Backstopping
How the intelligence method that made news over the holiday weekend fits in the Jay Reid case
On Saturday morning, July 5, 2025, Marc Caputo, writing in Axios, broke news that the CIA had finally begun releasing documents from its file on George Joannides, an intelligence officer active from 1950-1979, who died nearly 35 years ago.
Joannides appears to have run operations out of the Agency’s JMWAVE office (Miami) that interacted with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
JFK Facts editor Jefferson Morley, who battled the CIA in court for years in an attempt to gain access to these documents, has indicated that he expects more documents involving Joannides to be released soon.
I am highly confident that the CIA maintains backstop requests for Jay Reid that are similar to those found in the Joannides file, so detailing what a backstop is and how the process for obtaining one appears to have worked will illuminate what we could learn about Jay’s case from such a document.
The Joannides backstop
In her book A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities, and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination, researcher Mary Haverstick writes that “backstops are created so the investigator will bounce off them.” She continues:
What kind of evidence [can] truly be trusted? Once you come to grips with the fact that you might be facing a fully backstopped intelligence illusion, how [can] you ever tell who it was that conducted spy operations fifty years ago? Untangling the truth [seems] an impossible task, and reasonable doubt [will] surely linger.1
The Joannides backstop request that has the mainstream news all aflutter came from CIA headquarters and was filed on January 17, 1963, right around the time that I estimate Jay was at the peak of his intelligence activities, so the process for Jay likely would have been similar.
Unlike Joannides, who was a CIA officer, Jay was an agent - someone doing work on the Agency’s behalf. Therefore, it is likely that a backstop request for Jay would have originated with his case officer.
That the Joannides request came from CIA headquarters and was directed to the special agent in charge in the District [of Columbia] field office provides three important clues.
First, special agents are in the FBI, not the CIA, so this was an interagency request.
Second, the request is being sent to the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., where the fake driver’s license was to be from.
Third, Christos S. Gikas, who signed the request, appears to have been an ideal liaison between the Agency and the Bureau, as he had worked for the FBI before moving over to the CIA.
Relevance to the Jay Reid case
The Joannides backstop request raises a key question: Why did the CIA, whose works of forgery are notorious, need the FBI’s help to create a fake driver’s license?
Reading between the lines, the FBI had established relationships with certain clerks, likely as part of a broader, centrally run operation. And a backstop involves more than just creating fake documents - the records of those documents must be backfilled and inserted into the official record at the source of truth.
This is a very important finding, one which corrects an earlier misstep on my part.
My previous understanding was that the CIA handled the creation of such documents in-house and maintained its own relationship with various clerks, just as it did with the HTLINGUAL mail opening program in the 1950s and 60s.
An FBI relationship with clerks at individual offices makes sense for manipulating the official record - replacing a real document with a backstopped forgery.
Remember, the person who assisted me at the New Jersey archives was incredulous when I detailed how Jay’s birth certificate was forged. This person was clearly unaware that certain clerks made themselves available to assist the FBI on cases of federal importance.
The documents responsive to my outstanding FOIA request for all information held by the FBI on Jay was, at last check, on pace to be released by the end of this year.
That file, I am now very confident, includes a CIA request sent in July 1950 to the FBI to backstop Jay’s identity via the merger of his identity with that of Herbert W. Reed Jr.
In turn, my hunch is that the selection of Herbert W. Reed Jr. came via a CIA consultation with the Department of Defense, which would have maintained draft information on both men.
Merging identities
Just as we saw with Jay, the Howard Mark Gebler alias assigned to George Joannides was a blend of real and fake information.
The details in the request that deviate from the accepted facts about Joannides are as follows:
Name
Birth Location
Residence
Joannides is said to have been born in Greece, although we cannot be sure if his official identity is his real identity.
While it is not clear where Joannides lived in January 1963, another recently released document shows that in the spring of 1964 he lived in a brick house at 8813 Maxwell Drive in Potomac, Maryland.
Although the name Howard Gebler is not similar to George Joannides, Mary Haverstick discovered that there was an attorney named Howard A. Gebler who was connected to Sirhan Sirhan’s legal team following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
The two men bear a striking resemblance to one another.
Howard Gebler the attorney was apparently arrested in Haiti in 1967 on accusations of spying, and he may have been sprung from prison my CIA agent June/Jerrie Cobb.
Meanwhile, Jay’s appearance was very different from Herbert W. Reed Jr.’s, but their names were a near match, and they grew up about a 10-minute drive from one another.
That’s the thing about backstopping. It is very difficult to tell where one identity ends and another begins, not to mention how many identities a single person may be inhabiting.
Indeed, the Joannides data dump on the evening of July 3, 2025, also included a separate backstop cover request from 1964 that was sent to the U.S. Army on behalf of Joannides.
To date, I have only discovered one other identity tied to Jay. It is anyone’s guess as to how many more are out there.
Haverstick, Mary. A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities, and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination. Crown Publishing. New York, 2023. Pg. 61.