We're learning more about the CIA 'cover-up' surrounding JFK's assassination
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy spurred numerous of conspiracy theories, many of which doubted if sniper Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and asserting that the CIA was involved.
And a declassified 2013 report by CIA historian David Robarge details how, at the very least, the CIA knew much more than it has let on.
The report states that then-CIA director John McCone withheld important information from President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" - also referred to as the "Warren Commission" - and that top agency officials were part of a "benign cover-up."
The spy agency acknowledges that McCone and other high ranking CIA officials kept "incendiary and diversionary issues" from the investigation, much of which may have shed light on how Oswald spent his time in the years before the assassination.
According to the declassified report, the CIA decided to only tell the Warren Commission the "best truth" about Oswald. Having taken that decision, the CIA kept information from the inquiry that would almost certainly have led the inquiry down a different path.
Not being aware of these plots, the Warren Commission could not know that was something to investigate - but the new information suggests it would have been valuable.
While living in New Orleans in 1963, for example, Oswald shared office space with a CIA-backed anti-Castro group.
Oswald had handed out pro-Castro literature with the address 544 Camp Street on it. FBI agent Guy Bannister and a CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council also rented space at the same location.
Continuing the lie
The report also reveals that in 1978, McCone lied about failing to divulge the Castro plots.
When the House committee asked him whether the spy agency had withheld information from the commission about the plots to kill Castro, McCone said he couldn't answer because he had not been told about the plots.
According to one of the lawyers of the Warren Commission cited in the report, McCone had discussed Robert Kennedy's uneasiness about the CIA withholding that information in 1975.
The US Attorney General at the time of his brother's assassination, Robert Kennedy had been overseeing the spy agency's anti-Castro actions, which included some of the assassination plots.
According to the report, McCone thought that "Robert Kennedy had personal feelings of guilt because he was directly or indirectly involved with the anti-Castro planning."
The report hints at the kind of questions the president's brother might have been asking himself, namely: "Had the administration's obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?"
Although the report sheds some light on the extent of a CIA cover-up, it still leaves many questions unanswered. Numerous names and mentions throughout the report have also been redacted, suggesting that some information might never be publicly disclosed.
And as to whether Oswald acted alone or with accomplices, those who doubt the Warren Commission's findings might never find a satisfying answer.
"For all attempts to close the case as 'just Oswald,' fair-minded observers continue to be troubled by many aspects of eyewitness testimony and paper trails," Sabato writes.
The report concludes that McCone could only be accused of being a "co-conspirator" in a cover-up surrounding Kennedy's assassination insofar as he kept the conspiracy to kill Castro secret after November 22, 1964.