Giorgos Joannides

George Efthyron Joannides (July 5, 1922 – March 9, 1990) was a Central Intelligence Agency officer. In 1963, he was the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the agency's JMWAVE station in Miami. In 1978, he was the agency's liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Early life and education Joannides was born on July 5 1922, in Athens, Greece. His family immigrated to New York in 1923. He attended the City College of New York and St. John's University School of Law. Besides speaking English, he was fluent in Greek and French, and competent in Spanish.

Career Before 1949, he worked for the Greek diasporic newspaper National Herald. From 1949 to 1950, he worked in the press office of the Greek Embassy in Washington, D.C. In 1950, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency. with a staff of 24 and a budget of $1.5 million (equivalent to $ million in ). Joannides was charged with managing anti-Castro propaganda and the disruption of pro-Castro organizations. In that role, he was also known by the cover names "Howard", "Mr. Howard", and "Walter Newby".

Joannides directed and financed the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE), or Student Revolutionary Directorate, a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles whose officers had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans in the months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Oswald took part in a local radio debate with DRE members, Reporter Jefferson Morley wrote: "The spy [Joannides] withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It 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." G. Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the HSCA, later said that Joannides "obstructed our investigation" and that if he had known about Joannides' Cuban operations he would have "demanded that the agency take him off the job" and "sat him down and interviewed him. Under oath." According to Dan Hardway, an investigator for the HCSA, Joannides was running a "covert operation" to obstruct their investigation into the assassination. Another HSCA investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, said of Joannides that "instead of facilitating document requests he was more and more dancing around, delaying and blocking them". The CIA later evaluated Joannides' performance in this role as "outstanding". In July 1981, he was awarded the Career Intelligence Medal, where his liaison role with the HCSA and his work with the Cuban exiles were cited among a multitude of reasons for the award.

In 2013, John R. Tunheim and Thomas E. Samoluk wrote in the Boston Herald:

In 2022, the Mary Ferrell Foundation filed a lawsuit in an attempt to secure the release of the Joannides files. In 2025, government documents revealed that Joannides had contact with the anti-Castro Cuban exile Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), which confronted Oswald three months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The DRE themselves had claimed their CIA contact went by the name "Howard" and these documents revealed that Joannides did in fact go by the cover name "Howard". Previously the CIA had denied to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that such an individual existed, and in 1998 they told the Assassinations Records Review Board that "Howard" may have been "nothing more than a routing indicator".

Personal life and death Joannides and his wife Violet had three children, and lived in Pinecrest, Florida. In his later years, he had heart problems and moved to Houston, Texas to receive medical treatment from Michael DeBakey. He died on March 9, 1990, aged 67.