Career
Joannides joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952, and by 1963 was the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the Central Intelligence Agency"s JM/WAVE station in Miami, in which position he had a staff of 24 and a budget of $1.5m. In that role, he was also known as "Howard," Mr. Howard’ and ‘Walter Newby." Joannides directed and financed Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), or Cuban Student Directorate, a group of Cuban exiles whose officers had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
By some accounts, fashioned with the "plausible deniability" typical of Central Intelligence Agency operations, the plan was designed to link Oswald to Castro"s government, without disclosing the Central Intelligence Agency’s role.
In 1978 the Central Intelligence Agency summoned Joannides out of retirement to serve as the Agency"s liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, in specific regard to the death of President Kennedy. Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley writes "the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting.
lieutenant wasn"t until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy"s death, that Joannides" support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light."
In 2013 the Boston Globe wrote "There is a body of documents that the Central Intelligence Agency is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased Central Intelligence Agency agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the Kennedy assassination.
Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.".