The release of Kennedy assassination files Tuesday stirred up a hornet’s nest of social media speculation about a crime that changed history more than six decades ago.
And one particular element — the tale of a would-be whistleblower with ties to the CIA — seemed to be gaining traction more than others.
But while the story itself wasn’t new, one element of it hadn’t been public before.
Emily Brooks, a reporter for Beltway-centric news organization The Hill, published a post about it to the social media platform X.
This document from the JFK files drop is going viral on conservative Twitter right now. But this part isn’t new.
The viral part is quoting a 1967 piece in Ramparts magazine. So, the Gary Underhill stuff has been out there for a while. The full memo provides information about… https://t.co/DvLiuHF66Q pic.twitter.com/JNg7tGhWcs
— Emily Brooks (@emilybrooksnews) March 19, 2025
Among the more than 1,000 files released by the National Archives was one from July 1967 related to John Garrett “Gary” Underhill, a one-time journalist with ties to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence who claimed that the CIA was involved in the November 1963 assassination in Dallas.
In June 1967, Underhill’s allegations were the subject of a report in Ramparts, a now-defunct magazine, which described how Underhill had left Washington “in a hurry” the day after President John Kennedy’s death.
He told friends, according to Ramparts, that “a small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination.”
Do you think the CIA was involved in JFK’s assassination?
Underhill was found dead in his Washington, D.C., apartment in May 1964. His death was ruled a suicide, though there was plenty of reason to doubt that, according to Ramparts.
Underhill was shot behind his left ear, an automatic pistol was on his left side, the magazine reported. But Underhill was right-handed.
A suspicious death in a man who claimed to know the truth about Kennedy’s death is enough to stoke suspicions — even if the facts of his case have been public for almost 60 years.
But there is also a fresh element to the Underhill story from Tuesday’s release.
An Underhill associate cited in the Ramparts article was Samuel Cummings, the owner of Interarmco, an arms broker that was the source of the rifle Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald purchased from retailer Klein’s Sporting Goods.
The now-deceased Cummings is almost legendary in the arms-market world. The first paragraph of his New York Times obituary in 1998 described him as “the undisputed philosopher-king of the arms trade.”
What the newly released file reveals is that, in 1954, Cummings was the “principal agent of the CIA-owned companies known as International Arms Company and Interarmco Ltd.” (His Times obituary said he left the agency to take over the company.)
He assumed sole ownership of the company in 1958, according to the file, paying with a promissory note of $100,000 (about $1.1 million in 2025 dollars), to be paid in four installments.
But even after leaving the CIA’s employ to run Interarmco, Cummings maintained contact with the CIA as an “informant” as well as contracting with the agency to “dispose of arms,” according to the file.
So, the ultimate source of the gun used by Kennedy’s assassin was a company formerly owned by the CIA and that was owned at the time of the assassination by a former CIA agent who had maintained ties to the intelligence agency, which has often been accused in Kennedy’s death.
Like everything else associated with the Kennedy assassination, the release of files has raised ever more questions. It also draws ever more attention. Tuesday’s viral treatment of the Underhill story — a post on X from conservative commentator Colin Rugg alone drew more than 2.5 million views — proves that.
And with 1,182 files going public in two tranches, as ABC News reported, and more than 60,000 pages, there are almost certainly going to be more questions to come.
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