US releases files on assassination of John F. Kennedy

Myriad leads, from Soviet spies to African communist groups and the Italian mafia, have been uncovered in thousands of secret documents on the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy.

A portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House. Picture: AFP

Myriad leads, from Soviet spies to African communist groups and the Italian mafia, have been uncovered in thousands of secret documents on the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy.

The CIA and FBI files show US investigators spread their net wide and deep to find out if Lee Harvey Oswald conspired with others in the November 22, 1963 murder that shocked the world.

The papers also show the ­extensive US efforts to spy on and influence the communist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, where Oswald had contacts and which Kennedy had sought to overthrow.

The 1491 files, many of them long reports, were posted on the JFK Assassination Records page of the National Archives, which ­already has tens of thousands of listings related to Kennedy’s death and the investigation that followed.

The assassination has long given rise to many conspiracy theories that do not accept the official verdict that Oswald worked alone when he shot Kennedy as the young president was rolling through the streets of Dallas, Texas, in a convertible limousine.

Some believe Oswald, a communist sympathiser, was put up to it by Cuba or the Soviet Union. Others believe that anti-Cuba ­activists, possibly with support in US intelligence or the FBI, had Kennedy killed.

And still others believe his political rivals could have been at the root of the assassination.

Four years ago, then-president Donald Trump was legally bound by a 1992 law to release the information held back by US intelligence on the subject. The law ­requires all government records on the assassination be disclosed “to enable the public to become fully informed”.

John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline moments before he was shot in Dallas in 1962. Picture: AFP

Mr Trump declassified more than 53,000 documents in seven tranches, taking the portion of the entire assassination archive available to the public to 88 per cent, according to the National Archive.

But Mr Trump left thousands of others under wraps on national ­security grounds. President Joe Biden has since pledged to honour the law.

Philip Shenon, an expert in the assassination dossier, wrote in an article published by ­Politico on Wednesday that there are probably documents that will never be ­released for security reasons.

“So long as the government continues to keep some documents hidden, it will only further promote the idea that sinister conspiracies about Kennedy’s death have a basis in fact,” he said.

“Today, QAnon, which the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, has embraced JFK conspiracy theories,” Shenon said.

Shenon estimated that 15,000 assassination-related documents remain classified, most of them from the CIA and FBI.

Jefferson Morley, who keeps a website on the assassination, JFKFacts.org, and who has spent years in court seeking the declassification of documents, said the newest release still holds important records back.

Importantly, he said, interviews that historian William Manchester did with Jackie Kennedy and brother Robert Kennedy remain restricted. “Neither Jackie nor RFK believed the official theory that Kennedy was killed by one man alone for no reason,” Morley tweeted. “They said privately JFK was killed by his domestic enemies. That’s what’s on these tapes and why they are so sensitive.”

AFP