Lee Harvey Oswald was being led down a corridor at Dallas police headquarters on the evening of November 22, 1963, when he uttered perhaps the most fateful phrase in the history of conspiracy theories.
‘I’m just a patsy!’ he screamed at reporters demanding to know whether he’d shot dead President John F Kennedy earlier that day in Dealey Plaza.
Two days later, Oswald was himself shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in a moment captured live on television. He could never reveal whose ‘patsy’ he’d been – but there’s been no shortage of suggestions.
The Warren Commission, the official federal investigation into JFK’s killing, concluded in 1964 that 24-year-old Oswald acted alone with no evidence of a conspiracy.
However, the lack of an obvious motive on his part has led to mountains of speculation and conjecture over the years.
Why would a committed Left-winger want to kill a liberal president devoted to civil rights? Moreover, Ruby was a shady character with Mafia links, making Oswald’s death all the more suspicious.
Most Americans clearly believe that the Warren Commission didn’t get to the whole truth, with a major poll last year finding that 65 per cent refuse to believe Oswald acted alone.
So if he was a ‘patsy’, who was really behind the murder?
US President John F Kennedy smile at crowds lining their motorcade route in Dallas, Texas, minutes before he was assassinated
President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with Robert F Kennedy Jr at a campaign rally
Kennedy’s wife Jackie’s desperately attempts to save her husband after he is shot in Dallas
Of all the organisations and groups linked with the assassination over the years, one has always seemed particularly tantalising.
The Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, is dedicated to protecting the US – including its president. But it has nonetheless featured prominently in multiple theories, some utterly outlandish, that allege there was a dark ‘deep state’ conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
From the Mob and Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba to ‘big business’ and conservatives in his own government (who saw him as insufficiently hawkish abroad, especially in Vietnam where he was reluctant to commit more troops), Kennedy had a lot of enemies.
They included the CIA – sometimes known as ‘the agency’ or ‘the company’ – which JFK had threatened to dismantle after its disastrous attempt to invade Cuba and bring down Castro in 1961, in what was called the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Many Americans believe the Warren Commission too readily absolved the CIA of any involvement in the President’s murder.
These conspiracy theories have been inflamed for decades by the refusal of successive US presidents to release all the secret government documents relating to the killing.
Now, 61 years after the assassination, the spotlight is once again set to fall on the CIA. In the run-up to this year’s US presidential election, Donald Trump promised JFK’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that he would release in full the final remaining documents – hopefully solving the mystery once and for all.
Held in the US National Archives, these number 3,100 out of an original trove of 320,000. These papers, either partially or entirely censored, have been the focus of fervent hopes among JFK obsessives that the redactions might conceal a ‘smoking gun’ – definitive proof that Oswald didn’t act alone.
John F Kennedy waving from his car approximately one minute before he was shot
Yet Trump may come to regret that pledge.
RFK Jr, who dropped his own presidential run in favour of Trump and who has been rewarded by being nominated as health secretary in the Trump administration, is no stranger to conspiracy theories, from vaccine safety to fluoride in water.
For years, the gravel-voiced ex-lawyer has been arguing that there is ‘overwhelming evidence’ that the CIA was involved in his uncle’s death, claiming that this is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
RFK Jr has accused the US government of orchestrating a ’60-year cover-up’ over the assassination, which he believes was connected to JFK’s refusal to commit US combat forces to Vietnam.
He claims that the ‘first instinct’ of his father Bobby, who was JFK’s Attorney General, (and who was himself assassinated in 1968), was that the agency was behind the President’s killing.
RFK Jr insists that everyone connected to the assassination has now died and the CIA’s lingering opposition to release all incriminating files about the case is purely to ‘protect the institution’.
He told Fox News last year: ‘The day that his brother [JFK] died, my father’s first phone call was to the CIA desk officer at Langley [Virginia, the agency’s HQ]. My father said to him: ‘Did your people do this?’
Over the years, the CIA’s ongoing insistence that the documents remain sealed has only enhanced claims of a cover-up.
Donald Trump promised JFK’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, that he would release in full the final remaining documents on the assassination of his uncle (pictured) – a pledge he may come to regret
Under an act passed in 1992, all government documents about the assassination were to be made publicly available by October 2017, although some could be delayed for ‘national security’ and ‘privacy’ reasons.
Significantly, 1992 was the year after the release of director Oliver Stone’s controversial political thriller JFK which alleged the CIA was involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy to kill the President.
Trump has said that during his first term, his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (himself a former CIA director) urged him to reconsider an earlier promise to release the papers, insisting ‘it needs a little more time’.
Trump claimed the CIA was ‘probably’ behind Pompeo’s request. Earlier this month, it was revealed that RFK Jr is also lobbying to have his own daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, appointed deputy head of the CIA so she can further uncover the web of conspiracies he believes lies behind his uncle’s death.
Fox Kennedy, who was RFK Jr’s election campaign manager, is a former undercover agent who said she was recruited in her early 20s, becoming one of the agency’s youngest female officers.
Given that Trump is keen to keep RFK Jr close to him, reportedly seeing the ex-Democrat as a way of broadening his support base, he may feel he has no choice but to release the files.
