LANGLEY, Va., Oct. 13 (UPI) — A declassified CIA report reveals former director John McCone withheld information to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
A secret report written in 2013 by CIA historian David Robarge and declassified in fall of 2014, alleges McCone led a “benign cover up” that kept “incendiary” information about the CIA from the Warren Commission, the report said.
McCone’s cover up was designed to keep the commission focused on “what the agency believed was the ‘best truth’ – that Lee Harvey Oswald, … acted alone in killing John Kennedy,” the report said.
McCone withheld the existence of years of CIA plots to work with the mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro. Had that been known by the commission, it would have raised the question of whether Oswald truly acted alone or if he might have worked with Cuba or the Soviet Union.
But Robarge asserts that McCone was convinced that Oswald had acted alone and directed the agency to only provide “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the commission.
Robarge told Politico, the agency had declassified the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination.” A common conspiracy theory is that the CIA was in some way behind the killing.
President Lyndon Johnson created the Warren Commission in 1963 to investigate the murder of Kennedy. The commission found that Oswald acted alone in the assassination and the McCone revelations might not have changed that, but would have been potentially disastrous to the spy agency.
