On December 22, 1963, exactly one month after President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, the Washington Post published an op-ed that should have stopped the nation cold. Its headline read, "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence." Its author was Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States and the man who created the CIA in 1947.
This was not a retired politician offering nostalgic reflections. This was the founder of America's most powerful intelligence agency writing one month after a presidential assassination to warn that the CIA had become something dangerous, something he never intended, something that was casting a shadow over our historic position.
The timing was impossible to ignore. Thirty days after Kennedy's murder, while the country grieved and the new administration prepared to sell the lone gunman story, Truman sat down and wrote that the CIA had gone rogue. He did not mention Kennedy by name. He did not have to.
Nine days after the assassination, Truman, then 79 years old, began sketching notes in his own handwriting at his desk in Independence, Missouri. Documents in the Truman Library show he outlined what he wanted to say. One note stood out: the CIA had worked as he intended, only when I had control.
The article he produced was measured and careful, but devastating. "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our central intelligence agency," he wrote.
Truman explained what he had intended when he created the CIA in 1947: an intelligence arm of the president, a coordinator of information from various agencies, raw and unfiltered data delivered directly to the commander-in-chief so he could make informed decisions. Not an operational force. Not a policy-making body. Not a shadow government.
But that, he wrote, is what it had become. Truman said he had been concerned for some time about how the agency had transformed. It was no longer gathering intelligence. It was running operations, overthrowing governments, conducting assassinations, and operating in peacetime like a wartime espionage organization, all without proper presidential oversight.
The key passage, the one that would haunt Allen Dulles for months, warned that there was something about the way the CIA had been functioning that was casting a shadow over our historic position, and that it needed to be corrected.
The article appeared in the Washington Post on December 22, 1963, on page A1. Then something strange happened. The Post published the op-ed in its early edition that day but immediately excised it from later editions. It was gone, removed, disappeared from later printings of the same day's paper.
According to available information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, nor mentioned on any national radio or TV broadcast. The Milwaukee Journal ran it. The Chicago Sun-Times reprinted it on January 18, 1964. But the major media, the networks, the newspapers of record, and the news broadcasts ignored it completely.
How does that happen? Here was the founder of the CIA, one of the most respected figures in American politics, warning the nation one month after a presidential assassination that the intelligence agency had become a rogue operation, and the media buried it. The article asked whether editors of all major newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts could really have been unaware of its existence. The more likely answer, deliberate suppression. At key editorial decision points, the story was killed.
But one person read it, and he was not happy about it. Allen Dulles had been CIA director from 1953 to 1961, eight years running covert operations under Eisenhower, overthrowing governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, and planning the invasion of Cuba. His specialty was regime change.
When Kennedy took office, Dulles expected business as usual. The Bay of Pigs invasion was already in motion, planned under Eisenhower and ready to execute. All Kennedy had to do was approve U.S. military support when the Cuban exiles landed. But Kennedy asked questions. He wanted details. He was skeptical.
When the invasion failed in April 1961, Kennedy refused to send in American forces to rescue it. He let it fail. Then he fired Dulles. Kennedy made it clear he would not approve the use of U.S. air and ground support to save the operation.
Dulles was furious. This was not how presidents were supposed to behave. Presidents were not supposed to question the CIA. They were supposed to trust it, follow its guidance, and approve its operations. Kennedy did not. In November 1961, Kennedy told a reporter he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.
Two years later, Kennedy was dead. And Dulles, the director Kennedy had fired, was appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. Now here was Harry Truman writing in the Washington Post that the CIA had become a dangerous operational force conducting cloak-and-dagger operations in peacetime. Dulles needed to shut this down.
On January 7, 1964, Dulles wrote to Truman an eight-page letter expressing how deeply disturbed he was by the article. Dulles tried everything. He wrote to Truman's attorney, hoping he could convince the former president to retract his statements. He sent his own letter trying to implicate Truman himself in CIA covert operations. Truman did not budge.
So Dulles went to Missouri in April, arranging to meet face to face with Truman at his presidential library. After exchanging a few minutes of small talk about the old days, Dulles mounted his assault on Truman, employing his usual mix of sweet talk and arm-twisting. On April 17, 1964, the two men met alone for 30 minutes, with Dulles trying to get the 79-year-old former president to take it back.
Hell no, said Harry. Truman refused to retract anything. But Dulles had a solution. If he could not change Truman's mind, he would change the record.
Four days later, in a formal memorandum of conversation for his old friend Lawrence Houston, the CIA general counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction for Truman, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was all wrong and that Truman seemed quite astounded at it. It was a complete lie, manufactured for the CIA files, ready to be pulled out if anyone ever questioned whether Truman really believed the CIA had gone rogue.
How do we know it was fabricated? Because Truman did not change his tune. In a June 10, 1964 letter to the managing editor of Look Magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in strange activities. Truman stood by every word, but the CIA files said otherwise, holding a fabricated memo claiming he had retracted it all.
Why would Dulles do this? In early 1964, Dulles was feeling a lot of heat from many who were suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Columnists were asking how the truth could ever be reached with Allen Dulles as de facto head of the Warren Commission.
