The newly released files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 do not prove, as some allege, that the CIA was behind the murder. Yet they do show that the CIA might at least be partly responsible for it, and that agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and the halls of Congress were the scene of several crimes, some of them felonies.

The crimes were perjuries during sworn testimony from the late James Jesus Angleton, former head of counterintelligence for the CIA; and agency employees including Director John McCone and Deputy Director Richard Helms. The intelligence agency that grew out of the World War II Office of Strategic Services, first headed by deep stater Allen Dulles, was, as many believe, a rogue operation. 

As JFK assassination expert and former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley wrote on his Substack, “the fact pattern emerging from the new JFK documents shows that a small clique in CIA counterintelligence was responsible for JFK’s assassination.” Morley doesn’t argue that a CIA agent pulled the trigger. But he does say the agency was “responsible for, or complicit in” Kennedy’s assassination.

Beyond those files are others that raise questions about Angleton’s link to Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, and the possibility that he transferred nuclear secrets to Israel, having supposedly been exposed by Tad Szulc of The New York Times. CIA agents believed Szulc was a communist and likely Red agent, which raises the possibility that his work was at best propaganda and at worst outright Soviet disinformation to wreck Angleton and poison the U.S. relationship with Israel.

One problem with the last document dump is its sheer volume — some 20,000 pages, as Morley observed. It might take researchers years to fully digest, catalog, and tease out their implications in full.

CIA plot? Kennedy assassination expert Jefferson Morley says the CIA was “responsible for, or complicit in” the president’s murder on November 22, 1963. (AP Images)

The Latest

Though new documents have surfaced, a previously released-but-redacted document that fingered the CIA as responsible hit social media almost immediately. The declassified document details an incendiary allegation from CIA agent John Garrett “Gary” Underhill, Jr. that appeared in Ramparts magazine in 1967. “The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry,” the document says, reprising Ramparts:

He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it suicide.

The Ramparts article also noted that Underhill was one of the “un-people” the CIA used for assignments, and that he was friends with a man called Samuel Cummings, the chieftain of Interarmco, an arms dealer that numbered the CIA among its customers. Another customer: Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. That just happened to have been the store from which Lee Harvey Oswald purchased the Carcano rifle with which he supposedly shot Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository as the president’s limousine motored through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

“The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook,” the article continued:

They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics and other contraband, and manipulating political intrigue to serve its own ends. Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could “blow the whistle on it.” Although the friends had always known Underhill to be perfectly rational and objective, they at first didn’t take his account seriously. “I think to me the main reason was,” explained the husband, “that we couldn’t believe that the CIA could contain a corrupt element every bit as ruthless — and more efficient — as the mafia.”

The report said Underhill’s death was not “convincing,” the article continued. A writer friend who toiled at The New Republic found Underhill shot behind the left ear, which was “odd,” the friend said, because Underhill was right-handed. The writer believed the gun had a silencer. Neighbors didn’t hear a gunshot. The article claimed that the CIA was “honeycombed with self-contained cliques operating without any real central control.” Thus, Underhill’s “chilling” tale was hardly beyond belief.

In January 1968, Ramparts published a 25-page report about the assassination investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who speculated that a CIA-backed right-wing cabal murdered Kennedy. Garrison tried a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, for the assassination. A jury acquitted Shaw less than an hour after the trial concluded. Hollywood director Oliver Stone turned Garrison’s book On the Trail of Assassins — which claimed the Warren Commission lied about the murder — into the film JFK, which in turn led to the passage of the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

After Underhill’s suspicious death, “when an old friend wrote to Underhill’s widow asking about his demise, the reply came from an official of a now defunct Washington [company], Falcon Aeronautics, Inc., which smacks of having been an ad hoc CIA front,” the second Ramparts piece reported:

The official dismissed Underhill’s allegations with the comment that they were “similar to those flights of his imagination which he had during the last year or so of his life.”

The difference between the redacted Underhill document and the new one is information about Cummings, a CIA agent since 1950 who purchased arms for the agency to distribute to “resistance elements behind the Iron Curtain.” In 1954, Cummings became the “principal agent” for Interarmco, which the CIA owned and sold to Cummings. Other details are mundane.

Lies to Warren Commission, House Committee

The Underhill story segues to Morley’s remarkable findings thanks to the latest documents release. An FBI memorandum to top FBI official Alan Belmont, dated January 22, 1958, details the CIA’s Project Hunter, a massive mail-surveillance operation managed by Angleton. He told the FBI that it was “one of the biggest and most secret operations of the CIA.” Angleton confessed to the bureau that 200-300 agents were monitoring mail at a cost of $1 million. And he would lose his job if CIA higher-ups learned that he spilled the beans. CIA man Reuben Efron managed the surveillance.

