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Thousands of records about the US president’s assassination in 1963 still remain classified
US President Donald Trump has ordered the declassification of all remaining withheld records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Almost 5,000 documents are still veiled in secrecy.
Kennedy was killed in November 1963, while visiting Dallas, Texas. A congressional commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald was to blame. The CIA coined the pejorative term “conspiracy theory” to describe alternate scenarios regarding JFK’s death, which has not stopped many Americans from doubting the Warren Commission’s conclusions.
Trump’s order also applies to the remaining classified records about the 1968 assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights campaigner Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) says it has declassified 99% of some 320,000 documents related to the JFK assassination, as required by a law passed by Congress in 1992. The final deadline for declassification was October 2017, but the US intelligence community claimed it needed more time to review and redact the records.
According to multiple estimates, 2,140 documents remain fully or partially redacted, while another 2,500 records have been kept secret for other reasons, such as court orders or donor restrictions.
What is in the secret files?
One item of particular interest is a June 1961 memorandum written by White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger, outlining how JFK could accomplish his goal of “splintering the Agency [CIA] into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds.” One page is redacted in full, while two more have partial redactions. Kennedy was frustrated with the CIA after the botched invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April that year.
1. Partial redactions on page 8 and 10 and the full redaction of page 9 from the June 1961 memo written by White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger to Kennedy on how the president could best accomplish his goal of “splintering the Agency [the CIA] into a thousand pieces and… pic.twitter.com/nbTOcvmfAd
Another partially redacted record is the transcript of the testimony that CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton gave to the Church Committee in January 1976. Some scholars believe Angleton, who ran the CIA’s Israel desk for years and was a friend of Soviet spy Kim Philby, had lied to Congress about Israel obtaining nuclear weapons in the 1960s – something the Jewish State has neither confirmed nor denied.
Other potentially revealing records relate to CIA surveillance activities in Mexico in the early 1960s, when Oswald visited the country, and the work of a CIA officer with Cuban exiles in Miami that intersected with Oswald.
What can be expected of the revelations?
Historians and researchers that have spoken to major US outlets seem to agree that there will be no “smoking gun” in the remaining documents.
“There will be some puzzle pieces that will be put back in that will tell a more robust and rich story,” Tom Samoluk, a board member of the JFK Library Foundation, has told CNN.
Journalist Gerald Posner has warned that “anybody waiting for a smoking gun that’s going to turn this case upside down will be sorely disappointed.”
Kennedy’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has lauded the declassification as a step against the “60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation” used by the intelligence agencies to suppress “troubling facts” about the JFK assassination. He claimed that this “provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises – the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID – that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex.”
RFK Jr. has said that he believes there is “overwhelming evidence” tying the CIA to the assassination of both his uncle and his father.
When can we expect the release?
Trump’s executive order gave the US Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General 45 days to review the records and “present a plan” for their full and complete release. Both offices are currently held by acting officials, as the Senate still needs to confirm Pam Bondi as the attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI.
“We’re hoping this is going to be a mechanical plan,” Larry Schnapf, a New York-based attorney who has sued the government to compel the release of JFK files, told ABC News. If the government opts for a “substantive” review, going document-by-document, “it’s going to be a while,” he added.
