I’ve been debating with myself whether it’s possible to write about the latest revelations on career CIA officer George Joannides without leading readers down a JFK assassination conspiracy rabbit hole. I think the only way to do it is to resist the temptation to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’. Instead, I think the best course is to simply try to explain why assassination researchers have been interested in this guy for more than a quarter century, and also to help you understand what the CIA has done in response.

Surprisingly, I think the best place to begin is in the middle. In 1976, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established to investigate the murders of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The HSCA required access to a lot of classified CIA documents. By 1978, tensions had really heated up and the CIA reassigned Joannides to be the liaison to the HSCA for document production with respect to the JFK portion of the investigation.

What the CIA didn’t tell the HSCA is that Joannides was one of the main people they wanted to interview. Their investigators had been trying to identify a CIA officer who in 1963 had worked out of the agency’s JM/WAVE headquarters in Miami. They didn’t know very much about this person except that he was responsible for overseeing a group of exiled Cuban students known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), or Student Revolutionary Directorate. The members of the DRE knew this case officer by the name of “Howard.”

Joannides supposedly looked through all the CIA records in search of this Howard and found nothing. On July 3rd, 2025, the night before the national holiday, the CIA released information from Joannides’ files that confirm that he was ‘Howard.’

I’ll get to why that is interesting in a moment. First, though, I should tell you that people have known about the CIA’s skulduggery with respect to Joannides since the 1990’s. Here is how that happened.

Joannides died on March 9, 1990. The following year, Oliver Stone released the movie JFK which revived interest in the assassination. This then led quickly to the establishment of what was really the fourth major investigation. The first was the Warren Commission, followed by the Church Commission, and then the HSCA. In 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was established to oversee the declassification of material relevant to the murder of Kennedy. The process was to be completed by October 26, 2017.

Among the early material that was released, there was proof that Joannides had served at the JM/WAVE office in Miami and had responsibility for interfacing with the DRE. This was a bombshell. When G. Robert Blakey, who had served as the Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the HSCA, found out about it, he said that Joannides had “obstructed our investigation” and that if he had known about Joannides’ Cuban operations he would have “demanded that the agency take him off the job” and “sat him down and interviewed him. Under oath.”

Immediately the AARB executive director demanded that the CIA produce Joannides’ personnel file, but this (see image) is what they produced instead:

There are several things to note in that response. Ms. Combs characterized Joannides job description at JM/WAVE somewhat innocuously as “deputy and then chief of the station’s cover action branch.” In the just declassified 1981 internal CIA memo recommending Joannides for a Career Intelligence Medal, his job is described as “Deputy Chief of the Psychological Warfare Branch of Task Force W in Miami” who was promoted in December 1963. It states that he was an “unusually competent officer in the field of covert operations” who had “a flair for this activity” and “did particularly well with the handling of exile student and teachers groups.”

As Ms. Combs admitted, the exile student group involved was the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). Another document that was just released is a memo from January 17, 1963 instructing Joannides to obtain an” alias backstopped” Washington DC driver’s permit in the name of “Howard Mark Gebler.” In other words, Ms. Combs simply lied to Jeremy Gunn when she stated that there is “no indication that Mr. Joannides may have used or been known by the name of “Howard” during his contacts with the DRE…”

Finally, Ms. Combs decided that only performance reviews and one memo from the 1978-79 timeframe were “assassination records,” that legally needed to be released. She withheld the other documents, and in fact the CIA continued to withhold them past the October 26, 2017 deadline.

It would be more than a quarter century before the CIA came clean on the fact that Joannides was in fact “Howard.”

So, now we’re at the point where we need to know why people have been interested in “Howard” since the 1970’s investigations. This is where we risk going down a rabbit hole.

It begins in New Orleans. On May 26, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald wrote to the New York City headquarters of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), proposing to rent “a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a FPCC branch here in New Orleans”.Three days later, the FPCC responded to Oswald’s letter advising against opening a New Orleans office “at least not … at the very beginning.” Undeterred, Oswald responded “Against your advice, I have decided to take an office from the very beginning.”

Since Oswald was essentially broke, this has always been perplexing. On May 29, Oswald went to a printing company and ordered 500 application forms, 300 membership cards, and 1,000 leaflets with the heading, “Hands Off Cuba.” On July 19, Oswald lost his job as a “greaser and oiler maintenance man” at the Wm. B. Reily & Co. coffee plant.

Things got weirder in August. On August 5, Oswald walked into the office of Carlos Bringuier, who was the New Orleans delegate for DRE. In the interest of brevity, I encourage you to read Bringuier’s testimony before the Warren Commission rather having to describe what followed in detail. In short, Oswald asked for English language anti-Castro literature, portrayed himself as virulently anti-communist, and attempted to donate money to the DRE. He returned the next day and dropped off a book as a gift. But on August 9, Bringuier discovered that Oswald was out on the street distributing anti-Castro Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. He confronted him, an altercation ensued and both of them were arrested.

Before I go any further, I think I should pause to note that Oswald’s behavior here is just very strange and hard to explain. Despite having little money, he has obtained an office, bought a bunch of printed materials and set himself up as the head of the New Orleans chapter of FPCC, against that organization’s will. After losing his job, he has attempted to infiltrate the DRE only to turn around a few days later and distribute pro-Castro literature in public, getting himself arrested in the process. It makes one wonder if someone was putting him up to this behavior and funding it, and for what purpose?