That operation vacuumed correspondence between the Soviet Union and the United States, including Oswald’s, whose extensive CIA file was released in 2023. When Angleton testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations on October 5, 1978, he claimed that the agency had never monitored the would-be assassin.

In fact, “the CIA’s complete pre-assassination Oswald file runs to 185 pages,” Morley told the U.S. House Oversight Committee on April 1, 2025:

In the fall of 1963, all this information was held in one place: the office of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, not five miles away from the Kennedy White House.…

Another newly declassified document showed that Angleton lied under oath about what he knew about the mail surveillance of Oswald. He was responding to rapid fire questions from Michael Goldsmith, counsel for the HSCA.

“To your knowledge, was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project,” Goldsmith asked.

Angleton: No.

Goldsmith: Do you know Rueben Efron?

Angleton: Yes.

Goldsmith: Do you know what responsibilities he had?

Angleton: Mail intercept.

Continued Morley to the committee:

Angleton lied in answering because his answers to the second and third questions was truthful. The newly declassified memos show that

1) [he] created the “mail coverage” program.

2) he ran it from 1953 on.

3) he hired Reuben Efron for the job of deputy director of the project.

4) he ordered mail surveillance of Oswald in November 1959.

5) In July 1962, Efron reported to his superiors on Oswald’s latest correspondence.

The combination of the newly declassified documents makes the conclusion unavoidable: Angleton lied under oath about the mail coverage of Oswald.

Morley also showed that Richard Helms, deputy director of the CIA when Kennedy was hit, lied to the Warren Commission, as did his boss, Director John McCone.

McCone told the commission that the agency had “little information” in its files, with Helms adding that crucial information was “probably minimal.” Morley’s testimony about Helms and McCone comports with a CIA report that was declassified in 2014. It concluded that McCone plotted a “benign cover-up” because he hid important information from the commission, including material about the CIA’s attempts to murder Castro with the help of the Mafia. McCone said he would “handle the whole (commission) business myself, directly.” McCone saw to it that the agency’s cooperation with the commission was “passive, reactive and selective.” 

Yet the agency, again, had assembled more than 180 pages for its Oswald dossier.

“The record now shows that the FBI had sent 12 reports on Oswald to the CIA between 1960 and 1963, two of which landed on Angleton’s desk in mid-November 1963,” Morley testified. “Angleton’s aide, Jane Roman, initialed routing slips on November 14 and 15 1963, indicating the reports had been delivered to the counterintelligence chief.”

Coverup: CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton lied when he testified that the agency did not have extensive surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, Oswald was the target of the CIA’s surveillance of mail to and from the Soviet Union. (AP Images)

So those are two CIA deceptions to the Warren Commission about the assassination. A third, revealed 20 years ago, Morley told the panel, came from George Joannides, an agent detailed to the assassinations committee to get requested CIA files.

Chief of covert operations in Miami, Florida, “he ran a Cuban student group (known by the Spanish acronym DRE) that was funded by the CIA under a covert action program codenamed AMSPELL,” Morley testified:

His agents in New Orleans and Miami engaged in political action against Oswald’s pro-Castro activism, and generated propaganda about him both before and after Kennedy was killed.

Yet Joannides told an assassination panel investigator that he knew nothing of the program. His lie surfaced in 2001, which prompted the late Robert G. Blakey, chief counsel to the panel, to accuse Joannides of criminal obstruction in an interview with PBS’s Frontline.

Said Blakey:

I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE. 

That the Agency would put a “material witness” in as a “filter” between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat-out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would cooperate with the investigation.

The lies from Helms, Joannides, and Angleton, Morley told the Oversight members, add up to one thing: a coverup. “One false statement might be incompetence,” he said:

A second false statement could be construed as CYA for the first. But three false statements by top CIA officers about Kennedy’s killer? Three makes a pattern, a pattern of malfeasance of institutional misconduct.

Thus, Morley concluded to the Oversight panel, the three CIA men were either “responsible for, or complicit in, JFK’s death, either by criminal negligence or covert action.”

Speaking to Glenn Greenwald on his System Update podcast, Morley recalled that tension in the Kennedy administration over his Cuba policy climaxed in the Oval Office just days before Kennedy was murdered. “Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy and four days before the assassination Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance,” Morley told the podcaster:

And when you read Kennedy’s account of it, it’s hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened.… [T]hink about that. The … Deputy CIA director is demonstrating to the president [that] your security perimeter is not secure.… That’s four days before President Kennedy was killed. 

The two men also wondered about Dulles’ landing on the Warren Commission. After all, Kennedy had fired him for the botched attempt to overthrow the communist regime of Fidel Castro with the invasion at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961.

