CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files

As the editor of JFKFacts.org, a website devoted to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jefferson Morley is asked, “So who killed JFK? What’s your theory?”

Morley, a former reporter for the Washington Post and author of Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, invariably disappoints. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.”

Fifty-plus years after JFK’s death, this answer is laughable but serious. The JFK story remains unsettled well into the 21st century, no matter what the various conspiracy and anti-conspiracy theorists may proclaim. Indeed, the complex reality of how a president of the United States came to be gunned down on a sunny day, and no one lost his liberty — or his job — continues to live and grow in popular memory.

This is a book that reveals deceit and deception on the part of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination and why the CIA should reveal to the American people what it is still keeping secret.

Employing his investigative reporting skills through interviews and examination of long-secret records, Morley reveals that the CIA was closely monitoring the movements of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the months preceding the assassination of President Kennedy.

Questions naturally arise: Did the CIA suspect that Oswald was up to no good? Or was its surveillance part of a CIA scheme to frame Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did the CIA keep its surveillance secret from the Warren Commission?

Morley also reveals a close relationship between the CIA and an American anti-Castro group that began advertising Oswald’s connections to communism and the Soviet Union immediately after the assassination?

That raises questions: Why didn’t the CIA reveal that relationship to official agencies investigating the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did a federal judge and the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations accuse the CIA of deceit and deception?

The U.S. government retains almost 3,600 assassination-related records, consisting of tens of thousands of pages that have never been seen by the public. More than 1,100 of these records are held by the CIA.

What is in those secret files? What do they reveal about JFK’s death? Why has the CIA been so reluctant to release them? And when will they finally be revealed to the public? Will they answer the disturbing questions that the revelations in this book raise?