We still have no clue. But an investigative reporter who’s been on the case for almost a decade has established that in 1963 an anti-Castro group funded by the CIA got into a street brawl with Lee Harvey Oswald. And despite the involvement of the federal courts, the agency refuses to release the bulk of its files on the matter.
The story goes like this. In August 1963, one Lee Harvey Oswald visits a shop in New Orleans that turns out to be owned by a big-shot in a vocal and increasingly powerful anti-Castro Cuban group. The group, called the Cuban Student Directorate, is being funded by the CIA to the tune of US$50,000 a month. Oswald pretends to approve of the group’s goal of ousting Castro, but a few days later, when some of its members find him on the street handing out pro-Castro pamphlets, punches are thrown. In November 1963 JFK is killed.
So who got Oswald to murder the president? Castro? The mafia? Bent government agents? All of the above?
Nobody knows. That said, an investigative reporter by the name of Jefferson Morley, who’s been on the trail since 2001, has forced the CIA to release at least some of the files it has on the case – specifically the files relating to the 1963 activities of George Joannides, who was then the intelligence agency’s spook-in-charge of the anti-Cuban group. The fact that the American public has yet to see untold hundreds of files on the matter, because the CIA refuses to release them despite a court order, is once again breeding conspiracy theories like psychedelic mushrooms in a rainforest.
Read more: New York Times
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