Who Killed JFK? Theories Of CIA Involvement In The Assassination
Bettmann/Getty ImagesDistrict Attorney Jim Garrison speaking to reporters in 1967.
During his investigation, Jim Garrison came to believe that the CIA was highly motivated to murder the president. He claimed that they orchestrated the JFK assassination in order to stop Kennedy from ending the burgeoning conflict in Vietnam and from achieving peace with the Soviet Union.
“We discovered a whole mare’s-nest of underground activity involving the CIA, elements of the paramilitary right and militant anti-Castro exile groups,” Garrison later claimed in an interview with Playboy.
Indeed, “the CIA” may be the most common answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” among conspiracy theorists. Believers have long speculated about alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s ties to the CIA and the CIA’s possible interference with the Warren Commission. They’ve also pointed to tensions between John F. Kennedy and the CIA before his assassination.
These tensions were largely due to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The debacle resulted in the firing of CIA head Allen Dulles, and an anonymous source told The New York Times shortly thereafter that Kennedy was so angry with the intelligence agency in the aftermath that he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
After the assassination, even Kennedy’s brother Bobby suspected the CIA (though he later changed his mind). And Bobby’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been vocal about his own opinion about who killed JFK.
Public DomainCuban Revolutionary Armed Forces during the Bay of Pigs invasion. April 1961.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known conspiracy theorist, said in a 2023 interview. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.”
He added: “When my uncle was president, he was surrounded by a military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus that was constantly trying to get him to go to war in Laos, Vietnam, etc. He refused. He said that the job of the American presidency is to keep the nation out of war.”
That said, hard evidence tying the CIA to the Kennedy assassination is — perhaps unsurprisingly — difficult to come by.
“[A conspiracy is] obviously very difficult to detect and it may not be there,” Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and the moderator of jfkfacts.com, told NBC News. But Morley also believed that it was “premature to rule out a conspiracy involving CIA people” as potential JFK assassins.
Indeed, it’s possible that the CIA played a passive role in the Kennedy assassination. Some have speculated that the CIA learned of Oswald’s plot but did nothing as Kennedy’s death served their own interests.
Then again, the real answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” might lie on the other side of the law — with the Mafia.
