The name was George Joannides, and for decades the CIA insisted he was irrelevant, peripheral, or effectively nonexistent.

That story collapsed in 2025 when Joannides’s full personnel file finally surfaced, revealing a contradiction so stark it forces a reexamination of how power protects itself in America.

In 1963, Joannides was not a desk analyst or distant bureaucrat.

He was deputy chief of psychological warfare at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s largest station outside Langley, a sprawling Miami hub running covert operations against Fidel Castro.

Hundreds of officers.

Thousands of Cuban exile assets.

Millions of dollars flowing through front organizations.

And Joannides was right in the middle of it.

One of those organizations was the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, the DRE, a militant anti-Castro student group presented publicly as an independent exile movement.

In reality, it was funded, supervised, and guided by the CIA.

Every leaflet, every radio broadcast, every public statement passed through American intelligence oversight.

Joannides was their case officer.

He didn’t use his real name.

He used an alias.

Howard.

That detail matters more than anything that follows.

Because in August 1963, in New Orleans, a former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald clashed publicly with members of the DRE while handing out pro-Castro leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

There was a street fight.

Arrests.

A radio debate that aired Oswald’s voice, his ideology, his face, his name.

A tape of that broadcast was sent directly to Joannides at JM/WAVE.

Three months before President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer overseeing anti-Castro propaganda had received recordings and reports involving the man who would be accused of killing the president.

When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the DRE moved instantly.

Within hours, they were calling reporters, framing Oswald as a Castro agent, pushing a narrative that leapt from Miami to Washington overnight.

Headlines appeared the very next day claiming Oswald had tried to infiltrate anti-Castro groups.

This was not spontaneous outrage.

It was coordinated messaging from a CIA-funded operation, cleared through its case officer, George Joannides.

The first conspiracy narrative of the JFK assassination was born within twenty-four hours—and it came from a U.S.

intelligence-backed propaganda channel.

The Warren Commission never heard this story.

When the CIA testified in 1964, Deputy Director Richard Helms assured investigators the agency had only minimal, routine knowledge of Oswald.

No mention of JM/WAVE.

No mention of the DRE.

No mention of tapes, confrontations, or a case officer named Howard.

The commission concluded Oswald acted alone.

The CIA closed its files.

The country moved on.

For fourteen years, that silence held.

Then came the 1970s.

Vietnam, Watergate, and a national reckoning with institutional dishonesty.

Congress reopened the Kennedy investigation through the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

This time, investigators had subpoena power and a mandate not to be misled.

The CIA needed a liaison—someone who understood classified operations, someone trusted, someone who could manage what Congress saw and what remained buried.

In 1978, they brought George Joannides out of retirement.

This is where the story stops being merely disturbing and becomes almost surreal.

The CIA appointed the very officer who had overseen Oswald-related propaganda in 1963 to act as gatekeeper for Congress’s investigation into that same assassination.

Joannides controlled document flow.

He answered questions.

He assured investigators there was no CIA relationship with the DRE.

When asked directly about a mysterious case officer named Howard, Joannides said no such person could be found.

The man who was Howard told Congress that Howard didn’t exist.

HSCA investigators like Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez ran headfirst into a wall.

Files arrived late, redacted, or not at all.

Requests stalled.

Leads evaporated.

Years later, Hardway would testify that Joannides systematically obstructed their investigation.

At the time, they didn’t know why.

They had been assured—falsely—that Joannides had no connection to the events under review.

The HSCA concluded in 1978 that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy, but they could not identify who was responsible.

They criticized the CIA for lack of cooperation but stopped short of accusing it of direct involvement.

Joannides retired quietly in 1979.

Two years later, the CIA awarded him the Career Intelligence Medal.

The citation praised his work with Cuban exile groups and—remarkably—his “outstanding” performance as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

He was rewarded for stonewalling Congress.

Joannides died in 1990, his role still hidden.

It took the 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s JFK and the public backlash it generated to force Congress to pass the JFK Records Act.

The Assassination Records Review Board began prying loose documents the CIA had buried for decades.

Slowly, painfully, through lawsuits and FOIA battles led by journalists like Jefferson Morley, the truth emerged.

Joannides had been at JM/WAVE.

He had handled the DRE.

He had used the alias Howard.

And the CIA had lied about all of it—to the Warren Commission, to Congress, and to the American people.

The final confirmation came in 2025, when a January 1963 CIA memo surfaced directing Joannides to maintain a false identity complete with a fake driver’s license.

Howard was real.

The CIA had known it all along.

What does this prove? It does not prove the CIA killed Kennedy.

It does not prove Oswald was a CIA agent.

It does not solve the assassination.

What it proves is something arguably more corrosive: that a U.S.

intelligence agency systematically deceived investigators, manipulated oversight, and protected itself at the expense of truth for over six decades.

When faced with scrutiny, it didn’t come clean.

It doubled down.

It placed a compromised officer in charge of controlling the investigation and then decorated him for doing so effectively.

This is not ancient history.

This is a case study in how permanent institutions outlast presidents, outwait scandals, and outmaneuver accountability.

The danger is not dramatic coups or secret assassinations.

The danger is quieter: selective disclosure, delayed truth, and the slow erosion of trust until lies harden into official history.

Why did the CIA put a JFK witness in charge of the investigation? Because it worked.

For sixty-two years, it worked.

And only now, with witnesses dead and consequences gone, has the full shape of the deception finally come into view.