Think about the position Dulles was in. He had been fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs disaster. He had spent his career overthrowing foreign governments. He specialized in covert operations and regime change. He had motive. Kennedy had humiliated him and threatened to dismantle his agency. And now he was investigating Kennedy's murder.
Journalists were starting to ask questions. How could the man Kennedy fired investigate his assassination? How could the head of an intelligence agency that specialized in political assassinations be trusted to determine if that agency was involved?
Dulles had good reason to fear that Truman's limited-edition Washington Post op-ed of December 22, 1963 might garner unwanted attention and raise troublesome questions about covert action, including assassination. If Truman's article gained traction, people might start asking what exactly these cloak-and-dagger operations were, what these strange activities Truman warned about were, and whether they included political assassinations.
And if the CIA was capable of overthrowing foreign governments, assassinating foreign leaders, and conducting covert regime change operations around the world, why would it not be capable of removing a president who threatened to destroy it? Dulles would have wanted to be in position to dig out of Larry Houston's files the Truman retraction, in the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud. So he created one, a fabricated memo saying Truman had disavowed the article, insurance against anyone taking Truman's warning seriously.
What did Truman actually believe in private? He was even more explicit than in his published article. After the Bay of Pigs, Truman told writer Merle Miller his regrets about creating the CIA. "I think it was a mistake," he said. "And if I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. Eisenhower never paid any attention to it and it got out of hand. It's become a government all of its own and all secret. That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society."
Truman's first CIA director, Admiral Sidney Souers, shared his concerns. Five days after the op-ed appeared, the retired admiral, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a "Dear Boss" letter applauding Truman's outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA a different animal than the one I tried to set up for you. Even the men who had helped build the agency agreed it had become something monstrous.
In Truman's view, the transformation began when Eisenhower appointed Allen Dulles as director in 1953. Dulles's forte was overthrowing governments and parliaments, and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 under his belt, Dulles was riding high by the late 1950s and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.
Under Dulles, the CIA stopped being an intelligence agency. It became an operational force, a shadow government, a tool for regime change that operated beyond presidential control. And when Kennedy tried to reassert control, when he refused to be mousetrapped into supporting the Bay of Pigs, when he fired Dulles, when he threatened to splinter the CIA, he signed his death warrant. At least that is what the timing of Truman's article suggests.
Truman's article appeared on December 22, just 30 days after JFK's murder. The country was still reeling in shock. Rumors were rampant about possible conspiracies, foreign and domestic. Truman was not a reckless or irresponsible man. So why publish this article at this moment?
If Truman simply wanted to critique CIA overreach, he could have waited, written a memoir, published an essay in a foreign policy journal, and done it quietly and diplomatically, without the explosive timing. But he did not wait. He published it exactly one month after Dallas.
It would at least border on irresponsibility for him to release his article for publication so soon after Kennedy's death, unless he was trying to warn the public implicitly and obliquely, since it must have occurred to him, as it did to many others, that the agency he had created might have been involved.
The article never mentions Kennedy, but it did not need to. Everyone reading it in December 1963 knew what Truman was saying. The CIA has become dangerous. It operates beyond presidential control. It conducts operations that undermine American values. It has been diverted from its original assignment and now functions as a rogue operation. And one month ago, a president who threatened to destroy it was killed.
The message was clear. The warning was explicit. But almost no one heard it. The Warren Commission, with Allen Dulles as its de facto leader, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Three shots from the book depository. No conspiracy, no CIA involvement.
Dulles controlled the investigation. He controlled the narrative. He had access to all CIA files and could determine what the commission saw and did not see. He could steer the inquiry away from uncomfortable questions. And he had that fabricated memo from his meeting with Truman, ready to produce if anyone pointed to Truman's article as evidence that even the CIA's founder suspected his agency of foul play.
The truth was buried under classification, redaction, and suppression. Documents sealed for decades, evidence destroyed, witnesses dead or intimidated. And Truman's warning, published in the most prominent newspaper in America exactly one month after the assassination, vanished from public consciousness as if it had never existed.
Did Harry Truman believe the CIA killed John F. Kennedy? He never said it directly. He could not. To publicly accuse the intelligence agency of assassinating a president would have required evidence he did not have access to. It would have torn the country apart. It would have been irresponsible without proof.
But the timing speaks volumes. The content speaks volumes. The suppression speaks volumes. When Kennedy himself was assassinated on November 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman, as it did to many others, that the disgraced Dulles and his unrepentant associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a president they felt was soft on communism and to get even for their Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Nine days after the assassination, Truman started writing. Thirty days after, he published a warning to America that the CIA, the agency he had created, had become an operational force conducting cloak-and-dagger peacetime operations and casting a shadow over American democracy. And the man he was warning about, Allen Dulles, was investigating the murder.
So ask yourself: was this a coincidence, a retired president randomly deciding to critique the CIA one month after Kennedy was killed? Or was this a warning, carefully worded and deliberately timed, coded as much as Truman dared, that the agency had gone rogue and the president had paid the price?
When the founder of the CIA publishes an article warning about cloak-and-dagger operations exactly 30 days after a president is assassinated, and that article is immediately suppressed, and the CIA director who was fired by the murdered president fabricates a retraction and investigates the crime, you do not need a conspiracy theory. You just need to read what is in front of you. Warnings do not come with proof. They come before the proof is buried.