CIA Historian Admits There Was a 'Cover-Up' Following JFK Assassination

The CIA’s own in-house historian David Robarge concluded that director John A. McCone and Richard Helms engaged in a “benign coverup” that concealed important information from the Warren Commission.

Jon Miltimore
March 20, 2025

On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration released of thousands of pages of government documents concerning the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The move was prompted by an order by President Trump directing agencies to disclose their JFK files.

So far, The New York Times notes, the release of the documents has offered “few revelations.” Whether that will change remains to be seen.

One of the most prominent conspiracy theories in history is the idea that the CIA played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

As Scott Sayare pointed out in a 2023 New York magazine article, the idea of CIA involvement was born almost immediately after the 6.5×52mm Carcano 160 gr copper-jacketed bullet tore through JFK’s skull on Nov. 22, 1963.

The possibility of such a tie had been floated since almost the moment Kennedy was shot. The mutual detestation between Kennedy and the Agency, especially after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, was widely known in Washington. It is a measure of the paranoia of the era, and also of the Agency’s reputation for lawlessness, that on the afternoon of his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy summoned the director of the CIA to his home to ask “if they” — the CIA — “had killed my brother,” Kennedy later recalled. (The director, John McCone, said they had not.)

Anyone who flirts with the idea that the US security state played a role in JFK’s death risks being branded a conspiracy theorist today, which is likely why so few talk about the possibility publicly—even though the president’s own brother and prominent world leaders had their suspicions.


Finish article on Substack.