Former investigators tell House panel CIA obstructed inquiries and ran operations tied to Lee Harvey Oswald

Multiple witnesses who worked on past congressional investigations and the Assassination Records Review Board told a House task force March 18, 2025, that the Central Intelligence Agency obstructed inquiries into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, withheld material from investigators and conducted covert operations involving Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City in 1963.

Mister Hardway, a former investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, testified that the CIA "actively and continuously obstructed" investigations and that an undercover officer assigned to the committee impeded staff efforts in 1978. He described the officer, identified in historical records as George Joannides, as having been presented to committee staff as unrelated to the Kennedy case, while his activities suggested otherwise. "They assigned us a man who knew exactly how to keep us from finding what we were looking for," Hardway said.

Douglas Horn, a former ARRB staffer who later led the board’s military records team, and Judge John Tunheim, former ARRB chair, gave detailed accounts of missing or incomplete CIA records provided to congressional reviewers in the 1990s. Tunheim said the ARRB had the authority under the 1992 Assassination Records Collection Act to require agencies to present material and that the board was sometimes given incomplete files. "We were told the documents were no longer maintained as a collection," Tunheim said, describing the agency response to requests for papers related to CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

Witnesses described a specific pattern of concern around Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. Hardway said documentary evidence shows Oswald was used in a CIA operation that the agency ran to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He and others said the pattern of covert activity and selective disclosure explains agency reluctance to provide full records to investigators. "They obviously had something that they were very desperate about hiding," Hardway testified.

Horn and Tunheim cataloged categories of records they said were missing or redacted, including files connected to Joannides and other CIA officers, autopsy photographs, and certain film and photographic materials. Horn urged the task force to press for disclosure of a Joannides personnel file and other materials he said the ARRB had requested but did not receive.

Members pressed witnesses on whether such obstruction proved agency complicity in the assassination; witnesses urged caution about drawing prosecutorial conclusions from documentation of operational use and obstruction. Hardway told the panel that while the evidence shows operational use of Oswald in Mexico City, "it does not mean necessarily or even inferentially that they were involved in the actual assassination." Horn and others argued missing and altered materials make independent assessment more difficult and stressed the need for comprehensive access to records and original media like the Zapruder film.

The task force directed staff to pursue outstanding records with the National Archives and the CIA and to attempt to secure overseas holdings mentioned by witnesses. No judicial or prosecutorial actions were announced; the hearing was positioned as oversight and follow-up to the ARRB’s work and as a fact-finding step toward fuller public disclosure.