On August 21st, Bringueir and Oswald had a debate on a New Orleans radio show. That this occurred is also strange. All these events in New Orleans are suspicious enough that they formed the basis of the only trial ever conducted for the assassination of JFK, It was brought by New Orleans District attorney Jim Garrison, who charged Clay Shaw with being part of a conspiracy to murder the president. Shaw was the director of the International Trade Mart, which was another location where Oswald distributed FPCC material. The case against Shaw was weak and he was acquitted, but that hasn’t made concerns about these events disappear.

Now, Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE at the time. He was also deputy/director of the Psychological Warfare Branch of Task Force W in Miami. Task Force W was run by CIA officer William Harvey who ran Operation Mongoose, which was the CIA’s effort to remove Fidel Castro from power, by assassination if necessary. It is clear now that Joannides’ job entailed utilizing DRE for psychological warfare against Castro. He oversaw their operations and approved their public statements and media appearances, including radio. His job evaluation is clear that the CIA was thrilled with the job he did. He had a “flair” for covert operations and received a promotion.

So, to provide you a hypothetical, if the shenanigans between Oswald and the DRE in New Orleans were part of a CIA operation (for whatever purposes), the person who would have been overseeing and financing that project is George Joannides. Since the 1970’s, researchers (official and otherwise) have known this person went by the name of “Howard.” Since the 1990’s, they’ve heavily suspected that Howard was Joannides, but the CIA denied it until the very last.

That of all the people in the world the CIA could have chosen to control document releases to the HSCA, it secretly chose the man closest to the New Orleans story– the story that had so interested Garrison– is very telling. Consider the risk involved if Joannides had been exposed at the time.

But there’s a final chapter to the story that will help you truly understand the import of these disclosures. In the hours after JFK assassination, two things happened in concert. In Dallas, under repeated questioning, Oswald repeatedly made a point to mention his role as the head of the New Orleans chapter of Fair Play for Cuba. Why this was so important to him is unclear. Meanwhile, in the Miami area, a similar connection was being made. Here I refer you to an important article Jefferson Morley wrote in 2002.

On a political trip to Dallas, Kennedy died in a hail of gunfire. Ninety minutes later, a suspect, Lee Oswald, was arrested. Not long after that Joannides received a call from the Cuban students saying they knew all about the accused assassin. He told them not to go public until he could check with Washington. They went public anyway. As the American nation reeled from the shock of Kennedy’s violent death, [DRE members Juan] Salvat and Fernandez Rocha and other Cuban students embarked on a wide-ranging and effective media blitz to link Fidel Castro to Kennedy’s death.

In the span of a couple of hours in the evening of November 22, one leader of the Cuban Student Directorate called Paul Bethel, an influential former State Department official active in efforts to liberate Cuba. Another Cuban student called conservative spokeswoman Clare Booth Luce and told her the Directorate knew for a fact that Oswald was part of a Cuban government hit team operating out of Mexico City. A third told a New York Times reporter that the accused assassin was a Castro supporter.

The next day, this group published the very first JFK assassination conspiracy theory.

The next day, November 23, 1963, the Cuban students put their suspicions in writing. They wrote up a seven-page brief on Oswald’s pro-Castro ways. They also published a special edition of the Directorate’s monthly publication. It was a four-page broadsheet with photos of Oswald and Castro together under the banner headline “The Presumed Assassins.” This was probably the very first conspiratorial explanation of Kennedy’s death to reach public print–and the mysterious George Joannides of the CIA paid it for.

According to CIA records, Joannides was paying Salvat and Rocha $25,000 a month, which is an astronomical amount in today’s dollars. They claim that Joannides told them to wait until he talked to headquarters. Maybe that is true and maybe it isn’t. In either case, no one at the CIA acted as if they’d committed some faux pas.

For all these reasons, people have wanted to know who Howard was and it’s disturbing that the CIA lied and stonewalled over the issue for half a century.

The last thing I want to mention is something that happened after the incident between Oswald and Bringueir in New Orleans. Someone at the FBI sent a memo to the CIA. In a report dated September 23, 1963. they detailed how on August 9, 1963, Oswald “was confronted by some members of the militantly anti-Castro group called the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil or DRE…an altercation ensued [and] Oswald and some of the Cubans were arrested.”

So, the CIA was informed about what had happened. But in September and October, a man purporting to be Oswald turned up at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City seeking to gain permission to travel to Cuba and from there to the Soviet Union. The CIA in Mexico City cabled headquarters in Virginia asking for information on Oswald. And the same office that had just received the information on Oswald passing out Fair Play for Cuba literature in New Orleans lied to Mexico City and said that the most recent information they had on Oswald “was a State Department report from May 1962.”

For some reason, they did not want to share what they had on Oswald.

Less than two months later, Oswald was back in Dallas where he allegedly shot and killed Kennedy.

I think I’ll leave off here, because to go any further really will pull us all down in the rabbit hole. Everything I’ve written here is established. None of it is conjecture. The question is really about what it means.

Why has it been so important to the CIA to hide Joannides’ identity as Howard for all these years? Why did they risk putting him in the liaison position with the HSCA? What role was Oswald playing in these bizarre events and why did one part of the CIA hide his role from another part of the CIA in the lead-up to the assassination?

Does this all matter now?

I think it does. It certainly doesn’t solve the case of the JFK assassination but it doesn’t look innocent, does it?