'My CIA pal Jerrie led double life and was key to JFK murder – they won't release her file'

A woman who spent more than a decade befriending and investigating a famous female pilot has revealed she believes she was actually a secret CIA agent who played a key role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Filmmaker Mary Haverstick was delighted when she was tasked with creating a documentary about The Mercury 13 — a group of skilled female pilots who were prevented from entering NASA's space training programme in 1960. The focus of the documentary was supposed to be Jerrie Cobb, a renowned record-breaking pilot and Nobel Prize nominee who passed all the same physical tests as the men accepted on the Mercury 7 space mission but was denied a chance to become an astronaut because of her gender.

Her story was already a remarkable one, but Mary never suspected her research would end up dragging her down a rabbit hole and into the world of conspiracies about JFK's assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963. But the more she found out about Jerrie, the more Mary became convinced she'd been leading a double life.

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Instead of a documentary, she ended up writing a book, A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination, in which she claims Jerrie was a far more complex woman than the daredevil pilot the world knew her as. Mary initially realised there may be more to Jerrie's story when a Department of Defence Official warned her that documents Jerrie had given her for research were classified.

Opening up about how the incident kickstarted her initial suspicion, Mary, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, told The Telegraph: "From that warning it just nagged in my head, ‘wow, that is just too weird'". She started Googling for more information on Jerrie and her searches led her to another women — June Cobb.

June was a CIA agent who worked as Fidel Castro's secretary in Cuba in the late 1950s and her name appears in many declassified CIA files. But June also appears in files related to JFK's assassination — partly because she alerted the CIA that the president's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had travelled to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination and was present at a party attended by Cuban officials.

Last year, President Joe Biden was forced to release most of the records related to the assassination, which were supposed to be made public in 2017, after his administration was sued for delaying the release. But there are still thousands of documents President Biden is refusing to release and among them is a 20-page file on June Cobb.

As she continued her research, Mary started to discover some uncanny similarities between June and Jerrie and became convinced the two women were either the same person or had been swapping identities. She decided to confront Jerrie about her findings and was left baffled by her "bizarre" and "off the rails" response.

Mary recalled: “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. But she was happy; she technically denied being June, then proceeded to tell me lots of things about June that no one would know unless they worked closely with June or were June."

Jerrie told Mary that June had impersonated her for a while, but Mary believes it was actually Jerrie who was doing the impersonating. The filmmaker also recalled how in later conversations Jerrie revealed that she knew both JFK and the Cuban dictator.

Mary continued to scrape through the JFK archives for any sign of Jerrie in the documents and one thing stood out to her — a reference to a small twin-engine plane that witnesses reported standing for hours with its engines running at Redbird private airport in Dallas on the day of the president's assassination. The plane was the same kind Jerrie had been flying at the time and Mary revealed she made a "giant guess" and told Jerrie she thought June had flown to Redbird that day, but Jerrie revealed something astonishing.

"Jerrie broke into almost tears, was extremely emotional and then she told me it had been her," Mary said. Jerrie claimed she'd been hired by Life Magazine to fly a team of reporters to Dallas to cover the president's visit but that when they heard he'd been killed they left.

But Mary is "100% certain" Jerrie was lying when she gave her explanation, as she doubted a team of reporters and photographers would sit in a plane waiting to leave rather than hurrying to cover the biggest news story of the century.

Initially, she speculated Jerrie may have been at Redbird that day to fly Lee Harvey Oswald, or possibly someone else, out of Dallas after the assassination. But the deeper she dug, the more she became convinced Jerrie had played a bigger role in the murder. “I felt she had some culpability in the assassination because of the role she described to me and because of what she was hiding about her double identities,” she said.

Over the 10 years she knew Jerrie, Mary spent a significant amount of time with her and even came to consider her a friend but admits her book doesn't have all the answers. She revealed she was "reluctant" to actually write the book as it's not an "easy" story for her to tell, but ultimately she felt obligated to. Despite the title of the book, Mary admits she feels Jerrie was "unknowable at her core".

She claimed in the time she knew her, she never saw Jerrie show empathy and was alarmed by her "emotional disconnect". Jerrie died in 2019 at the age of 88. Before her death, she took Mary on a final road trip to see a solar eclipse.

Despite both women being aware it was likely the final time they would see each other, Jerrie never made any deathbed confession about her life. Mary recalled: “I did hope there might be a document or something but I had got to know her ground rules pretty well, I had come to realise that she would never tell an overt story of what she did. I came away thinking she’s as enigmatic and more so as the day I met her.”