The assassination of President John F. Kennedy took place on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. John Kiriakou has, on the Carlos Watson program, laid out the position he has arrived at over the course of his CIA career — drawn from three sources.[1] He has repeated a version of this position — that elements of the CIA and elements of the Israeli government were both involved — across numerous other appearances, describing it as the one conspiracy theory he actually believes.[2][3][4]
Kiriakou’s position
Rogue elements, not agency policy
Kiriakou has stated his personal belief that elements of the CIA were responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, framing it carefully as his own view and not a proven conclusion.[5] He has said elsewhere that there is credible evidence CIA officers had something to do with the assassination,[6] and, discussing the preponderance of documentary evidence with a colleague of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he has come around to believing elements of the CIA were probably involved, though not as sanctioned CIA policy.[7] He does not believe CIA leadership such as Director John McCone or counterintelligence chief James Angleton ordered the killing, but believes “rogue officers” within the agency were probably involved — a suspicion he traces partly to residual anger from the Bay of Pigs and to Kennedy’s talk of abolishing the CIA outright.[8] Separately, he has said it took him years to come around to the belief that at least elements of the CIA were responsible.[4] He has also said he believes elements of the CIA dating to the Allen Dulles era hated Kennedy enough to have him killed because Kennedy had refused to provide air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[9] Whether rogue elements did it is, on his account, something “we’ll never know” — though he holds that the circumstantial evidence justifies asking.[10]
On the question of Lyndon Johnson’s involvement he is non-committal: “To me that just seems like a bridge too far. But the people that I know who believe LBJ was involved do have some compelling evidence, I guess.”[11]
The argument with Oliver Stone
Kiriakou’s clearest statement of his own position comes from an exchange with Oliver Stone, whom he befriended after prison. In Stone’s office one day, Stone asked whether he was one of those people who did not believe the CIA killed Kennedy. Kiriakou answered that he thought elements of the CIA were probably involved, but that as a CIA operation to kill Kennedy — no, he had never believed that. Stone told him he was “so full of shit.”[12][13]
The McCone exchange
Per an account given to Kiriakou by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, CIA Director John McCone was standing in the driveway at the Kennedy family home Hickory Hill with Bobby Kennedy Sr. RFK Sr.: “Tell me your people didn’t do this.” McCone: “I don’t know who did it.” Kiriakou: “He didn’t say, ‘Of course my people didn’t do it.’ He said, ‘I don’t know who did it.’ And I think that … there were elements of the CIA that were probably involved.”[14][15][16][17][18][19]
The account reaches him through the Kennedy family’s own proximity to the director. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Kiriakou that on November 22, 1963, his mother picked him up early from school and took him to their Hickory Hill mansion in McLean, Virginia.[20] Kiriakou says McCone was a longtime family friend of the Kennedys who swam in their pool and often stayed for dinner — the two families were close enough that RFK Jr. overheard the driveway exchange firsthand.[21][22]
The Gately remark
In Pakistan, Kiriakou served alongside Jean Gately, the commander of the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation. On confronting him with the realization of who he was, Kiriakou heard from Gately: “Fucking Kennedy. We could have won that thing.” Kiriakou: “And that was the very first time I ever saw that kind of flash of anger. And I thought, ‘Oh, I understand 1963.’”[23][11]
Oswald, Angleton and Mexico City
Kiriakou described CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton’s interest in Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Kiriakou, Angleton wanted to formally recruit Oswald as a CIA asset. In October 1963 — approximately six weeks before the assassination — Oswald traveled to Mexico City and met with CIA officials there. Kiriakou presented these meetings as significant and not adequately explained by the Warren Commission.[24]
A tranche of newly unredacted files, per Kiriakou, contained two “blockbuster” memos, with several thousand more pages still due for release. One of the two memos, he says, showed that Angleton — the CIA’s deputy director for counterintelligence — ordered the agency in 1963 to recruit Oswald as a source, confirming decades of suspicion the CIA had consistently denied, which Kiriakou calls proof the agency had “been lying for 62 years.”[25] He has made the same point elsewhere, saying newly released material confirmed the CIA had lied for decades about having had contact with Oswald, including surveilling him in Mexico City.[26]
