David Ignatius wrote this article for the Washington Post about the assassination based on Murder, Inc., and things I told him. You need to be a subscriber to the Post to read it though. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/28/jfk-assassination-file-release-cuba-mexico-oswald/
Many of the comments to the online article ask good questions. And so I want to answer some in a series of entries for this blog. I'll start by answering how I possibly could remember after fifty years seeing a document at the CIA that said the Mexican government had concluded Cuba was involved in President Kennedy's assassination.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church persuaded the Senate to create a special committee to investigate abuses by the intelligence agencies uncovered in the Watergate investigation, with Church chairing the committee. Senators Schweiker and Hart formed a subcommittee on John Kennedy's assassination, asking among other things whether the agencies, principally the FBI and CIA, had adequately investigated the assassination in support of the Warren Commission. It became clear they had not. FBI Director Hoover had quietly censured a number of agents for failure to aggressively investigate Oswald before the assassination. One agent had secretly destroyed a threatening note Oswald sent the FBI only weeks before the assassination.
The Church Committee had already discovered that the CIA had been trying to assassinate Fidel Castro since 1960 and that one such operation in the fall of 1963 led to the CIA meeting with a high-level Cuban in Paris at the very moment Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. It offered him a poison pen with which to kill Castro, promised assassination rifles would be smuggled into Cuba for him, and assured him that John Kennedy personally knew about the operation. The CIA told the Warren Commission none of this. Moreover, the CIA knew that Castro seemed aware of the operation and threatened to kill Kennedy if it continued. The operation had continued.
However, the political winds from Watergate shifted against the Church Committee in December 1975, and it began wrapping up. The staff was told to write final reports and not to continue investigating. The staff on the JFK assassination subcommittee was allowed to interview witnesses, but we were also writing our report. The fall 1963 assassination operation was an important part of that since neither the Warren Commission nor the CIA officers working with the commission had known about it. It gave Castro a motive to retaliate or at least to show Kennedy that two could play the assassination game. In addition, we had CIA documents saying that in March 1964 the Mexican government identified a man who allegedly was "involved in the assassination" and who had fled to Cuba. So the possibility that Kennedy's murder was in response to the CIA operation and that the Mexican government had evidence not given to the Warren Commission (the CIA had not shared the March 1964 report with the commission) was very much on my mind.
In the midst of all this, in late March or early April 1976, the CIA informed me that it had a document I should see. This notice came out of the blue. It was not in response to anything we had asked. We were wrapping up our investigation. The CIA said I would have to drive out to headquarters to see the document. This was the only time in my experience that the CIA would not furnish us copies of documents. So I felt that this document had to be very sensitive. It was my first and only trip to the headquarters.
After checking in, I was directed to a large, working office. There were a number of desks, stacked with papers, but the only person there was a middle-aged man who asked if he could help me. (I met him a few weeks later and learned he was Tom Karramessiness). I said I didn’t want to bother him; I was just there to review a document and would wait until a secretary got back. He said everyone was at lunch and besides he was the only one cleared to show it to me. He pulled a thin folder out of a safe, had me sign the access slip (David Ignatius's article calls it a "vetting slip"), and then ushered me into a small room. He gave me a pencil and some blank sheets of paper and said he would review my notes before I left. As Ignatius writes, the document said the Mexican government investigated the assassination and concluded Cuba was involved. It went on to describe the source of this information. I will not disclose that.
The obvious question I had was what had the CIA done to investigate this. I didn't need to take notes on one or two sentences. This confirmed what we, the Church Committee staff was saying in our draft report. However, the document standing alone didn't prove anything. The source was credible but even if the Mexican government had reached such a conclusion, that didn't mean it was true. I spent only a few minutes in the room. When I walked out, I asked the custodian if he had read the document. He said no, he didn't have the “need to know.” He then pointed to the vetting slip and warned that I was only the sixth person to read it and "If this shows up in the Washington Post, we'll have a pretty good idea who leaked it." Threats like that tend to reinforce one's memory. I also have a clear visual memory of where I was at the moment I heard John Kennedy had been shot and where I was when I heard a commercial airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center. Moreover, I felt like the CIA had volunteered this document for fear it might be criticized later if it did not let the Church Committee know about it.
I told Senators Schweiker and Hart the gist of the document, but not the source. I was sure the CIA would bring the document to them and not make them drive to Langley. A permanent intelligence committee had been announced, and since Senator Hart was on it, he could pursue the matter if he was interested. If he did, there is no record of it in the released JFK files.
Of course, by this time the House had created its own committee to investigate the assassination, so later in the year, I met with its staff to discuss the Church Committee's investigation. I did not tell them about this specific document, but I did point out that the intelligence agencies of other countries had probably investigated the Kennedy assassination and the House committee should try to get reports from foreign intelligence services. Nothing suggests the committee made such an attempt.
But the document, and the other things I had discovered, haunted me, and I continued to follow the Kennedy assassination and research it. In 1989, David Ignatius published my OpEd "Did Cuba Murder JFK" in the Post's Outlook Section. In 1992, I appeared on the Today Show to discuss the assassination, and I testified before a House committee in support of legislation to open the so-called "secret files." After the legislation was passed, I met with staff of the Assassination Records Review Board. I believe this is why the ARRB declared CIA files on its assassination operations should be turned over to the National Archives and made public. I also suggested the ARRB obtain records from foreign governments. As I recall, it did ask the Mexican government, but none were turned over. Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave President Bill Clinton copies of the Soviet Union's files on Oswald and the assassination. But these did not include KGB files.
After following the assassination for so many years and with the release of the secret files, I wrote Murder, Inc. By 2022, it was clear that the document I had seen back in 1976 would probably never be released. So, as a private citizen, I asked the Mexican National Archives for its government’s files on the assassination. I eventually received those, and they are discussed in earlier entries in this blog. They are heavily sanitized and redacted. Although there are hints that the Mexican government did pursue leads pointing to Cuba, there is nothing as clear and direct as the document I saw in 1976. I finally decided to go public with what I knew after reading the president's January 2025 Executive Order that all information related to Kennedy's assassination was declassified and should be made public.