Son of ex-CIA operative says JFK assassination involved other gunmen, contradicts Oswald-only account

A new account from Ricardo Morales Jr., the son of Cuban exile turned CIA operative Ricardo Morales Navarrete, known in intelligence circles as The Monkey, portrays a left-field view of the Kennedy assassination: that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that the CIA may have played a role, even if not necessarily at the top level. The claims come as Morales and co-author Sean Oliver publish Monkey Morales: The True Story of a Mythic Cuban Exile, Assassin, CIA Operative, FBI Informant, Smuggler, and Dad, a biography that blends Morales Jr.’s family history with alleged operational details from his father’s career. The CIA has long denied any involvement in Kennedy’s death or any connection to Oswald, but Morales Jr. and Oliver say newly gathered material adds to a narrative that remains deeply contested in public memory. Separately, declassified documents released in recent years have provided fresh context about what the agency knew or did not know about Oswald before the assassination, further complicating the picture for observers of the case. Morales Jr. frames his account as a family memoir and a historical inquiry, not a prosecution of a single theory.

Morales Jr. recounts a 1982 shooting trip with his father and his brother in Florida, during which the elder Morales allegedly disclosed his connection to Oswald and offered a stark assessment of the killer’s supposed abilities. Morales recalled that his father said there was “no way” Oswald could have fired the fatal shot after witnessing him practice at a CIA training camp in Florida. “Every time they needed somebody trained, they would bring [my father] in to train them,” Morales told the Daily Mail. The elder Morales reportedly believed Oswald was at the Dallas scene and fired the first shot, but not the shot that killed Kennedy. Morales Jr. emphasized that his father maintained there were other assassins who fired the second and third shots.

The account aligns with a broader set of doubts that have surrounded the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Morales said his father’s position was shaped by his professional experience and by the inconsistencies he observed in the official narrative, including the commission’s decision not to publish X-rays or photographs that might have clarified the sequence of shots. Morales described his father as someone who would have recognized skilled marksman quality, but who did not believe Oswald possessed the control or precision to hit Kennedy with a single, fatal shot from a moving target. He added that his father did not consider Oswald a top-tier marksman in moving-target shooting, a distinction that fed the elder Morales’s suspicion that others could have participated.

On the night of Kennedy’s murder, Morales Sr. said he and other CIA operatives were in Dallas with orders to remain on standby with armed personnel, awaiting further instruction that never arrived. Morales described his father’s unit as part of a “cleaning crew” deployed to the city that day, though he said his father did not disclose the nature of the operation or its goals beyond the point that no follow-up orders materialized. Morales Jr. emphasized that his father did not name specific locations or individuals as participants in any alleged cleanup, but he noted the broader pattern his father described: CIA operatives working in tightly knit, small groups and subject to pressure from powerful political and defense interests that could influence operations without formal approval from agency leadership.

The new claims surface as the CIA continues to deny involvement in Kennedy’s death, while historians and conspiracy theorists keep scrutinizing the agency’s role in Oswald’s life and the information it possessed before November 1963. In recent years, a wave of previously classified documents has revealed that a CIA officer named George Joannides provided support to a group of Cuban students in Miami around the time Oswald lived there, a finding that some observers say complicates the agency’s posture toward Oswald before the assassination. While those documents do not establish CIA complicity in Kennedy’s death, they have fed ongoing debate about what the agency knew and what it withheld about Oswald’s activities in the United States. Morales Jr. and Oliver argue that the Joannides material is part of a larger pattern in which the CIA’s actions and communications about Oswald remain murky, enabling alternate explanations to persist.

Morales Jr. told Daily Mail that his father did not publicly claim the CIA was behind Kennedy’s death, but he suggested the agency’s culture—small-cell operations, compartmentalized knowledge, and private motivations—could have allowed a scenario in which a kill order was executed without broad approval from the agency’s leadership. “It wasn’t like the CIA got together, took a vote, and everybody agreed,” Morales said. “You could have three or four agents that work for the CIA who control a group of, let’s say, seven or eight Cubans who are assassins. And the CIA operatives are getting pressure from rich, powerful forces in the United States government and the military industrial complex that they want somebody killed.” He added that the younger Morales’s testimony reflects a broader belief in a covert, multi-layered mechanism rather than a simple, single-actor assassination.

The elder Morales’s life was marked by danger and secrecy. He served in Operation 40, a CIA-backed group of anti-C Castro exiles, and later faced exile himself before rising to a position in the agency’s orbit. Morales Sr. reportedly told his son that, despite his career and the training he provided to others, he did not speculate publicly about who pulled the trigger in Dallas. He did, however, share what Morales Jr. described as a readiness to follow orders, a trait Morales Sr. said defined many in his line of work. Morales Jr. noted that his father’s career and his later writings about it were cut short by a fatal bar fight in Dallas in 1982, a death his son has described as potentially staged. Morales Sr.’s death came after the elder man left a witness protection program and began drafting an autobiography that his brother later burned; years afterward, Morales Jr.’s uncle reportedly admitted in a deathbed confession to killing the man believed responsible for Morales Sr.’s slaying, though no legal case followed.

Morales Jr. and Oliver’s book situates these personal and professional histories within a broader critique of the nuclear politics of the era, including Vietnam-era policy decisions that some say relied on a permanent war economy and a persistent appetite for destabilization as a means of advancing interests tied to defense contractors and other power centers. Morales Jr. said in interviews that the book’s aim is to illuminate a possible alternative account of Kennedy’s death that remains underexplored in mainstream narratives. He emphasized that the claims are part of a larger historical inquiry rather than a definitive accusation against any individual agency or person.

The timing of the book and Morales’s revelations has drawn renewed attention to the Kennedy assassination’s enduring mysteries, particularly as new sources and documents become accessible to researchers and journalists. The Daily Mail report notes that Morales’s account is part of a broader effort to reexamine the event through the lens of first-person accounts and long-suppressed records, while acknowledging that no single source can definitively rewrite history. The book Monkey Morales is published by Post Hill Press, with Sean Oliver as co-author and Morales Jr. as co-writer, and is dedicated to Morales Jr.’s brother, Roberto, who was killed in a 2025 mass shooting on a Florida State University campus. The narrative invites readers to consider how personal histories, intelligence work, and political incentives intersect in one of the 20th century’s most enduring geopolitical mysteries, while also underscoring how the truth can intertwine with memory and legend in ways that complicate the public record.

If the account presented by Morales Jr. holds any historical weight, it would not only complicate the official line on Kennedy’s assassination but also raise questions about the opacity of intelligence operations in the Cold War era and the ways in which memory preserves or distorts truth. For now, the CIA continues to deny involvement, and historians will likely scrutinize the new material alongside existing evidence, including the classified and publicly released documents that have shaped the current understanding of Oswald, the Warren Commission, and the origins of the many conspiracy theories that still swirl around Dallas on that fateful day.