At 10:00 a.m. on July 3rd, 2025, Congresswoman Anna Palina Luna stood before reporters in Washington DC holding a stack of freshly declassified documents. Her words were precise, deliberate, and damning. We just learned definitively that the CIA has been lying for 62 years about the assassination of an American president.

62 years, not 6 months, not 6 years. 62 years of systematic deception. 62 years of hiding documents. 62 years of denying the truth about a man named Georgees. The documents Luna released that morning revealed something unprecedented in American history. A CIA officer who had direct contact with Lee Harvey Oswald before President Kennedy’s assassination was later appointed to control the congressional investigation into that same assassination.

The spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. If you want to understand what might be the greatest investigative scandal in American history, please hit that like button. It helps us share more forgotten stories like this and please subscribe if you haven’t already. Back to George Joannes.

Who was he? Why does he matter? And how did one man manipulate two separate investigations spanning 15 years to hide the truth about what the CIA knew before Kennedy died? The story begins not in 2025, but in 1963 in Miami at a CIA station with the kryptonym JM Wave. George Fyron Joanes was born in Athens, Greece in 1922.

His family immigrated to New York in 1923. He attended City College of New York and St. John’s University School of Law. In 1950, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency. By 1963, Joannes had risen to become deputy chief of the psychological warfare branch at JM Wave, the CIA’s massive Miami station.

JM Wave was the largest CIA station outside of Langley headquarters. Hundreds of officers, thousands of Cuban exile assets, dozens of covert operations designed to destabilize and ultimately overthrow Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba. Joanites directed and financed Directorio revolutionario Estudiant DR or student revolutionary directorate, a group of Cuban exiles who opposed Castro.

The DRE published newsletters, conducted propaganda operations, and maintained militant anti-communist positions. Joanes didn’t use his real name with the DRE. He used the code name Howard, a Jan. 17, 1963. CIA memo showing Joannes was directed to have an alias and fake driver’s license bearing the name Howard Gibbler. The CIA paid the DR approximately 25,000 per month, equivalent to over 250,000 in today’s money.

The DR’s Miami headquarters received direct funding. Their propaganda materials were financed. Their operations were supervised. And Georgees, operating as Howard, was their case officer. Everything that follows depends on understanding this fact. In 1963, the DRE was not an independent exile group. It was a CIA operation.

Every leaflet they printed, every radio broadcast they made, every public statement they issued, all of it was done with CIA funding and CIA oversight. And George Joanites was the man controlling it. On August 9th, 1963, something happened in New Orleans that would change American history. A 23-year-old former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald was standing on a street corner at Canal Street handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-castro organization.

On Agen 9, 1963, more than 3 months before Noer 22, Oswald distributing literature supporting Fidel Castro confronted Cuban students in New Orleans who opposed the dictator. Carlos Bringingier, the New Orleans delegate of the DRE, confronted Oswald. There was a physical altercation. Both men were arrested.

The incident made local news. A few days later, Oswald and Bringier appeared together on a local radio debate program. Oswald took part in a local radio debate with DR members, a tape of which was made and sent to Joanites. Think about that. A tape of Lee Harvey Oswald debating with CIA funded Cuban exiles was sent directly to George Joanites three months before Kennedy was assassinated.

The CIA case officer overseeing anti-Castro propaganda operations received direct information about the man who would be accused of killing the president. What did Joanites do with this information? What did he report to his superiors? What action did the CIA take? For 62 years, these questions had no answers.

Because for 62 years, the CIA claimed George Joeides didn’t exist. On November 22nd, 1963, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Within hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and within hours, the DR launched a propaganda campaign. Within hours of President Kennedy’s assassination, members of the DRE contacted various news organizations, supplying the evidence of the radio debate and pointing to Oswald’s apparent loyalty to the Castro regime.

It was Bringier’s contention that Oswald, a covert pro-castro supporter, was trying to infiltrate the DR’s New Orleans cell. Jose Antonio Lenuza released the story, but only after first clearing it with his CIA control, George Joanites. The story ran in the Miami Herald under the eye-catching title Oswald tried to spy on anti-Castro exile group.

Bringingier’s tale of Oswald as a Castro stoogge also made the Washington Post Castro foe details infiltration effort. Both of these stories appeared the day after the assassination. The first conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination that Oswald was a Castro agent was created and distributed by a CIA funded propaganda operation supervised by George Joanites and it hit newspapers within 24 hours of Kennedy’s death.

