Who Really Killed JFK?

What the JFK Assassination Documents Will Most Likely Reveal

Note: A shorter edition of this essay appeared in Newsweek on December 16. The full-throated defense of the answer to my title question above can be found in Chapter 8, “JFK, Blown Away,” in my book Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, which you can order here.

So ubiquitous are conspiracy theories related to the assassination on November 22, 1963 of President John F. Kennedy that there’s even a joke featuring a conspiracist who dies and goes to heaven, where God offers to reward him for a life well lived by answering any question he’d like to ask.

Conspiracist: “Who actually killed John F. Kennedy?”

God: “Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, using his own Carcano M91 rifle.”

Conspiracist: “This goes even higher than I thought.”

JFK conspiracists have long called for the release of classified government documents related to the assassination so they could determine just how high up the conspiracy goes. On Thursday December 15, 2022, they got their wish when the National Archives and Records Administration, at the urging of the Biden administration, released a tranche of 13,173 documents related to the assassination. (This is in addition to the 87,000 documents already released as part of the 1992 Assassination Records Collection Act.) Historians and scholars of the assassination, along with conspiracy theorists convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had co-conspirators that day, have just begun to churn through the massive data dump of documents that are often difficult to read in their smudged ink and degenerated photocopying, much less interpret in historical context.

Don’t expect any big surprises, no smoking guns. Why? Because if there were we would know it by now. Sooner or later massive conspiracies are almost always exposed by whistleblowers and insiders who can’t keep their mouths shut. The assassination of JFK is by far the most analyzed murder in history, producing thousands of books, articles, essays, commentaries, editorials, films, and documentaries, none of which have revealed enough evidence that could convince a grand jury to put anyone on trial other than the lone assassin fingered by the Warren Commission in their exhaustive report: Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, of the several hundred docs I have scanned, most are related to Oswald and his various activities and travels before the assassination, as in this one dated 12/13/63 discussing Oswald’s trip to Mexico in October 1963, a month before he assassinated JFK.

Of the documents delayed release, Robert Kennedy Jr. asked rhetorically “what are they hiding?” The answer, I strongly suspect, is activities of the CIA and other U.S. government agencies and actors in foreign countries that could embarrass the federal government and compromise the relationship the current administration has with these nations. As revealed in the 1975 Church Committee report on Foreign and Military Intelligence (chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church, triggered by new claims about JFK’s assassination) and many documents since, for decades the CIA was directly involved in the overthrowing of foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, and Chile’s President Salvador Allende and General Rene Schneider.

Let’s not forget that the CIA attempted to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro so many times that he said “If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

And the CIA did assassinate Castro’s revolutionary co-conspirator, Che Guevara, in Bolivia in 1967. The CIA was also involved in rigging elections in Latin American counties to favor dictators and politicians friendlier to American business interests.

Then there’s the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA, also exposed by the Church Committee, showing that since the 1950s the agency had engaged in mind-control experiments involving LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting people—including U.S. citizens protected by the Constitution—with an aim toward developing drugs and procedures that could be used in interrogations.  

As well, there is the Kennedy-era document called Operation Northwoods, officially titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” It included numerous false flag operations as a pretext to killing Castro and overturning his Communist regime, such as staging a phony attack on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, employing a fake Russian MIG aircraft to buzz a real U.S. civilian airliner, hijacking planes, faking an attack on a U.S. ship to make it look like Cubans did it, and developing “a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington” that would harass U.S. citizens, all to be blamed on Castro.

“The desired resultant from the execution of this plan,” the document drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff read, “would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” Ironically, Operation Northwoods only came to light in 1997 in the Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, as part of a compilation of documents totaling 1,521 pages of once-secret records related to JFK’s assassination.

The Church Committee also uncovered Project SHAMROCK, which involved the National Security Agency (NSA) obtaining information and intelligence from the major telecommunications companies about both foreigners and U.S. citizens, and a “mail covers” program by the CIA and FBI that involved opening and photographing hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail—without a search warrant or notification of the mail senders or receivers. (An early revelation on the latest JFK documents is that the government intercepted mail to and from the actress and activist Jane Fonda, possibly part of this program.)

Acknowledging that the country needs intelligence on potential enemies foreign and domestic, the Church Committee added this cautionary warning: “If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”

Keep in mind that this was written in 1975, long before the Internet and the Wikileaks revelations of what both the Bush and Obama administrations were doing in the surveillance of American citizens. If there are any big revelations to come in this latest document release, it is going to involve such questionable actions on the part of the government, and not that it was involved in the assassination of its own President.

Although this will not satisfy committed conspiracists who reject the lone-assassin theory for the killing of JFK, the entire episode and the ensuing fallout for the past six decades goes a long way toward explaining why trust in the government is so low. The only way to gain it back is through transparency, which is why this massive document release is so important, even if it doesn’t reveal anything new about what happened to our 35th President.

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Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.