ISTANBUL

An ex-CIA whistleblower said a secret document revealed that an agency official admitted misleading Congress about the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico before former US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Axios reported on Wednesday.

"It's a blueprint of a cover-up, how to lie to Congress and the American people," former CIA-State Department historian Thomas L. Pearcy told Axios.

Pearcy said the nearly 50-page CIA inspector general’s report highlighted how intelligence agents have routinely concealed facts and records about Kennedy’s assassination that remain unpublished.

Kennedy, the 35th US president, was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, while riding in an open-top motorcade.

Oswald, a former Marine, shot Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was arrested and charged but was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator, in a widely televised event.

As the 62nd anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches on Saturday, US President Donald Trump has promised to release all related records under the 1992 JFK Records Act.

A CIA spokesperson said the agency “is committed to full transparency” and has stepped up efforts to release JFK records under the Trump administration, which only recently learned of the documents cited by Pearcy.

The inspector general report was a CIA damage assessment examining how the agency’s reputation was affected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and included a memo from a CIA official who, in 1978, boasted about misleading HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey regarding Oswald’s Mexico City files.

According to Pearcy, CIA officers gave Blakey duplicates of the files with sensitive documents removed, heavily “sanitized” so that Blakey, who reviewed each file for 20 to 30 minutes, raised no questions.