Joeiti’s Cuban student agents, funded by a secret operation cenamed AM Spell, had repeated direct contact with Oswald in August 1963 and generated propaganda about him, even calling for a congressional investigation of his one-man fair play for Cuba Committee chapter. This raises an obvious question. If the CIA’s Miami station knew about Oswald months before the assassination, if they had tapes of him, if they were monitoring his activities through their Cuban exile assets, why didn’t they warn the Secret Service? Why didn’t they flag him as a potential

threat? And more importantly, when the Warren Commission began investigating Kennedy’s assassination in 1964, why didn’t the CIA tell them about George Joanites in the DRE? The new documents don’t shed any additional light on Kennedy’s shooting or settle the controversy over whether Oswald acted alone.

Nor is there any evidence showing why the CIA covered up Joe’s ties to DRE. All the records disclosed so far show how the CIA lied about financing or being involved with DR. That includes the AY’s interactions with the Warren Commission 1964. The Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson, was tasked with investigating Kennedy’s assassination.

The commission interviewed witnesses. They examined evidence. They requested information from the CIA. The CIA assured the Warren Commission they had minimal interest in Lee Harvey Oswald. Deputy Director Richard Helms testified that the agency had only routine knowledge of Oswald from his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.

The Joannity’s file shows that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission when deputy director Richard Helms testified falsely under oath that the agency had only minimal contact with Oswald. The CIA never mentioned George Joanites. They never mentioned the DR’s CIA funding. They never mentioned that Oswald had confronted CIA funded Cuban exiles.

They never mentioned that a tape of Oswald had been sent to a CIA case officer 3 months before the assassination. All of this was concealed. The Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone. They found no evidence of conspiracy and the CIA’s role in monitoring Oswald before the assassination remained hidden. For 14 years, the secret held.

George Joanites continued his CIA career. He served in Athens. He was promoted. He received commendations. And the American public believed the official story. A lone gunman. No conspiracy. nothing to hide. Then in 1976, everything changed. Public skepticism about the Warren Commission had grown throughout the 1970s.

New witnesses came forward. Journalists discovered contradictions. The Watergate scandal had shattered trust in government institutions. Americans demanded answers. 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 had subpoena power. They had access to classified documents. They had a mandate to uncover the truth, and they were determined not to repeat the Warren Commission’s mistakes. The HSCA required access to a lot of classified CIA documents. By 1978, tensions had really heated up. The CIA needed someone to serve as liaison to the HSCA.

Someone who could control document production, someone who could manage what the congressional investigators saw and didn’t see, someone who understood how sensitive operations worked and how to protect agency secrets. In June 1978, Joanites was selected to assist the AY’s senior coordinator for work with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, an assignment he continued until his retirement in January 1979.

George Joanites came out of retirement to be the CIA’s liaison to the Congressional Committee investigating the Kennedy assassination. The same George Joe Ananites who had supervised the DRE in 1963. The same George Joanites who had received the tape of Oswald. The same George Joeites whose propaganda operation had shaped the first narrative about Kennedy’s murder.

And the CIA never told the HSCA about Joanites role in 1963. In 1978, Joanites successfully kept his involvement and the details of the CIA’s propaganda operations at the time hidden from the HSCA and the American public. Let that sink in. The CIA appointed the man most directly connected to Oswald’s pre-assination activities to control the investigation into those same activities.

It would be like appointing a murder suspect to run the investigation into his own crime. It would be like making the chief witness the gatekeeper for all evidence. It would be institutional sabotage masquerading as cooperation. Dan Hardway was a law student working as an investigator for the HSCA. His assignment was to examine CIA operations related to anti-Castro groups and possible connections to Oswald.

When the committee’s investigation got underway in the spring 1978, Joe Anites was called back to headquarters after having heart surgery to assist the AY’s senior coordinator for work with the HSCA. When Joe Anites was introduced to the investigation, Hardway said, “We were told that he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy investigation that was the subject of our investigation.

In addition to that, the CIA assured us they had no working relationship with the DRE.” Both statements were lies. Hardway and his colleague Edwin Lopez were investigating CIA connections to anti-Castro groups in Miami and Mexico City. They kept requesting documents. They kept asking about CIA operations and George Joanites kept blocking them.

