Trump's JFK Files Release Didn't Interest the Conspiracy-Heads Much. But I Found Something in There That Changes Everything.
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When Americans conjure their pantheon of gun-culture heroes, they evoke industrialists like Samuel Colt, inventors like John Moses Browning, and gunslingers like Annie Oakley. Rarely does anyone invoke the name of Samuel Cummings, the founder and chief executive of a company called Interarms. But arguably no 20 th -century figure has greater claim to a spot in the American gun pantheon than Cummings. “Arms Dealer Sam,” as a 1969 profile described him, was America's most prolific gun seller in the decades after World War II, when the availability of cheap firearms made the country's historical gun myths a material reality for tens of millions of Americans.
With the Trump administration's March 2025 decision to release tens of thousands of unredacted documents related to the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a few tantalizing revelations have emerged about this most important and invisible gun entrepreneur of the 20th century. In researching Cummings' life for my book about gun culture and capitalism in Cold War America, I often encountered a rumor: Interarms, the business that Cummings founded in 1954 and built into the world's largest private arms dealer in just a few short years, began as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. People interested in the who and why of the JFK assassination might have found the March release underwhelming , but for me, one document seems to offer confirmation of decades of historical hearsay: The CIA created and owned America's largest gun distributor.
Cummings' career intersected with the CIA from the start, a fact he never denied, for it added an air of mystery to his often mundane gun-selling operations. After a stint in the Army he attended the George Washington University, signing on with the CIA in 1950 as an arms analyst. He spent his time poring over reconnaissance images to identify the weapons North Korean and Chinese troops used in the Korean War. Then, in 1952, the agency sent him to Europe for a year on a clandestine mission to acquire war-surplus arms to send behind the Iron Curtain and to nationalist Taiwan. Cummings posed as a Hollywood producer in search of props for war films.
Cummings was always cagey about the origins of Interarms, but he pointed to this continental expedition as one moment of inspiration: So many war-surplus firearms sat unused in European warehouses waiting for an entrepreneur to connect that tremendous supply to the perennial American demand for guns. By 1954 he had established Interarms as a private importer and distributor based in Alexandria, Virginia. By the end of the decade, thanks to the millions of thousands of firearms Cummings imported each year for sale on the US consumer market, it would be the world's largest.
Interarms was the pioneer of a new consumer trend in the postwar United States: providing American buyers access to seemingly limitless inexpensive war-surplus firearms. After a bit of “sporterization” by Cummings' staff, cleaning and modifying them for recreational use, these durable weapons proved to have mass appeal. Numbers are hard to come by—counting guns in American history is more art than science—but Cummings alone imported several million of these guns, mostly rifles, buying them for pennies on the dollar and selling them for a fraction of the cost of a brand-new firearm, before the 1968 Federal Gun Control Act cut off the flow, in a sop to those US gun manufacturers who claimed Cummings' cheap guns were killing their business.
The key document in the latest release of JFK files is a CIA memo on a 1967 article in Ramparts magazine, a left-leaning monthly publication that peaked in the Vietnam era of investigative journalism. The article mentions Cummings in passing for his connections to a figure named J. Garrett Underhill, a former military intelligence officer who claimed that the CIA had engineered the Kennedy assassination and who turned up dead several months later. This CIA memo seems to have been part of routine monitoring of US media sources for mentions of agency activity. The unnamed author provides information on both Underhill and Cummings drawn from their CIA files.
Because CIA archives are inaccessible, with the exception of the relatively few documents that have been declassified and redacted through the Freedom of Information Act process, Cummings' file has never been available to researchers. And as for this specific document, researchers have seen it before—I cited it in my book , in fact—but key phrases were redacted. Now we know what was behind those black lines.
Summarizing Cummings' file, the previously released redacted version of the document states that “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the [redacted] International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco.” In the newly released, unredacted version, it reads: “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the CIA-owned companies known as International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco” (emphasis mine).
In other words, the CIA “owned” the country's largest importer and distributor of guns, the company that would spearhead a remarkable boom in gun ownership in the United States in the decade and a half before the Gun Control Act iced war-surplus imports.
The document explains that Cummings took sole ownership of Interarms in 1958, buying out the CIA's interest for $100,000—a real sweetheart deal, considering the agency valued the company at $219,000. By that point, Cummings had already made his name in the business as perhaps its most shrewd operator. He imported and sold firearms directly, through his Alexandria-based mail-order business Ye Olde Hunter, and also distributed them wholesale to thousands of businesses across the country, from small mom-and-pop shops to department stores like Sears. In the decade and a half before the GCA kneecapped his war-surplus business, Cummings imported some 5 million firearms for distribution on the US consumer market.
