct possibilities.
The first is that, in the late summer of 1963, the CIA was thinking of countering and discrediting the activities, outside the United States, of a pro-Castro organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). It may be recalled that Oswald had set up a chapter of this organization in New Orleans that summer, a chapter in which he was suspiciously the only member.
In September, Oswald took a mysterious trip to Mexico City where he visited the Russian and Cuban embassies, seeking a visa to Havana. In each embassy, his attempts at securing this visa were rejected. He put on such a disturbance in the Cuban embassy that he had to be forcefully ejected.
Meanwhile, his visits to both embassies were recorded by secret CIA surveillance operations. Photos of Oswald were taken and audio recordings of his later calls to the embassies were made. After the assassination in Dallas, the CIA would publically (and falsely) say that these photos and recordings had been accidentally destroyed.
In the years since, speculation has been that Oswald was, in some capacity, used in this CIA operation of countering and discrediting the activities of the FPCC outside of the United States. This would demonstrate that the CIA had a working relationship with Oswald–that they were using him as an asset–in the months before JFK was killed.
The other possibility that Morley may have discovered is much more ominous.
The Chief of Cuban Operations of the Western Hemisphere Division at CIA, a man named David Atlee Phillips, was seen talking to Oswald in Dallas two months before Oswald assassinated Kennedy. This would demonstrate a direct relationship between a high-level CIA official and the president’s accused assassin.
Near the end of his life, Phillips wrote an unpublished manuscript that had the protagonist, based entirely on himself and his life, stating:
"I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper's rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep. Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I'm not sure, and I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President's assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."
I guess we will know soon enough which possibility is true thanks to the efforts of Jefferson Morely.