Joanites began to change the way file access was handled. Dan Hardway, an investigator for the HCSA, testified. The obstruction [snorts] of our efforts by Joanides escalated over the summer of 1978. It was clear that CIA had begun to carefully review files before delivering them to us for review.

Another HSCA investigator, Gateon Fonza, said of Joanites that instead of facilitating document requests, he was more and more dancing around, delaying and blocking them. The HSCA investigators specifically asked about the DR’s CIA contact. Former DR members had told them about a case officer who used the name Howard.

The investigators asked Joe and 90s directly, who was Howard? Former committee chief counsel Robert Blakey testified that he asked Joanides about Howard and Dr. and that Joanides assured me that they could find no record of any such officer assigned to Dr. but that he would keep looking. Joanites, who was Howard, told congressional investigators he couldn’t find any record of Howard, the man being asked to identify himself, claimed he didn’t exist.

When I confronted Phillips with this in my last interview of him at our offices on August 24th, 1978, he became extremely agitated, but could not explain why the misinformation. The HSCA investigation concluded in December 1978. The committee found that Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy, though they couldn’t identify the conspirators.

They concluded the CIA had been uncooperative, but found no evidence of agency involvement in the assassination. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the committee, later changed his views that the CIA was being cooperative and forthcoming with the investigation when he learned that the CIA’s special liaison to the committee, researchers Georgees, was actually involved with some of the organizations that Lee Harvey Oswald was allegedly involved with in the months leading up to the assassination.

George Joanites retired from the CIA in January 1979. In July 1981, he was awarded the career intelligence medal where his liaison role with the HCSA and his work with the Cuban exiles were cited among a multitude of reasons for the award. Read that again. The CIA gave Georgees a medal and the citation specifically praised his work as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In July 1981, shortly after his work stonewall in Congress, the CIA awarded Joanites the career intelligence medal. The citation memo accompanying the award, kept secret until recently details that Joanites received the honor in part for his 1978 assignment as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee. The CIA later evaluated Joanites’s performance in this role as outstanding.

The CIA rewarded Joanites for deceiving Congress, for obstructing an investigation, for hiding documents, for lying about his own identity. They gave him a medal and called his performance outstanding. Dan Hardway testified before a House Oversight Committee last month that Joanes was running a covert operation to undermine the congressional probe into the assassination.

George Joanites died on March 9th, 1990. He took his secrets with him and for another 11 years the truth about his role remained buried. In 1991, Oliver Stone released the film JFK. The movie was controversial, criticized for taking liberties with historical facts, but it had one undeniable effect. It renewed public interest in the assassination.

Congress responded in 1992 by passing the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The law created the assassination records review board ARRB which had authority to compel release of classified documents related to the assassination. In 1998, the ARRB discovered something buried in CIA personnel files.

Georgees’s name appeared in documents related to the DR and JM Wave station in Miami in 1963. Among the early material that was released, there was proof that Joanites had served at the JM Wave office in Miami and had responsibility for interfacing with the DRE. Journalist Jefferson Moley began investigating.

He filed Freedom of Information Act requests. He sued the CIA for documents and slowly, painfully, over years of litigation, the truth emerged. Reporter Jefferson Moley wrote, “The spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It wasn’t until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy’s death that Joe and support for the Cuban exiles who clashed with Oswald and monitored him came to light.

In 2003, when the full story became public, G. Robert Blakey, the HSCA’s chief counsel, was furious. G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel and staff director of the HSCA, later said that Joanites obstructed our investigation and that if he had known about Joanites’s Cuban operations, he would have demanded that the agency take him off the job and sat him down and interviewed him under oath.

Among these organizations was an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolutionario Estudian, which was linked to the CIA. Joanites was in fact working for the CIA in 1963. Chief Council Blakey later stated that Joanites should have in fact been interviewed by the HCSA rather than serving as a gatekeeper to the CIA’s evidence and files regarding the assassination.

He further disregarded and suspected all the CIA’s statements and representations to the committee, accusing it of obstruction of justice. Blakey issued a statement. I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency and its relationship to Oswald.

We now know that the agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. But even after 2003, the CIA continued to obstruct. They released some documents. They withheld others. They claimed national security.

They claimed sources and methods. They delayed. They redacted. They denied. The critical proof, the document definitively connecting Joanites to the alias Howard remained classified until 2025. On January 20th, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing intelligence agencies to comply with the JFK Records Act and release all remaining classified documents related to the assassination.