Cummings' impact on the industry in just his first years of operation—as we now know, running a company owned by the CIA—cannot be overstated. Congress began investigating war-surplus imports in 1957. It held hearings on a bill sponsored by two Democrats, Connecticut Rep. Albert Morano and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, that would have banned the importation of all such weapons, including the very gun that would be used to kill Kennedy in 1963. Congress seemed baffled as to the origins of all these war-surplus weapons. Where were they manufactured? Who was bringing them in? Why, if it threatened the business of traditional US manufacturers like Remington and Winchester, wasn't the federal government exercising its authority to regulate international commerce in the interest of protecting an industry vital to national defense?
The State Department had an answer for Congress in 1958 hearings : Sam Cummings' imports were good for America—perhaps not for American business, it granted, though State did not, in this instance, see protecting US industries from foreign competition as its charge. Instead, it was good for US foreign policy that many millions of guns that might have fallen into the hands of communist insurgencies overseas instead came to American shores, courtesy of entrepreneurial importers, of which Cummings was by far the most prodigious. It's not clear the extent to which State knew of the CIA's investment in Interarms, but it couldn't have been a coincidence that they were on the same policy page.
Cummings, too, had something to say to Congress: The traditional manufacturers, who had urged their New England representatives to take up the cause of restricting imports, were afraid of competition. They refused to adapt to a new global marketplace and new patterns of mass consumerism, with eager buyers looking for entry-level prices. His cheap imports were opening up the market to those shoppers, gun-curious men in the growing suburbs who might want to get their feet wet with one of his $20 sporters but who weren't quite ready for the shiny new $150 rifle with all the bells and whistles. But they'll get there—in the same way a young car-shopper starts with a beat-up old jalopy, he argued, eventually they'll walk onto the lot in middle age looking for a pricey new Cadillac.
State and Cummings proved persuasive defenders of gun imports. Congress dropped the bill and nothing like it would pass for another decade—a decade, of course, of political assassinations, social upheavals, rioting and rebellion and rising fears of urban crime. The gun industry would profit handsomely from the upheavals Americans collectively call the '60s. If the '50s was the decade of Cummings' cheap imported rifles, the '60s was the decade of the cheap imported handgun. The United States imported about 79,000 handguns in 1958; a decade later, it imported more than a million per year. Some were war-surplus firearms, but most were cheaply manufactured in postwar Europe. Entrepreneurs envied Cummings' import success and wanted a piece of the action. With American appetites for “self-defense” weapons like handguns growing in the turbulent '60s, these entrepreneurs connected with manufacturers throughout Western Europe to turn leftover wartime scrap metal into cheap and dangerous weapons for the insatiable US market. Congress finally intervened in 1968 with the Gun Control Act, which imposed new limits on gun imports. But it also left open loopholes that allowed for cheap production to simply relocate domestically. Cummings was the first and most significant of a generation of gun capitalists who remade gun culture in the postwar United States.
So is this newly unredacted document a “smoking gun” (pun definitely intended) that proves the CIA created Interarms and made Sam Cummings' career? Did the CIA bankroll the world's largest private arms company, and in the process create Americans' addiction to cheap guns? My training as a historian tells me to hedge my bets. I have spent years chasing Sam Cummings through the archives. He's always been a shadow, undeniably present but hard to discern. But having some clarity regarding Interarms' CIA roots certainly helps explain how Cummings had such tremendous success in such a short period of time. Cummings trafficked in guns, for sure, but more importantly, he trafficked in information. He knew which guns were coming on the surplus market and when, he knew which defense ministry officials made decisions about selling surplus weapons, and he knew how to get guns from one place to another and make a profit. The CIA, of course, also trafficked in information—precisely this sort of information—perhaps better than any other institutions in the postwar world. Cummings surely learned more from the agency than simply where to buy cheap guns.
There is a point at which speculation about Cummings and the CIA, in the context of the Kennedy assassination, enters tinfoil-hat territory. But this one document is a truly tantalizing revelation. Where else might the story lead, and how might it help us better understand the gun country the United States became after World War II? Scholars have long written of a phenomenon called “blowback” to describe what happens when the CIA's international meddling leads to unexpected, and often disastrous, long-term consequences—think of US support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance, eventually giving rise to al-Qaeda. What would it mean to add “founded the country's largest gun distributor” to the Blowback Hall of Fame? At the very least, this newest revelation demonstrates that America the gun country was not a natural consequence of something innate in the American character, but rather was constructed by Americans in the postwar era—maybe even by the CIA.
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