A newly released memo confirms CIA officer George Joannides used the covert identity, Howard Gebler, while handling the anti-Castro group tied to Oswald.
A newly released CIA memo reveals that George Joannides, an undercover officer specializing in psychological warfare, used the alias “Howard Gebler” while managing an exile group opposed to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The group also interacted with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963—contradicting decades of CIA denials about Joannides’s role in events leading up to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
For years, the CIA maintained that it had no ties to the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), an anti-communist group that clashed publicly with Oswald in 1963 and played a pivotal role in publicizing his pro-Castro sympathies after Kennedy’s slaying.
However, a CIA memo dated Jan. 17, 1963, released this week under the JFK Records Act, shows that Joannides was issued false identification under the name “Howard Gebler.” The memo notes that CIA’s Miami station, known as JM/WAVE, requested alias documentation for Joannides, including a fake driver’s license.
Former DRE members testified in the 1970s that their CIA contact in 1963 was known only as “Howard.” For decades, the agency denied knowing who “Howard” was or that any officer had been assigned to manage the DRE during that period.
Other declassified CIA personnel records, summarized in written testimony by former congressional investigator Dan Hardway, suggest that Joannides served as the agency’s case officer for the DRE, overseeing “all aspects of political action and psychological warfare” and controlling about $25,000 per month in covert funding for the group’s propaganda efforts.
“In 1978, I did not do any research into Joannides, or his activities in 1963, because, while working for the HSCA in 1977-1978, I was not informed that he had had any involvement with any aspect of the Kennedy case, and I had no basis to even suspect that he had,” said Hardway, who served as a staff investigator and researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), focusing on potential CIA connections to Oswald and anti-Castro groups.
In his testimony, Hardway cited a sworn statement from Robert Blakey, the HSCA’s chief counsel, indicating that Joannides actively obstructed the committee’s work by withholding files and limiting investigators’ access to critical records related to anti-Castro operations and Oswald’s activities.
“Joannides lied to me about who he was and what he knew about the DRE and his role with it. CIA lied to me about knowing who Joannides was and what he knew about the DRE and his role in it. That, too, must be a part of this record,” Blakey’s statement says.
By Tom Ozimek
