Thousands of documents relating to JFK assassination released by US National Archives

The US National Archive has released thousands of documents related to the 1963 assassination of then-president John F. Kennedy, acting shortly after president Joe Biden issued an executive order authorising the move, which also kept hundreds of other sensitive records secret for up to another year.

The release of 13,173 documents was not expected to include any new bombshells or to change the conclusion reached by the commission led by the chief justice Earl Warren that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone. However, the latest cache will be useful for historians focusing on the events around the assassination.

Mr Kennedy was shot and killed while in his motorcade travelled through Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, at the age of 46.

Thousands of books, articles, TV shows and films have explored the idea that the assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy. None have produced conclusive proof that Oswald - who was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after killing Mr Kennedy - worked with anyone else, although they retain a powerful cultural currency.

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Many of the newly-released documents belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency, including several that focused on Oswald’s movements and his contacts. Others focus on requests from the Warren Commission investigating the assassination.

The documents show that the US government opened a so-called 201 file on Oswald in December 1960, nearly three years before Mr Kennedy’s murder and after Oswald’s failed defection to the Soviet Union in 1959.

A December 1963 document described how CIA officials in Mexico City “intercepted a telephone call” Oswald made in October from that city to the Soviet Embassy there “using his own name” and speaking “broken Russian”. Oswald was hoping to travel through Cuba on his way to Russia and was seeking a visa, documents show.

No association

There were initial concerns that Ruby, Oswald’s killer, might have had some connection to Oswald. But a newly released September 1964 memo to the presidential commission investigating the assassination said “the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner.”

Congress in 1992 had ordered that all remaining sealed files pertaining to the investigation into Mr Kennedy’s death should be fully opened to the public through the National Archives in 25 years, by October 26th, 2017, except for those the president authorised to be further withheld.

In 2017, then-president Donald Trump released a cache of records, but decided to release the remaining documents on a rolling basis.

All of the remaining JFK files were originally supposed to have been released in October of last year. Mr Biden postponed that planned release, citing delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and announced they would be instead disclosed in two batches: one on December 15th of last year and another by Thursday after undergoing an intensive one-year review.

With Thursday’s release, 95 per cent of the documents in the agency’s JFK assassination records collection will have been released in their entirety and no documents will remain redacted or withheld in full after an “intensive one-year review” of all previously unreleased information.

In a memorandum Thursday, Mr Biden said that until May 1st next the National Archives and relevant agencies “shall jointly review the remaining redactions in the records that had not been publicly disclosed.” After that review, “any information withheld from public disclosure that agencies do not recommend for continued postponement” will be released by June 30th next. - Reuters

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