Jack Ruby, Jolly West, and MKUltra

Another document that shows a CIA link to the assassination — unconnected to the latest release but available in documents stored at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — concerns Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. He was the notorious CIA psychiatrist who helped run the agency’s illegal MKUltra program. That renegade operation involved dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSD, among other drugs, and using torture, including sleep deprivation and sexual abuse, to extract information “from presumably unwilling subjects,” as West explained in a memorandum about MKUltra to CIA chieftain Sidney Gottlieb. He began the project on orders from the first CIA director, Allen Dulles.

As Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring reported in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,West also proposed “techniques for implanting false information in particular subjects … or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” West also “wanted to reverse someone’s belief system without his knowledge, and make it stick,” the two writers explained.

That relates to Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner and mob associate who famously murdered suspect Oswald in front of a camera two days after the Kennedy assassination. Ruby claimed he couldn’t remember killing Oswald when cops pounced on him, Chaos explained. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” he asked of the cops who restrained him. Ruby was, they said, in a “fugue state.”

MKUltra’s West asked the judge who empaneled Ruby’s grand jury, Joe B. Brown, if he, West, could examine Ruby, O’Neill and Piepenbring wrote. Brown said no. When Ruby was sentenced to death, he fired his attorney and hired another: lawyer-psychiatrist Hubert Winston Smith. He brought in West. Given his studies of brainwashed American prisoners of war, Smith wrote, the two writers revealed, “West could use his ‘highly qualified’ skills as a hypnotist and administrator of the ‘truth serum sodium pentothal’ to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting.”

The night before West examined him, Ruby rammed his head into a wall, a vain attempt to kill himself. The wound only required a “little merthiolate.” After West interviewed Ruby, the MKUltra psychiatrist wrote that Ruby was insane. “Last night the patient became convinced that all the Jews in America were being slaughtered,” West wrote, in a “retaliation against him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who is responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” 

Continued West:

Somehow, through an awful mistake, and the distortions and misunderstandings derived from his murder trial, the president’s assassination and its aftermath were now being blamed on him. Thus, he himself was now also the cause of the massacre of “25 million innocent people.” He had seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail; he could still hear the screams. He had seen and heard many other similar horrors. The orders for this terrible “pogrom” must have come from Washington to permit the police to carry out the mass murders without federal troops being called out or involved.…

At this time, Mr. Ruby is obviously psychotic. He is completely preoccupied with his delusions of persecution of the Jews on his account. He feels hopeless, worthless, and guilty because he is to blame for the mass murders of his own people. The experiences of last night are not only grossly delusional, but include auditory and visual hallucinations as well. His emotions are abnormal; feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, suspiciousness and despair are expressed in various proportions. Often the affect is inappropriate to the ideas accompanying them.…

Jack Ruby is technically insane at this time. He is not now capable of cooperating intelligently in his own defense.

West diagnosed Ruby with “acute psychotic reaction” with a “paranoid state.” Yet O’Neill and Piepenbring also offered other remarkable facts relative to the West-Ruby interview. Going forward after West’s visit, “every doctor” who examined Ruby found him “delusional.” But West wasn’t the first headshrinker who examined him. Other psychiatrists before West who examined Ruby — “nearly half a dozen” — found him “essentially compos mentis.” That means he was sane. That obvious observation suggests that West — again, the MKUltra operative — drugged Ruby and drove him insane, or that Ruby was an MKUltra robot on a mission. Another story the two writers reprised explains.

On July 4, 1954, Jimmy Shaver, an airman at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas — where Jolly West was stationed — was charged with the rape and murder of a three-year-old girl, Chere Jo Horton. After her disappearance from a car outside a bar, where her parents left her to go in for a drink, a search party found another car “with her underwear hanging from the door.” They eventually found Shaver, “shirtless, covered in blood and scratches,” the writers explained:

Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how’d he gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped.

Two months after his arrest, Shaver still remembered nothing. West hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium thiopental. He confessed to murdering Horton after myriad leading questions. Shaver had been temporarily insane the night he supposedly murdered Horton, West said, but afterward was “quite sane.” Maybe that is why Shaver maintained his innocence until he was executed, after retrial, on his 33rd birthday in 1958.

What no one in the trial except West knew, however, was that he had conducted MKUltra experiments on “unwitting patients” at Lackland. All the records for patients at the base hospital in 1954 appeared in its master index except those with surnames beginning with “Sa” through “St.”

“Articles and court testimony,” O’Neill and Piepenbring wrote, “described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesia and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland Airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

Recall what Ruby said after the Oswald murder when cops subdued him: “What am I doing here? What are you guys jumping on me for?” He was in a “fugue state.” Or, like Shaver, “dazed” and “trance-like.”

