Did the CIA kill Kennedy?

After the Bay of Pigs failed in April 1961, Kennedy pushed out the men at the top of the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, his deputy Charles Cabell, and Richard Bissell, who ran covert action. [4] He kept the covert war on Cuba going, though, under Operation Mongoose. [1]

On 30 June 1961 his aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sent him a memo titled “CIA Reorganization.” It said that “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”, meaning CIA under diplomatic cover. In Paris the memo counted 123 CIA people; in Chile, 11 of the 13 political officers were CIA. It noted the agency had some 1,500 people under State Department cover. [2][3]

The line most often quoted, that Kennedy vowed to “splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”, first appeared in a New York Times article of 25 April 1966, attributed to an unnamed official. No named witness has ever confirmed he said it. [4]

The memo had been public for years with passages blacked out. On the evening of 18 March 2025, under President Trump’s 23 January directive, the National Archives released a large batch of records, 2,182 records and 63,400 pages by the National Security Archive’s count, and the memo came out whole. The Archives kept posting more as they were digitized. See the 2025–26 releases. [2][4]

The newly visible passages were about cover: how many CIA officers sat in embassies under diplomatic titles, and how that let the agency run its own foreign policy. The National Security Archive set the old and new copies side by side. [1][2]

At the 1 April 2025 House hearing, researcher James DiEugenio called it “a popular example” of how the CIA had hidden information: two of the most important pages, he said, had been censored. [3]

The Church committee found in 1976 that the CIA never told the Warren Commission about its plots to kill Castro, including those run through mob figures, and that the people investigating the assassination were kept in the dark about them. [1][2]

The CIA’s own 1973 list of possibly illegal activities, the “Family Jewels”, records that in March 1962 Director John McCone, “under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,” agreed to tap the phones of two columnists, and that President Kennedy was personally briefed on a break-in operation against the French embassy in 1962 and 1963. The agency’s secrets ran in both directions. [4]

In 1978 the CIA made George Joannides its liaison to the House committee. In 1963 he had been chief of covert action at the Miami station, running the exile program whose agents publicized Oswald’s pro-Castro activity. Jefferson Morley testified in 2025 that Joannides blocked any investigation of those contacts. See the Joannides file. [3]

On 15 December 2022 Tucker Carlson told Fox viewers he had asked a source with access to the withheld files whether the CIA was involved. “The answer is yes,” he quoted the source. “I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” He blamed Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, for persuading Trump to hold files back in 2017. He also raised the April 1964 jail visit to Jack Ruby by the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, who found Ruby “technically insane.” [1][2]

In May 2023 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s nephew, said there was “overwhelming evidence” that the CIA was involved in his uncle’s death. [3][4]

On 1 April 2025 Jefferson Morley testified to a House task force under oath. “Three false statements by top CIA officers about Kennedy’s accused killer, that is a pattern,” he said. He named Richard Helms, James Angleton and George Joannides. [5]

The House committee, which concluded in 1979 that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”, also concluded that “the Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination.” [1]

It reached that view after reviewing Oswald’s CIA file, the agency’s Mexico City records and the claims that Oswald was a CIA agent, which it rejected. [1][2]

The Church committee did not try to say who killed Kennedy. It concluded that the CIA and FBI investigations of the assassination were deficient and that facts that might have affected the Warren Commission’s inquiry were withheld. [3]