Kiriakou says journalist Jefferson Morley found a National Archives document showing that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald belonged to, was actually a CIA front organization, and that the same document identified a CIA officer — whose name Kiriakou struggles to pronounce, Ioannides — as the direct CIA connection to Oswald.[27][28] He also recounts that Army intelligence officer Underhill, who had high-level CIA friends, told his mother in a panic that those friends had admitted responsibility for killing Kennedy — and was later found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound to the back of his head, ruled a suicide.[29]
In one appearance, before returning to the assassination, Kiriakou digressed into the history of the Janissaries — an Ottoman military corps historically formed by kidnapping Greek children, raising them as Turks, and training them to fight against Greeks.[30]
The Cuban exiles
Felix Rodriguez and the scrapbook
Kiriakou has relayed an account from attorney Danny Sheehan concerning the Bay of Pigs Cuban exiles allegedly implicated in a Kennedy assassination plot, including Felix Rodriguez; Sheehan told him he had deposed Rodriguez and alleged Rodriguez was on the team that killed the president.[31][32] Visiting a Cuban-history museum in Miami while reporting a story on Rodriguez, Kiriakou was shown a personal scrapbook by one of Rodriguez’s war buddies: photographs of Kennedy’s face marked with a bullseye, and others slashed through — evidence, in Kiriakou’s telling, of how deeply the anti-Castro Cuban exile community hated Kennedy.[33][34]
George Joannides
Kiriakou names Miami CIA station chief George Joannides, a Greek-American — elsewhere rendered as “Gianides” — as a figure long suspected by some researchers of involvement in the assassination, someone with contact with both Oswald and the anti-Castro Cuban exiles as well as mob bosses Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello.[35][36][37] Pressed by Oliver Stone on who he thought did it, Kiriakou named the same man — a rogue CIA officer stationed in Miami who was very close to the Cubans, and who should be looked at more closely — transcribed in the auto-captions of that appearance as “George Ganes.”[13]
The organized-crime question
Kiriakou engaged with Oliver Stone’s argument that organized crime was involved, describing it as a serious theory rather than a fringe one.[38] He says there are credible reports, drawn from mob informants and declassified documents, that Santo Trafficante and the boss of New Orleans may have had some involvement — possibly peripheral, possibly more direct — in the assassination.[39]
He told Stone the mob question had never been properly settled: the stories about Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante and what they said in the immediate aftermath — “like we finally got him” — and the ties between Chicago and Jack Ruby. “I just don’t think that’s ever been fully investigated.” By Kiriakou’s account Stone became genuinely angry that he would not simply agree.[40][41]
The withheld documents
The 1992 statute and the annual block
Kiriakou dates the release obligation to a law Congress passed in 1992 mandating the disclosure of documents relating to the Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. His account of why three decades passed without compliance is a recurring bureaucratic ritual: “every year the CIA whispers in the president’s ear and says sources and methods, security, national security — you can’t release it,” and president after president blocks it. When the second Trump administration finally ordered release, the deadlines he understood to apply were thirty days for the JFK material and sixty for the RFK and MLK files.[42][43] He has also raised the thirty-year mandatory declassification requirement directly against the Kennedy records, noting that by the terms of that law the documents should long since have been released.[44]
Kiriakou says both President Trump (in 2016) and President Biden (in 2020) promised, and then failed, to release the remaining JFK assassination documents.[45] He has put the number of still-unreleased pages at roughly 10,000 to 15,000, said the CIA — not the FBI — holds them, and noted that Trump, Biden, and even a congressional legislative mandate all failed to force their release.[46] Kiriakou says Trump has executive declassification authority to release the files unilaterally at any time, but was reportedly talked out of it after being briefed — much as Biden reportedly was before him. He recounts a federal judge telling him Trump had said, when asked why he hadn’t released the files, “If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t do it either.”[47][48]
In May 2026, Kiriakou stated that the CIA had raided the office of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, seizing forty boxes of classified documents that were reportedly under review for declassification, including materials related to the assassination.[49]
Deflationary expectations
