Forgery and planted disinformation · 1964 · US

CIA withholding from the Warren Commission

The Warren Commission was created on 29 November 1963 to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy and reported on 24 September 1964. The CIA did not tell it about the agency's plots against Fidel Castro, some run with organised crime. The CIA's own chief historian, David Robarge, wrote in a study published in 2013 and released in 2014 that Director John McCone and other leaders took part in a "benign cover-up". This case is about what the Commission was not told, not about what it concluded.

Members of the Warren Commission standing around President Lyndon Johnson as Chief Justice Earl Warren hands him the bound report.
Members of the Warren Commission present their report to President Lyndon Johnson in the Cabinet Room, 24 September 1964. Left to right: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin, Richard Russell, Gerald Ford, Earl Warren, Johnson, Allen Dulles, John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs. Credit: White House photo by Cecil Stoughton, LBJ Library, via Wikimedia Commons. License: Public domain.
Run by
CIA leadership
Per CIA chief historian David Robarge, Director John McCone and other senior officials, who directed "passive, reactive and selective" help
The Castro assassination plots
One omission
Plots of the early 1960s, some involving organised crime, were not disclosed to the Commission
The Commission reported without the information
1964 report
Press coverage of Robarge's study notes it never learned to ask whether Oswald had Cuban connections that bore on the plots
Time to exposure
1975-76 / 2014
The Senate Church Committee reported on the intelligence agencies' performance in 1976; the CIA released Robarge's study in 2014

Timeline

  1. 1960-63 · Context

    The CIA runs a series of plots against Fidel Castro, some with organised-crime figures.

  2. 29 Nov 1963 · Context

    President Johnson creates the Warren Commission by Executive Order 11130.

  3. 1964 · It worked

    Robarge writes that McCone and other senior officials chose not to disclose the anti-Castro schemes, wanting to keep the Commission on what the agency believed was the "best truth", and that McCone directed "passive, reactive and selective" assistance.

  4. 24 Sep 1964 · It worked

    The Commission presents its report to President Johnson; it is made public three days later.

  5. 26 May 1976 · Exposed

    The Senate Select Committee (Church Committee) votes to release its book "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies", examining whether the CIA and FBI withheld information from the Commission.

  6. 2 Jan 1979 · Exposed

    The House Select Committee on Assassinations, in its summary of findings (H. Rept. 95-1828; the full final report is dated 29 March 1979), concludes the Commission did not receive information about the anti-Castro plots.

  7. 2013-14 · Exposed

    Robarge's "Death of a President: DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" appears in Studies in Intelligence (Vol. 57, No. 3, September 2013) and is declassified in the fall of 2014. It calls the nondisclosure a "benign cover-up".

The investigation that was supposed to be told everything was not told about an operation the CIA itself judged relevant enough to keep from it.

“benign cover up”

David Robarge, CIA chief historian, Studies in Intelligence 57, no. 3 (2013), as quoted by UPI, 13 October 2015

The playbook

  1. 1

    Suppress the correction

    The plots against Castro, which bore on a question the Commission needed to ask about Cuba, were withheld from the people examining the case.

  2. 2

    Hidden messenger

    The agency's covert operations stayed out of view while it gave the Commission the material it chose to give.

  3. 3

    Borrowed authority

    The CIA's help was presented to the Commission and the public as cooperation from the intelligence community, without saying what was held back.

Through the FATE framework

  • Focus4/10

    The effect was to keep a line of inquiry out of view rather than to push a message.

  • Authority7/10

    The Commission relied on the CIA as an expert source for the foreign-intelligence side of the case.

  • Tribe2/10

    Little in-group or out-group appeal; the deception was by omission.

  • Emotion2/10

    It worked quietly, not by stirring emotion.

Propaganda techniques used

Same playbook today

The same playbook can be run by anyone, on any side. We list every current PSYOP that matches CIA withholding from the Warren Commission, whoever is behind it.

No live PSYOP we track matches this playbook right now. When one does, it will appear here.