Fall guy: Lee Harvey Oswald, according to the “official” narrative, was the lone gunman who killed Kennedy. Many have doubted this over the decades since the assassination, and now the release of the JFK files indicate that there is much more to the story.   (AP Images)

Szulc, Angleton, and Nuclear Secrets

Other documents also raise questions about Angleton. His lie to the House Assassinations Committee isn’t the only intrigue that might link him to the Kennedy assassination. As with the renewed interest in the already-released Underhill documents, the latest release raised again previously released testimony of Angleton and New York Times reporter Tad Szulc before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — the famous Church Committee of the 1970s. The committee not only investigated CIA assassination plots but also disclosed the doings of MKUltra.

The committee called Szulc to testify on June 10, 1975 about a forthcoming article in Penthouse magazine. Szulc disclosed the CIA’s transfer of nuclear secrets, including fissionable plutonium, to Israel. “Angleton told me that essentially this information was correct,” Szulc told the committee about such an operation in the 1960s:

The CIA delivered to the Israeli government classified information, technical knowledge know-how, the services of distinguished physicists and fissionable material in the form of plutonium to assist in the development of an Israeli nuclear weapon at the Dimona Israeli testing grounds.

Szulc told the committee that Angleton was “rather taken aback” with Szulc’s revelations. Still, he could “confirm it with two corrections.” The transfer occurred in the late 1950s after the Suez Canal War, and no fissionable plutonium went to the budding nuclear power.

When Angleton testified on June 19, 1975, he denied telling Szulc any such thing. The reporter’s claims are “false,” “totally false,” and “absolutely false,” the former CIA counterintelligence chief testified.

Other JFK documents show that Angleton was thick as thieves with Israeli intelligence. That led social media to explode with accusations that Angleton did, indeed, transfer the nuclear secrets. More supposed evidence that Angleton might not only have transferred the nuclear materials but also been working for the Mossad is Israel’s honoring the former CIA man with a monument unveiled at a secret ceremony after he died. That link, some say, strongly suggests that the Israelis assassinated Kennedy because he had insisted on inspecting Israel’s nuclear facilities and did not want Israel to become a nuclear power.

Yet as close to Israel as Angleton might have been, neither Szulc’s nor Angleton’s testimonies show that he transferred nuclear secrets. As well, an FBI memorandum dated February 14, 1977 and released in the latest batch suggests that Szulc might have concocted a yarn to destroy Angleton. The memo fingers Szulc, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, as a possible Red agent. After the exposure of the Philby-Burgess-Maclean spy ring that penetrated British intelligence, Angleton greatly feared a similar security breach inside the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Exposing Angleton as an Israeli agent of influence might destroy him, and remove the main obstacle to Soviet penetration of U.S. intelligence.

The memorandum reported that Szulc was naturalized in 1954 by a “special bill” but “has been under suspicion as a hostile foreign agent since 1948 when the FBI reported (apparently from a British source) that he was a Communist.”

In 1959 in Santiago, Chile, he falsely told a CIA agent that he was “cleared” to interview agency sources. “This was the first of many such incidents in Latin America, and resulted in a warning to all Latin American Stations to beware of SZULC and his efforts to interview Agency personnel.” Szulc’s lie ended in surveillance given that his attempts to interview CIA sources might blow their cover. 

“By 1960 his reputation was so widespread that several different CIA officers called for an investigation that would clear up ‘once and for all’ his suspected connections with a hostile intelligence service,” the memo says:

He was in frequent contact with Communist Party leaders and functionaries throughout Latin America, constantly sought out and elicited information from U.S. Embassy officers, frequently mentioning the name of other CIA officers with whom he was acquainted.

Whether Szulc was a communist spy was never proved, but he remained a strong suspect, among other reasons, because of what British sources told the CIA. A source in Rio de Janeiro “reported that he was ‘directed’ by the Polish regime in Warsaw to seek employment in U.S. journalistic circles,” the memo says:

This report runs like a thread throughout his file.… This report and other questions that arose early in his career (his contacts with a cousin who was a Press Attache in the Polish Embassy in Rio) were, however, just the earliest elements that aroused suspicion.

Szulc’s reportage — undoubtedly including the Angleton allegations in Penthouse — were such that a “senior operations officer stated in 1975 that a Soviet agent could not be more beneficial to the Soviets and the Communist cause than SZULC has been.” From there, the memorandum lists the reason to suspect Szulc, including his passing information to the Polish delegation in Rio and his pro-Castro and anti-CIA stories.

“The case against Tad SZULC as a foreign agent is weak,” the memorandum says:

However, his most recent activities are entirely consonant with the view that he has already served the Soviets well and can end his career as an overt propagandist.

Angleton died in 1987; Szulc in 2001. One or both took their secret to the grave.

But now that more Kennedy files have been disinterred, perhaps Americans might get the full story about the assassination, even if they learn only that Oswald did murder Kennedy thanks to the CIA’s willful negligence and hugger mugger.