A psychological warfare officer with the CIA’s Miami branch assumed a false identity to approach Oswald, then helped cover it up, newly released files show.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Newly declassified documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency this week confirm that Lee Harvey Oswald was contacted by a high-ranking CIA psychological warfare officer just months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The records, part of President Trump’s JFK disclosure initiative, identify “George Joannides,” deputy director of the agency’s Miami branch, as the operative who assumed a covert identity to reach Oswald. A 1963 CIA memo released Thursday shows Joannides was assigned an alias—“Howard Mark Gebler”—along with a fabricated address and driver’s license.
884786585 CIA Memo for Special Agent George Joannides in Lee Harvey Oswald JFK Investigation 16503918 by yourNEWS Media
According to Axios, “Until Thursday, the agency had denied that Joannides was known as ‘Howard,’ the case officer name for the CIA contact who worked with activists from an anti-communist group opposed to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro called the Cuban Student Directorate [DRE],” a group covertly funded and directed by Joannides’ CIA branch.
Members of the DRE confronted Oswald on August 9, 1963, in New Orleans while he distributed pro-Castro leaflets. Oswald later debated DRE members on local media, reinforcing his image as a Communist sympathizer just months before he would fatally shoot the president in Dallas.
These encounters followed the rejection of Operation Northwoods, a 1962 Pentagon false flag proposal that aimed to justify a U.S. military invasion of Cuba by staging terror attacks and blaming them on Fidel Castro. That plan came in the wake of the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion one year earlier.
The new documents confirm that Joannides and other officials worked to hide the CIA’s role in the events leading to Kennedy’s assassination. After Oswald’s arrest and death, CIA leadership slow-walked records, stonewalled congressional investigators, and ran “covert ops” designed to block full disclosure of Joannides’ involvement.
“All the records disclosed so far show how the CIA lied about financing or being involved with DRE. That includes the agency’s interactions with the Warren Commission (1964), the Church Committee (1975), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1977-78) and the Assassination Review Board (until 1998),” Axios reported.
Although the memo definitively links Joannides to covert operations involving Oswald, it does not settle the larger question of whether Oswald acted alone or was part of a broader conspiracy. Nor does it clarify why the agency engaged in a decades-long effort to obscure Joannides’ connections to DRE activities.
The disclosure is being hailed by lawmakers as a win for transparency. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), chair of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets, has celebrated the release as a major step forward.
If you haven’t seen the headlines this morning, news broke of the Task Force’s success in securing documents from the CIA that reveal a decades long secret.
Thank you to @CIADirector Ratcliffe for the transparency, without him this could not have been done, as well as the hard… https://t.co/GWHXflonEp
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) July 5, 2025
Rep. Luna responded to the revelations in a post on X.