And if Trump does try to make good on his pledge, experts predict he will face a determined battle from an organisation once notorious for ruthless political scheming and dirty tricks.
So what might be in those final redacted files? For one thing, JFK assassination sleuths expect further evidence that CIA bosses shamelessly lied when they repeatedly claimed they knew nothing about Oswald before the killing.
Robert F Kennedy Jr meeting Donald Trump at a campaign rally in October. RFK Jr has insisted that the CIA’s reluctance to disclose the remaining files is to ‘protect the institution’
In fact, it had compiled an 181-page file of information – some of it redacted to this day – about Oswald long before he shot JFK.
Even those who believe the CIA played no part in the assassination concede that the remaining documents may seriously embarrass the agency by revealing that it failed to raise the alarm over a man it knew so much about.
According to Jefferson Morley, a renowned JFK assassination expert who has written three books on the CIA, it had been watching Oswald carefully for four years, placing him under surveillance and even assigning an agent to open his mail.
The CIA knew that after being discharged from active duty into the Marine Corps Reserve in 1959, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union and spent two and a half years in Minsk where he married a Russian woman named Marina and had a daughter.
The CIA wasn’t monitoring him, claims Morley, because it suspected he was a threat to the presidency but because he was inadvertently allowing them to keep tabs on Left-wing organisations – such as a pro-Castro outfit named the Fair Play For Cuba Committee – which Oswald supported, but which the agency regarded as a threat to national security.
But if it was watching Oswald so closely, why on earth was the CIA unable to warn the US government that he was about to kill the President?
That, says Morley, goes to the heart of the matter. ‘Was the CIA negligent with Oswald? Watched him all the way into Dealey Plaza and then he shot the President and it’s just ‘Oh, sorry, we missed him’?’ Morley told the Mail.
‘So was it negligence? Was it ‘intentional negligence’ or was it actually a ‘false flag’ CIA operation to assassinate the President and blame Cuba? Those are the choices… it looks very bad for the CIA.’
A mugshot of Lee Harvey Oswald. The marxist and former US marine famously screamed at reporters ‘I’m just a patsy!’
Morley told the Mail he believes a person or persons within the CIA, or perhaps the Pentagon, was ‘manipulating’ Oswald: possibly ‘rogue agents’ operating without high-level authorisation.
Not only was Kennedy talking of radically reforming the CIA but –just a year after narrowly averting nuclear war with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 –was adopting a far more dovish line towards America’s Communist foes around the world. This approach was infuriating the intelligence establishment.
Hollywood, which loves nothing better than sinister Right-wing bogeymen, has been blaming the CIA for the assassination for years.
Oliver Stone based his 1991 film on claims that anti-Castro and anti-Communist elements within the CIA were behind a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that involved Oswald.
More recently, Rob Reiner –director of films such as When Harry Met Sally and This Is Spinal Tap – has produced a popular podcast which also claims JFK was killed by his enemies in the CIA and Pentagon.
A CIA spokesperson insisted to the Washington Post in 2022 that the agency was not withholding information about Oswald or the assassination.
‘The CIA believes all substantive information known to be directly related to Oswald has been released,’ claimed the spokesman.
‘The few remaining redactions protect CIA employee names, sources, locations and CIA tradecraft.’
Oswald shown after his arrest. He was later shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in a moment captured live on television
That may be so, and it remains true that not all JFK assassination experts believe the CIA set out to kill the President or even that Oswald had any assistance.
But even those who believe the gunman acted alone expect the remaining documents to show that the CIA failed in its duty to alert the FBI, which handles domestic security, about Oswald.
So if the CIA is merely trying to protect itself, does that mean Trump will ignore its objections and publish the files in full? Not necessarily.
There’s said to be another secret lurking in the files that may stay Trump’s hand.
The single document with the most redactions concerns Oswald’s intriguing visit to Mexico just two months before the JFK shooting, to obtain visas for the Soviet Union and Communist Cuba.
The CIA was able to monitor his movements and even his phone calls with Soviet officials because it was already bugging these embassies – along with those of other Communist countries such as Czechoslovakia – thanks to cooperation with the Mexican government.
In fact, according to Jefferson Morley, three successive Mexican presidents, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, were working ‘hand in glove’ with a CIA dirty tricks campaign which also involved bugging the Presidents’ political rivals and which, even now, the Mexican government would be ‘very embarrassed and furious’ to see disclosed.
Today, Trump is anxious for Mexico’s help in stemming the tide of migrants streaming over America’s southern border.
RFK Jr walking through the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. He has been nominated by Trump to run the Department for Health and Human Services
He may calculate that the political risk of releasing this information is too high.
And even if Trump puts his alliance with the eccentric but determined RFK Jr first, and releases all the documents, will that end all the speculation about the assassination?
Hardly. According to expert Gerald Posner, who believes Oswald acted alone: ‘People believing in conspiracy will claim: ‘Well, see, there you go. They destroyed the real documents.’
One thing is for sure: in trying to appease the demands of his health secretary-in-waiting, Donald Trump – usually a canny operator – has created an almighty headache for himself.