Ever sat in a bar or at a family dinner and heard someone go off about how the "Company" finally got him? It’s a classic. Honestly, it’s basically the American national pastime. For over sixty years, the idea that JFK was assassinated by the CIA has morphed from a fringe whisper into something a majority of the public actually believes. But when you move past the Oliver Stone movie scripts and the wild-eyed Reddit threads, what do we actually have? We have a mountain of declassified paper, a lot of "lost" files, and a history of the CIA doing some very shady stuff in the 1960s.
Why the CIA Still Gets Blamed for 1963
It didn't just come out of nowhere. You've gotta look at the vibe in 1963. Kennedy was kind of at war with his own intelligence community. After the Bay of Pigs disaster in '61, he famously wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds." He fired Allen Dulles, the legendary CIA director. Then, Dulles ended up on the Warren Commission—the very group tasked with investigating Kennedy's death. Talk about a conflict of interest.
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The "rogue agent" theory is usually where people land. It's the idea that a small group of mid-level officers, guys who spent their days training Cuban exiles to kill Castro, decided the President was a traitor for not invading Cuba. They had the skills. They had the untraceable weapons. They had the "plausible deniability" mindset.
The Oswald Connection: Was He or Wasn't He?
Lee Harvey Oswald is the middle of this whole mess. The Warren Report says he was a loner. A loser. But the files released in the 2020s, including the big 2025 dump from the National Archives, show the CIA was watching him way more closely than they ever admitted.
They knew he was in Mexico City weeks before the hit. They knew he was talking to Soviet and Cuban spies. Yet, somehow, the most scrutinized man in the hemisphere just happens to get a job on a parade route and takes a shot? It feels off. Jefferson Morley, a journalist who has spent decades suing the CIA for records, points out that the Agency’s "stonewalling" is what fuels the fire. If they have nothing to hide, why are they still fighting to keep 60-year-old memos under wraps?
The House Select Committee and the "Probable Conspiracy"
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) actually did something crazy. They disagreed with the Warren Commission. They concluded that Kennedy was "probably" killed as a result of a conspiracy.
They didn't explicitly say the CIA did it. However, they were pretty brutal about how the Agency handled the investigation. They called the CIA "deficient" in sharing information. Basically, the CIA didn't tell the investigators about their own plots to kill Fidel Castro. Since those plots often involved the same people Oswald was hanging around with, that’s a pretty big "oopsie" to leave out.
The E. Howard Hunt "Confession"
You might’ve heard about E. Howard Hunt. He was a career CIA officer and one of the Watergate "plumbers." Before he died in 2007, his sons claimed he made a deathbed confession. He supposedly sketched out a "Big Event" involving LBJ and CIA operatives like Cord Meyer and David Atlee Phillips.
Is it true? Hard to say. Hunt was a professional liar by trade. His own son, Saint John Hunt, has championed the story, but many historians think it was just a final "spy game" from a man who loved the drama. Still, it’s one of those pieces of the puzzle that keeps the JFK assassinated by CIA theory alive in 2026.
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What the New Records Actually Show
As of March 2025, the National Archives released tens of thousands of previously redacted pages. We didn't find a memo signed by the Director saying "Kill the President today."
What we did find was a pattern of "active surveillance" on Oswald that the CIA denied for decades. We found out about George Joannides, a CIA officer who was secretly running the anti-Castro group Oswald was fighting with in New Orleans. The CIA didn't tell the HSCA that Joannides was involved with that group while Joannides was actually acting as the CIA’s liaison to the investigators. That’s not just a mistake. That’s a cover-up of the process itself.
Practical Steps for the Curious
If you want to actually get to the bottom of this without losing your mind, you’ve gotta look at the primary sources. Don't just watch YouTube.
- Read the HSCA Final Report: It’s more nuanced than the Warren Report and acknowledges the "probable conspiracy" angle.
- Check the Mary Ferrell Foundation: This is the gold standard for JFK database research. They have the 2025 releases digitized.
- Differentiate between "The CIA" and "CIA People": Most serious researchers think if the Agency was involved, it wasn't an official "order." It would have been a rogue operation by men who felt they were saving the country from a President they viewed as soft on Communism.
The reality of the JFK assassinated by CIA theory isn't about finding a smoking gun anymore. It’s about the "smoke." We see 60 years of obfuscation, hidden files, and misleading testimony. Whether it was a direct hit or just a massive intelligence failure they were too embarrassed to admit, the Agency’s fingerprints are all over the aftermath.
For anyone looking to dive deeper, start by comparing the CIA’s internal "routing slips" on Oswald from 1963 against their 1964 testimony to the Warren Commission. The discrepancies there are where the real story lives. Focus on the New Orleans period of 1963, specifically the connections between Oswald and the DRE (Directorate to Rescue Cuba). That's where the overlap between "lone nut" and "intelligence asset" gets the most blurry.