The CIA resisted. Director John Ratcliffe faced internal pressure, but Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, chairing the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets, maintained relentless pressure. The declassification task force reaffirms its commitment to exposing the full truth behind historic cover-ups, restoring transparency, and ensuring accountability.

On July 3rd, 2025, the CIA released George’s complete personnel file, 40 documents, internal memos, operational cables, and the smoking gun. A John 17 1963 CIA memo showing Joannes was directed to have an alias and fake driver’s license bearing the name Howard Gibbler. In 2025, government documents revealed that Joanes had contact with the organization Directorio Revolutionario Estudantiel DR which confronted Oswald 3 months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The DRE themselves had claimed their CIA contact went by the name Howard, and these documents revealed that Joanites did in fact go by the pseudonym Howard. Previously, the CIA had denied to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, HSCA, that such an individual existed.

And in 1998, they told the Assassinations Records Review Board, that Howard may have been nothing more than a routing indicator. For 62 years, the CIA had maintained Howard didn’t exist or was insignificant or was untraceable. And now in 2025, internal CIA documents from 1963 prove they had been lying the entire time. “The cover story for Joanes is officially dead,” said Jefferson Moley, an author and expert on the assassination. “This is a big deal.

The CIA is changing its tune on Lee Harvey Oswald. This CIA admission is nothing short of astonishing. It places Oswald in direct contact with a CIA supervised and financed operation just months before he allegedly killed the president. For decades, the CIA denied, downplayed, or dismissed this link.

Congresswoman Luna held a press conference. The release of the George Joeites CIA file forever changes the game, said task force chairwoman Repernor Anna Paulina Luna. We just learned definitively that the CIA has been lying for 62 years about the assassination of an American president. Represerer Anna Paulina Luna, RFL, who is currently involved in congressional efforts to review newly released JFK assassination records, stated that Joe Anites was 1,000% involved in a CIA coverup.

The documents revealed more. On page three of a 1981 CIA memo recommending Joanes for a career intelligence medal praised him for his handling of the Cuban student agents who generated propaganda about Oswald. The CIA didn’t just reward Joanes for deceiving Congress. They specifically cited his work with the Cuban exiles, the same work that involved Oswald, as a reason for the medal.

Joanades’s dual role as both a key figure in the events under investigation and years later the CIA gatekeeper to congressional investigators constitutes a staggering breach of trust. The agency’s lack of disclosure raises serious questions about obstruction of justice and institutional integrity. Rewarding officials for obstructing Congress, a felony, demands further congressional investigation.

Dan Hardway, the former HSCA investigator who had been stonewalled by Joanites 47 years earlier, testified before Congress in May 2025. When Joanites was introduced to the investigation, Hardway said, “We were told that he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy investigation that was the subject of our investigation.

” Thanks to the work of the ARRB though, we now know that not only was DR still a CIA operation all through 1963, but its controlling case officer was also none other than George Joanites. The full scope of the deception became clear. The CIA had monitored Oswald through their Cuban exile assets in 1963, received reports and recordings of Oswald 3 months before the assassination.

hidden this information from the Warren Commission in 1964, appointed the same officer who had monitored Oswald to control the congressional investigation in 1978, lied to Congress about that officer’s identity and role, rewarded that officer with a medal for obstructing the investigation, continued denying the truth for another 47 years until forced to release documents in 2025.

It has been almost 62 years since JFK was killed, but the assassination remains a current and important story because the CIA lied for six decades about what it knew in the years, months, weeks, and days leading up to Nov 22, 1963. The short answer is very little and nothing that changes the core historical understanding.

Oswald had three welldocumented encounters with members of the DR’s New Orleans chapter in the summer of 1963. These included a street confrontation, a televised debate, and a brief jailhouse exchange with DR activist Carlos Bringier. All appear to have been incidental and not directed by any higher authority. There is no evidence that the Miami based DR leadership overseen by CIA officer Georgees had any knowledge of Oswald prior to the assassination.

Let’s be clear about what the Joanites documents do and don’t prove. They don’t prove the CIA killed Kennedy. They don’t prove Oswald was a CIA agent. They don’t prove there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president. What they do prove is systematic deception, institutional lying, deliberate obstruction of justice and a 62-year cover up of the CIA’s pre-assination knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The disclosures depict institutional deception, but do they bring us closer to understanding JFK’s death? Setting aside the issue of whether CIA had any role in the assassination itself, the documents do remove any remaining doubt that the agency obstructed oversight and manipulated the historical record. Why did the CIA hide Joanites’s role? Several theories exist.

