Exclusive: JFK Files Reveal CIA Targeted Canadian Group That Influenced West’s China Pivot .

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In an unexpected revelation from President Trump’s sweeping release of CIA documents tied to the JFK assassination, one of the most consequential findings may have little to do with Kennedy’s death in Dallas—and everything to do with a chapter of Cold War influence that resonates powerfully with the current collision course between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan.

Buried among the 80,000 files now public, a declassified CIA dossier on Sam Jaffe, a controversial American journalist, discloses that he fed the Agency intelligence about a Toronto-based group—the Committee for New China Policy—that may have successfully nudged both Canadian and U.S. governments toward recognizing Communist China under Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai’s “One China” rule in the late 1960s and early 1970s, catalyzing a seismic diplomatic shift that reshaped the global order.

The revelations center on Jaffe, a hard-driving, flamboyant broadcaster who befuddled his colleagues with his access to senior Chinese and Russian officials throughout his career. The key sentences from Jaffe’s CIA file, released last week, read:

“During Jaffe’s tour in Hong Kong, and subsequently in Washington, he was in touch with CIA officers. He provided good information on a Chinese news official and he was helpful to the Agency in reporting on a Canadian organization, The Committee of New China Policy. All official contact with Jaffe ended in 1971.”

There is no explanation for why the CIA placed Jaffe’s interactions with American, Russian, and apparently Chinese intelligence in the JFK assassination files. Clearly, however, Jaffe played some role in the high-stakes Cold War information battles involving Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

His journey began as a Marine combat correspondent during the Korean War. By 1955, Jaffe had joined CBS, covering the United Nations and major international events. That same year, as a freelancer, he scored an exclusive interview with Mao Zedong’s right-hand man—Red China’s spymaster and united front architect, Premier Zhou Enlai—at the Bandung Conference of Third World nations in Indonesia.

It was a significant journalistic coup, and one that seems even more meaningful in retrospect: Zhou Enlai serves as a curious common thread linking the Committee for New China Policy to its key founder, Daniel Tretiak, a professor at Toronto’s York University whose influence stretched from meetings with Chinese officials in Canada and New York to delivering a speech at the 1972 Republican National Convention.

That speech referenced Tretiak’s own interactions with Zhou Enlai and, in hindsight, included anti-Taiwan recommendations that might well have originated with Zhou himself.

From 1955 to 1961, while reporting on United Nations politics in New York, Sam Jaffe was already navigating the shadows behind the headlines. He quietly briefed the FBI on his interactions with Soviet diplomats and maintained contact with CIA domestic liaisons, according to his CIA file.

This early entanglement with U.S. intelligence foreshadowed a pattern that would define much of his career. In 1960, Jaffe’s role deepened when he covered the trial of CIA pilot Gary Powers in Moscow. Powers had been flying a high-altitude U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory when his aircraft was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. He survived by parachuting to safety but was immediately captured and put on trial.

According to declassified CIA documents, Jaffe was coached by an Agency psychologist to observe Powers’s demeanor in court—strongly suggesting he reported back to the CIA, though this remains unconfirmed in the files released as part of the JFK assassination disclosures.

In 1961, Jaffe joined ABC and opened the network’s first Moscow bureau, plunging into a Cold War beat that would place him at the center of seismic events—from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Khrushchev’s dramatic ouster in 1964. His time in Moscow drew interest from intelligence circles.

The CIA file notes Jaffe had contact with a KGB officer named Kuvkov, and “there is some evidence he was given preferential treatment by Soviet authorities.” Among his peers, Jaffe’s friendly interactions with senior Soviets raised eyebrows. “Some Western pressmen felt that Jaffe, as an aggressive newsman, was giving a little to get the story,” the file records, hinting at the tenuous line between journalism and espionage.

Expelled from Moscow in 1965, Jaffe was reassigned to ABC’s Hong Kong bureau, where he shifted focus to the Vietnam War. His frontline reporting earned him an Overseas Press Club award, further cementing his reputation as a fearless journalist. But public reports—not reflected in the JFK file that covers Jaffe—suggest that, like the Soviets, he had somehow won extraordinary access to senior Chinese Communist officials, a thread that ties back to his 1955 interview with Zhou Enlai. Jaffe’s late-career assignments in Hong Kong and Washington came at a pivotal moment—specifically, the three-year window from 1968 to 1971, when Chinese intelligence efforts appeared to bear fruit in shifting Western elite opinion. It was during this time that the idea of recognizing Communist China as the sole legitimate government—the “One China” policy—gained traction.

The penultimate revelation from the CIA JFK file on Jaffe—namely that he “provided good information on a Chinese news official and he was helpful to the Agency in reporting on a Canadian organization, The Committee of New China Policy” (CNCP)—offers no insight into why this intelligence ended up in the JFK records, nor does it say much about the group itself.

Yet The Bureau’s open-source research suggests that this “academic pressure group” played a notable part in shaping Canada’s diplomatic realignment toward Beijing after its founding in the late 1960s—coinciding with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power. Trudeau had pledged to re-examine Canada’s defense alignment with the United States and to adopt a fresh approach to Cold War adversaries. Though the CNCP was based in Canada and aimed primarily at influencing domestic debate, its membership network and intellectual footprint straddled the Canada–U.S. policy and academic spheres, extending its influence well beyond Canadian borders.

Remarkably, it’s American government records—not Canadian ones—that offer the clearest glimpse into the influence of one of the group’s founding figures: Daniel Tretiak. A political scientist then based at York University in Toronto, Tretiak was born in Long Island, New York, and pursued a career devoted to the study of China, earning degrees from the University of Arizona, Harvard, and a PhD from Stanford. From 1971 to 1977, he taught political science at York. He died in March 2020, in Beijing.

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