George Joannides

"Who was Howard?" Journalist Jefferson Morley's journey began with that question. Who was the CIA officer, using the name Howard, who "ran" the Cuban exile student group known as the DRE, during 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald had now-famous interactions with the group and its local leader Carlos Bringuier, with whom he had a street altercation and a later radio debate?

Oswald's 1963 summer in New Orleans, where he leafletted on behalf of his one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, generated still-unanswered questions. Was his pro-Castro support genuine or the building of a "legend," and if so on whose behalf? Why did he apparently try briefly to infiltrate the DRE? Was bar owner Orest Pena right that Oswald was an FBI informant? Was Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, wrapped up in CIA-approved anti-FPCC operations? Who were the Cubans some reported seeing Oswald in the company of?

Morley's digging eventually led him to Howard's true identity: George Joannides, a political action and propaganda officer who took over CIA's handling of the group in November 1962 and left that role in May 1964. Prompted by Morley, the ARRB had asked the CIA, which responded that there was no registered alias for a "Howard" - perhaps the word was just a "routing indicator." The discovery that Howard was actually Joannides was made in November 1998, two months after the end of the four-year term of the Assassination Records Review Board.

Morley made another startling discovery. Joannides' career intersected with the JFK assassination story in another way: he had been the CIA's liaison on document requests to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. When Robert Blakey, the HSCA's chief counsel, was told this, he wrote:

"That the Agency would put a 'material witness' in as a 'filter' between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.....the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency."

Morley turned to the quest for CIA's internal records on Joannides. Where were the monthly reports Joannides would have filed on the group, which CIA was paying $51,000 a month to in 1963 dollars? Did Joannides travel to New Orleans in 1964 when the Warren Commission was interviewing Carlos Bringuier and others? The ARRB had briefly held some documents on Joannides, but had returned them as not relevant before the story of Joannides' full identity broke.

Morley filed a FOIA lawsuit in 2003 that lasted 15 years. The litigation forced disclosure of a document showing that Joannides had been awarded a medal after serving as liaison to the HSCA. In the end, future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would be the one to dismiss the case.

Then, in 2025, Morley petitioned Rep. Luna of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for previously-denied material from Joannides' personnel file. In early July, the CIA posted 40 documents, among them a memo requesting the issuance of a driver's license to Joannides under the alias "Howard Mark Gebler."

Still missing are 17 months of progress reports and financial accounting for the DRE, the group which on November 22 was the source of much of the information on Oswald's pro-Castro activities and helped cement the public image of him as a fanatical left-wing assassin. The CIA has implausibly claimed that perhaps no reports were generated during Joannides' tenure.

Former ARRB chairman Judge John Tunheim told Luna's task force that the CIA "deliberately misled" the board on Joannides and his files. When shown the released file, Tunheim commented by email "The 'Howard' confirmation.....is very irritating given the [CIA's] representations", adding "If this is all it is, why fight so hard to keep it secret? I am concerned that this is not the entire file."

Dan Hardway, an HSCA staffer who interacted directly with Joannides, testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on May 20, 2025. "When Joannides was introduced to the investigation," Hardway said, "we were told that he had no connection of any kind with any aspect of the Kennedy investigation that was the subject of our investigation. In addition to that, the CIA assured us they had no working relationship with the DRE, an anti-Castro student group, when representatives of that group had an encounter in New Orleans with Oswald which they turned into quite a propaganda coup [after JFK’s assassination]."