The US government on Thursday released a new set of documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a turning point in American history and the subject of persistent conspiracy theories despite the official conclusion. government that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy dead.
Historians and researchers said they were starting to sift through the 13,173 documents containing newly released information, hoping to shed light on one of the most investigated murders in recent history and the actions taken by the government before and after it.
The documents included records relating to Oswald’s trips to Mexico City several weeks before Kennedy’s assassination and to Finland in 1959, the year he defected to the Soviet Union; and images of your Cuban visa application. Some of the documents — including one about Operation Mongoose, a secret US government campaign to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro — included deleted portions.
Many documents had been released before, but now have fewer parts hidden, said the researchers, who were scrambling to find out what new information was revealed.
“There won’t be any big news. Nothing that will push the needle one way or the other,” says Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who has handled Freedom of Information Act cases related to the Kennedy assassination and who has pushed for more documents to be released. were publicized.
“For anyone interested only in the Kennedy assassination, I daresay you won’t find anything that makes you choke. The value of these documents will be for the die-hard researchers and scholars who will now spend months digesting each page.”
The National Archives said that more than 97% of the records in its collection related to the murder – approximately 5 million pages – are now available to the public.
President Joe Biden decided last year to delay the release of the latest set until Dec. 15, saying the national archivist had reported that the pandemic has had a “significant impact” on government agencies that need to be consulted on edits.
A 1992 law required the government to release the last of the Kennedy assassination documents by October 26, 2017, unless the presidency chose to withhold them for national security reasons. The administration of Donald Trump released a set of records about the case in the fall of 2017.
But after intense lobbying by the CIA and FBI, the then president agreed to withhold a batch pending review to ensure that nothing released would harm national security. The Republican told agencies that any edits must be extremely rare.
According to the CIA, 95% of its collection documents have been released and none of them have been fully redacted or fully retained. The agency said its collection of records includes about 87,000 documents, approximately 84,000 of which were released in full.
“The profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resound in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who lived through that terrible day; meanwhile, the need to protect records relating to the assassination has faded with the passage of time,” Biden said in a statement. memo on Thursday.
“Therefore, it is critical to ensure that the US government maximizes transparency by disclosing all information in records about the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons advise otherwise.”
According to Gerald Posner, investigative journalist and author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK”, anyone who believed that the latest batch could change the “fundamental conclusion ” of the Warren Commission in 1964 was on a “foolish mission”.
The court, led by Judge Earl Warren, concluded that Oswald acted alone when he fired three shots from a building in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, killing Kennedy and wounding state governor John Connally Jr. in an open limousine passing through Dealey Plaza.
Still, says Posner, “the very fact that we’re talking 59 years later about which documents the CIA and other agencies are resisting releasing in full does fuel the public’s sense that there is something wrong with the Kennedy assassination.”
Polls over the years have consistently revealed that a majority of Americans believe that there were other people involved in the murder. A House of Representatives select committee said in a report in 1979 that evidence suggested the possibility of a conspiracy, but did not identify who those conspirators might be.
Many documents released on Thursday detail covert CIA operations in Latin America in the years before and after the assassination.
For example, a memorandum dated December 1963, a month after the crime, discusses efforts to disrupt a meeting of the Single Federation of Workers for Latin America –described as an “assembly of left-wing, socialist, and communist union leaders”– in Brazil.
One document outlined CIA efforts to frame Cuba for smuggling Soviet weapons into various Latin American countries, as well as planned operations to bomb power plants, oil refineries and other industrial targets in Cuba.
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