Why the CIA Wanted JFK Dead Before Dallas – The Secret Files Truman Never Saw

On the morning of April 17, 1961, Allen Dulles sat in his office at CIA headquarters reading the first cables from the Cuban coaSt. For three years the agency had trained roughly fourteen hundred Cuban exiles for an invasion meant to topple Fidel Castro.

Key details had been kept from the new president. The operation, approved under Eisenhower and inherited by Kennedy, collapsed within seventy-two hours.

More than a thousand fighters were captured. Kennedy accepted public responsibility, quoting the old line that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.

Privately he told aides that the CIA had expected to bounce him into committing American air power once the landing began.

He declared they would not get another chance. Dulles had directed the agency since 1953.

Under him it had helped overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala and had run covert programs across dozens of countries.

He regarded the institution as the guardian of a permanent national interest that outlasted any single administration.

In November 1961 Kennedy fired him. At a public ceremony Dulles received the National Security Medal; the next day his resignation was announced.

Deputy Director Richard Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell were forced out in the same week.

The agency lost its director, its deputy, and its chief of covert operations in rapid succession.

Kennedy replaced Dulles with John McCone, a Republican businessman chosen as an outsider. McCone discovered that the clandestine service maintained its own funding channels and operational priorities.

The director held the title; the operators often ran the work. The same week Dulles departed, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 100 and authorized Operation Mongoose.

The goal was to destabilize Cuba and remove Castro. Robert Kennedy oversaw the effort; Air Force General Edward Lansdale directed it on the ground.

By 1962 the Miami station known as JMWAVE had become the largest CIA installation outside Langley, with hundreds of officers, boats, aircraft, and a substantial budget.

Assassination plots using poisoned cigars, contaminated equipment, and biological agents were attempted and failed. William King Harvey, a veteran of the Berlin Tunnel, grew impatient with White House pacing and began running unilateral operations.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy secretly pledged to end the covert campaign in exchange for the removal of Soviet missiles.

McCone ordered the activities suspended. Harvey’s network continued. When Robert Kennedy learned of the insubordination he exploded; Harvey was reassigned to Rome.

Before leaving Miami he told exile contacts that the administration had sold them out. By 1963 Kennedy faced open hostility from parts of the intelligence and military establishments.

He had rejected Operation Northwoods, a Joint Chiefs proposal to stage attacks on American targets as a pretext for invading Cuba, and had removed its principal advocate.

Dulles, now a private citizen, briefed journalists and politicians on what he described as presidential weakness.

In June Kennedy delivered the American University speech calling for a re-examination of Cold War attitudes and announcing a nuclear test moratorium.

Inside the agency the address landed as a direct challenge to the rationale for its existence.

On September 7 Castro, aware of active CIA plots against him, publicly warned that American leaders who supported the elimination of Cuban leaders would not themselves be safe.

On the same day a CIA officer met in Brazil with the asset known as AM/LASH to discuss the mechanics of Castro’s assassination.

On November 22, while a CIA officer in Paris handed that asset a poison device, Kennedy’s motorcade entered Dealey Plaza.

The coincidence is recorded in operational files without internal commentary or formal inquiry into whether the machinery built for one target had implications for another.

Newly available records show that in the months before Dallas the Special Affairs Staff ran Cuba-related activities that McCone himself had not been fully briefed on.

Exile groups such as Alpha 66 continued operations Kennedy had ordered shut down, using cut-outs that frustrated both White House and FBI efforts.

In Mexico City the CIA monitored a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald at the Soviet and Cuban embassies.

Voice comparison later suggested the speaker on certain calls was not Oswald; the discrepancy was noted and not pursued.

That information did not reach the Warren Commission. After the assassination McCone’s first institutional response was an internal review of Cuba files.

When he met the Warren Commission he provided selected material and did not volunteer the existence of AM/LASH or the Paris meeting of November 22.

Allen Dulles was appointed to the commission. He attended every session and helped shape the questions asked of the agency he had once led.

The commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. It did so without access to the full range of operational files, without knowledge of the concurrent assassination planning, and without examining the Mexico City voice anomaly.

Harry Truman, who had created the CIA in 1947, published an op-ed weeks after Dallas warning that the agency had grown into a covert instrument beyond proper presidential control.

He died in 1972 without seeing the Church Committee’s later confirmation of assassination plots or the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ 1979 finding that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy.

The 2025 document releases added volume but no single conclusive order. What they illustrated was an institution capable of running operations its own director did not fully know, monitoring a future accused assassin without elevating the information, and conducting lethal planning on the day the president died.

Subsequent administrations expanded rather than contracted the agency’s scope. The structural independence Truman had authorized and Kennedy had tried to curb survived every investigation.

The files do not prove a centralized plot. They do document a machine that answered first to its own continuity.

Kennedy had fired its leadership, publicly humiliated its signature operation, pursued arms control it opposed, and explored diplomatic openings that reduced the need for a permanent covert apparatus.

Whether those conflicts produced his death remains unproven. That they produced an institution determined to protect itself is a matter of record.

The Morning Cables That Turned a Covert Landing into an Open Institutional War When a President Removed the Architects of the Agency and Discovered the Operators Still Ran the Work

The Assassination Device Handed Over on the Same Day the Motorcade Entered the Plaza How Files Withheld from Every Official Inquiry Left the Central Questions Permanently Unanswered

The Machine Built for Permanent Crisis That Outlasted the President Who Tried to Restrain It

Nothing complicates the official timeline quite like discovering the most sensitive operations were never shown to the people writing the final report.