Kiriakou’s expectation of the JFK tranche specifically was deflationary, and he said so before it landed. Asked whether the files would resolve anything, he sided with former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante’s argument that if the Agency had been involved the relevant documents would have been destroyed immediately afterwards or never created at all. His own prediction, which he put to a contact at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, was that the release would consist largely of already-public documents with lighter redactions, concerning CIA surveillance activity in Mexico City in October and November 1963. The contact agreed: “it’s not going to be a smoking gun, it’s not going to tell us who killed Kennedy… we’re not going to learn anything new from these documents.”[50][51][52] He drew the contrast with the other two files deliberately: he is “a little bit more hopeful about RFK and MLK” precisely because those killings carry clear-cut questions that have never been answered, where the Kennedy file’s questions have been argued to exhaustion.[52]
He has speculated the withheld material concerns CIA surveillance of communists in Mexico City in 1963.[45] An analyst at the National Security Archive, when Kiriakou asked what he thought the documents contained, agreed with his guess that they concern CIA surveillance operations in Mexico City in 1963, calling the reason the material remains classified decades later “the mystery.”[53] He has separately noted that the remaining classified documents are what he believes would be most revealing, without attributing any specific content to them from personal knowledge.[54]
”Every document that remains classified has the word Israel in it”
Kiriakou recounts a conversation with a friend at the White House, in which he offhandedly thanked the president for releasing all the remaining Kennedy documents. The contact: “He didn’t release all of it.” Kiriakou: “What’s left?” The contact: “Every document that remains classified has the word Israel in it.” Kiriakou: “Damn it. I was hoping they weren’t involved.”[55][56]
He has given the same account in stronger terms elsewhere, saying the friend told him the president had declined to declassify the remaining ten to fifteen thousand pages because “every page of them pointed directly at Israel and it wasn’t worth upsetting the balance of the relationship” — an account he attributed explicitly to that single source, without claiming independent verification.[57] He has repeated in the same terms that several thousand pages remain undisclosed despite a promise of full declassification, and that he has been told they “point directly at the Israelis.”[58][59] On the basis of these accounts he states his personal belief: “My belief is that it was some sort of Israeli involvement” — offered as a personal conclusion, not as established fact.[60]
The competing Cuba account
Kiriakou has also given a different explanation for the same withholding. He says roughly 10,000 to 15,000 pages remain unreleased, and that his CIA contacts have told him the withholding is because the pages implicate one very specific foreign country: Cuba.[61] He notes that within 20 minutes of the assassination the KGB sent Washington a message denying any Soviet role, followed roughly a minute later by a similar denial from the Cubans.[62] Kiriakou also recounts a guest’s story of sitting with Fidel Castro when news of the assassination broke — Castro’s immediate reaction was, “They’re going to blame me for this.”[63]
The Israel motive
Kiriakou’s reconstruction of motive: Israel was “livid that John Kennedy not only would not give them a nuclear weapon, but would not allow them to develop a nuclear weapon.” Asked about the risk of taking out an American president: “Enormous, like incalculable risk.” And so why anyway: “Because they saw it as a matter of their own survival. Remember, the whole idea was that the Arabs were going to push them into the sea — there wouldn’t be one Jew left.”[64][55]
He has repeated this same motive in other appearances: Israel specifically asked President Kennedy for nuclear technology to build a bomb, which he refused, and Kennedy at the time wanted to inspect Israeli nuclear sites — inspections the US did in fact go on to conduct, without finding anything, even though Israel is now known to hold a nuclear arsenal.[65][66]
Truman, Eisenhower, and the CIA’s independence
Kiriakou notes that less than a month after the Kennedy assassination, former President Truman — who had created the CIA — complained in an op-ed that the agency was not at the service of the president, but operating on its own.[67] He says both Truman and Eisenhower believed the CIA was somehow involved in the assassination.[68] His own summary judgment: history has shown it was likely not a sanctioned CIA operation to kill Kennedy, but there were CIA officers involved in the killing.[69] Kiriakou traces the roots of institutional distrust further back, recounting that J. Edgar Hoover opposed creation of the CIA during the drafting of the National Security Act of 1947, and was only persuaded to drop his opposition after Truman falsely told him the new agency would become a division of the FBI.[70]
As the baseline for public trust
Kiriakou uses the Kennedy assassination less as an event than as a date against which to measure credulity. Explaining why so few people accept the official account of a later killing, he said: “in the old days, let”s say around the days of the Kennedy assassination, people believed their government. People wanted to believe that the government was telling the truth. And now in 2025 people don”t believe that the government is telling the truth.” He does not present the change as a failure of the public: “they always believe that there”s more to the story, because in fact, over the years, that has proven to be the case.”[71][72]