From JFKFacts.org today, written by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley:
On November 23, 1963, members of the Cuban Student Directorate, a CIA-funded organization based in Miami, published a special edition of their monthly magazine, Trinchera (Trenches), in which they linked the accused assassin Lee Oswald to Cuban president Fidel Castro.
This was the first JFK conspiracy scenario to reach public print.
According to declassified CIA records, it was paid for by undercover officer George Joannides.
Morley worked with a former CIA analyst following the release of millions of assassination records to piece this story together more than a decade ago.
The CIA has not denied any of it. Morley is in the middle of a years-long lawsuit to see the records on Joannides.
The leaders of the Directorate, also known by its Spanish acronym DRE, received $51,000 a month from the CIA, according to this April 1963 memo found in the JFK Library in Boston.
Within the CIA, the Directorate was known by the code name AMSPELL. The group was “conceived, created and funded by the Agency in September 1960 and terminated in December 1966,” according to an CIA memo, dated April 1967.
“Members were used through 1966 as political action agents for publishing propaganda… and producing radio propaganda and special propaganda campaigns,’ the memo states.
Joannides was chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA’s Miami station and handled contacts with the group, according to his July 31, 1963, job evaluation that Morley found. In return for CIA support, the group engaged in “
intelligence collection, political action and propaganda.”
The DRE publication emphasized remarks Oswald had made during debate on a New Orleans radio program with DRE delegate Carlos Bringuier in August 1963. Oswald and Castro, the group, concluded were “the presumed assassins.”
Also, as part of a response in the lawsuit Morley is pursuing, the CIA recently admitted for the first time that Joannides
maintained a residence in New Orleans while stationed in Miami.
As Morley concludes:
Thus the first JFK conspiracy theory, paid for by the CIA, was published within 24 hours of Kennedy’s murder.