Theory one, incompetence and embarrassment. The CIA monitored Oswald but failed to recognize him as a threat. After the assassination, admitting they had information about Oswald would have exposed their failure, so they buried it. Theory two, protecting operations. The CIA’s extensive anti-Castro operations involved questionable tactics, propaganda, infiltration, possibly worse, revealing Joanites’s role would have exposed these operations to public scrutiny.

So, they covered it up. Theory three, something darker. Some researchers believe the Joanites coverup suggests CIA involvement in the assassination itself. If the agency had nothing to hide, why lie for 62 years? Why was the chief of the covert action branch of Miami generating propaganda about the so-called lone gunman who denied killing JFK and was killed in police custody? Why did Joanites illegally target US citizens opposed to US Cuba policy? [snorts] What did Joe Anites report about his agents contacts with Oswald? Why did the CIA conceal

those contacts in 1964, 1978, 1998, and 2023? We may never know the complete truth. George Joanites died in 1990. Most of his contemporaries are dead. Documents remain classified. Witnesses are gone. But we know this. The CIA lied to the Warren Commission. They lied to Congress. They lied to the American people for 62 years.

And when given the opportunity to come clean in 1978, they instead appointed the key witness to obstruct the investigation from within. Cover-ups corrode trust. Think about what this means for institutional accountability. The CIA committed what G. Robert Blakey called obstruction of justice in investigating a presidential assassination.

They rewarded the officer who did it with a medal and they faced no consequences. Joanites’s dual role as both a key figure in the events under investigation and years later the CIA gatekeeper to congressional investigators constitutes a staggering breach of trust. This is the danger of the permanent security state.

Not that they’ll stage a coup, not that they’ll assassinate presidents. The danger is subtler and more corrosive. The danger is that they’ll lie, that they’ll obstruct investigations, that they’ll hide documents, that they’ll protect themselves at the expense of truth, that they’ll reward officers who deceive Congress, and that they’ll get away with it for 62 years.

The release of the personnel file of undercover CIA officer George Joanites shifts the burden of proof in JFK assassination discussions onto the government and the theoreticians of the lone gunman. After two decades of CIA obfuscation, JFK researchers do not need to concoct a conspiracy theory to explain the malfeasants of the agency and Joanites in 1963 and 1978.

The Joanites file is smoking proof that the CIA lied repeatedly to investigators, Congress, and the public about Joanites’s actions as they related to Oswald and JFK’s assassination. Was George Joeites involved in Kennedy’s assassination? We don’t know. Did he have information that could have prevented it? Possibly. Did he deliberately obstruct two separate investigations into the murder of a president? Absolutely.

Did the CIA reward him for that obstruction? Yes. And did they lie about it for 62 years? The documents prove they did. Some argue that after 60 years, the details are no longer important. They are wrong. Cover-ups corrode trust. Every American should care about this story. Not because it solves the Kennedy assassination, but because it reveals how institutions protect themselves, how bureaucracies outlast presidents, how the permanent government defies oversight, and how secrets can be kept for generations through systematic

deception. The George Joanites scandal is not ancient history. It’s a case study in institutional power, in how intelligence agencies operate, in the limits of congressional oversight, in what happens when those charged with protecting the truth instead work to hide it. In the past year, thanks to President Donald Trump’s executive order, the work of the House Oversight Committee task force led by Repier’s Anna Paulina Luna and tenacious investigative reporting by journalists such as Tom Jackman in the Washington

Post and Jefferson Mley in JFK Facts. We have seen a breakthrough in the release of documents that were unnecessarily hidden for decades. The documents are now public. The lies are exposed and the question remains, if the CIA lied about this for 62 years, what else are they lying about? If this story changed how you think about institutional power and government secrecy, do something that ensures others see it.

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Real documents, real lies, real history. And now I want to hear from you. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. United States, Europe, Latin America, somewhere else. Our community spans the globe and your voice is part of holding power accountable. Share your city, your country, even share your thoughts on government transparency and institutional accountability.

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The Man Who Investigated His Own Crime: The George Joannides Scandal DD

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