What’s new in the JFK files? Five things to know about the assassination records

The US government has released tens of thousands of pages about the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy, although it’s unclear how much light they will shed on one of the great turning points in American history.

The National Archives published the documents on Tuesday at the order of US President Donald Trump, who earlier said officials would release “all of the Kennedy files”. That sparked a “scramble” at the Justice Department, whose attorneys worked through the night, scouring hundreds of pages of documents, ABC News reported.

The files are mostly dense with information that experts already knew, but there are some gems: unveiled American assets who spied on Castro, Soviets feeding information about Kennedy’s assassin to US professors abroad, and the inner workings of CIA spycraft.

Here are five things to know about the newly released documents on a watershed moment in US history.

This release includes tens of thousands of pages

The National Archives initially released more than 1100 records totalling more than 31,000 pages. A second set of documents published later that day upped that to nearly 2200 documents and at least 63,000 pages – short of the “80,000 pages” Trump had promised on Monday. (All the documents from both releases can be read on the archives’ website.)

The Tuesday disclosures are the latest in a series of disseminations since the 1990s that have moulded the nation and its historians’ view of Kennedy’s killing. The vast majority of the archives’ 6 million pages of records related to the assassination have already been declassified, according to the agency’s website.

Recently declassified documents related to the JFK assassination.Credit: AP

Larry Schnapf, an attorney who has been trying to get the government to release records about the JFK assassination since 2017, said he expected more to be made public in coming days or weeks.

The most tantalising documents, Schnapf said, had not been published. Last month, the FBI reported to the National Archives that the agency had found 2400 records totalling 14,000 pages – all files that were never given to the Warren commission or the House select committee on assassinations, both of which were established to investigate the murders of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

“We don’t have any idea what’s in those documents,” Schnapf said.

Many of the documents had been released earlier, but with redactions

Based on their document identification numbers, none of the files released on Tuesday are new, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Most of the new material is previously redacted information that has been unmasked.

The records delve into topics that have sparked intrigue and befuddled those interested in the assassination. That includes documents about the CIA keeping tabs on gunman Lee Harvey Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in Mexico City weeks before the assassination and records on how the Soviets monitored Oswald during his time in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

After scanning multiple documents, Philip Shenon – who wrote A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination – said there wasn’t much that altered his understanding of the killing. He said this was dense material that required an expert’s eye to discern how the new unredacted records were different from their partly or fully redacted prior versions.

JFK in Dallas, Texas, on the day of his assassination on November 22, 1963.Credit: AP

“It’s always possible there is a blockbuster, but so far, nothing here on the face of it is rewriting the essential truth of what happened that day,” Shenon said. “It would take days, weeks and months for a serious researcher to really understand what’s in these documents.”

Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, said while he had not seen any surprises or earth-shattering revelations so far, the documents did reveal more information about the US’s signals intelligence at the time. This could help deepen historians’ understanding of the Kennedy administration’s decisions and methods, he said.

“These are more than just tidbits,” Naftali said. “It helps explain some of Kennedy’s actions and activities in the Global South, because he was getting some high-level information about the activities of Cambodia, Indonesia and Egypt.”

The release shines a light on CIA operations a half-century ago

The newly unredacted records include single sheets that represent the mundane bureaucratic blizzard of paper that kept Washington running half a century ago: cables, memos and dispatches.

The files range from a translation of a message asking for medication to treat anaemia to a half-faded report about the movements of Joachim Joesten, who wrote an early book about the Kennedy assassination, in which the only change is officials have unredacted the name of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik in a list of European cities.

Some of the newly unredacted records confirmed what has been widely assumed, such as that the CIA placed spies in foreign countries under the guise of working for the US State Department.

Naftali noted that some of the newly unredacted documents also confirmed more American covert actions, such as involvement in elections and labour movements, in Brazil, Finland, Cyprus, Greece and Spain.

A 1961 memo titled “CIA Reorganisation”, written for Kennedy, gives an inside look at the agency’s spycraft philosophy and its encroachment in other parts of the US government. More than 1500 CIA employees were under the cover of state workers, the memo says.

The report was written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who served in the Kennedy White House as a “court philosopher”, according to his 2007 obituary in The Washington Post. In it, he writes how “originally the use of State Department cover for CIA personnel was supposed to be strictly limited and temporary” but the CIA abandoned trying to find other ways to infiltrate other countries because this was faster and cheaper.

For instance, Schlesinger wrote, 128 CIA people worked in the Paris embassy: “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the generals’ revolt in Algeria, passers-by noted with amusement that the top floor was “ablaze with lights”.

US intelligence on the USSR and Cuba makes several appearances

In the decades before and after the assassination, much of the US’s intelligence power was trained on the USSR and Cuba – and that can be seen in the unredacted documents.

Among the documents is a 1991 teletype that talks about information from a KGB official named Vyacheslav Nikonov, whose grandfather was Stalin’s former Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov – the namesake of the Molotov cocktail. Nikonov told an American professor studying in Russia that he had “personally reviewed” five thick volumes of files about Oswald.

Nikonov was reportedly “now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB. From the description of Oswald in the files, he doubted that anyone could control Oswald”, but Nikonov said the KGB “watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR”.

“The file also reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR,” according to the teletype.

Lee Harvey Oswald.Credit: Fairfax

The newly unredacted information reveals that E.B. Smith, a retired University of Maryland history professor who befriended Nikonov while working as a Fulbright professor at St Petersburg State University, fed information about Nikonov to the US government. Smith died in 2013. Nikonov is a member of the state Duma who was sanctioned by the US government during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Some files, such as a 1965 memo titled “Cuban Affairs in the Department of Defence”, speak of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader whom the US was trying to destabilise. The report assumed that Castro wasn’t interested in a conflict with the US that would endanger his own regime.

“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” according to the report.

But some of the records also shed light on how America gained insight into Castro. An unredacted document revealed that Manuel Machado Llosas, treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and “good friend” of Castro, was actually a CIA asset.

Experts’ and politicians’ reactions so far have been measured

The overall reaction to the disclosure of the files has been muted as experts and others try to make sense of the unredacted records.

Vogue correspondent Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of Kennedy and the son of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, posted about the records online.

The front page of The Sun-Herald published on November 24, 1963.Credit:

Schlossberg, who has been critical of Trump, chastised the president and his first cousin once removed, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“These men are stealing history from present and future generations – by appropriating the past for their criminal agenda, they normalise themselves in the minds of those without living memory,” Schlossberg wrote on Wednesday morning on X.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, JFK’s nephew, praised Trump in January for ordering the records to be unredacted and viewable to the public. He called in a reversal of a “60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship and defamation” that, he said, included the Vietnam War, the September 11, 2001 attacks and their aftermath, and the government’s COVID-19 response.

Some criticised the government for releasing sensitive information that could make people the targets of harassment and fraud. In unredacting some pages, officials published dozens of social security numbers, which attorney Mark Zaid – who’s fought for the records to be made public – said in a post on X was “completely unnecessary & contributed nothing to the JFK assassination understanding”.

Joseph diGenova, a lawyer who worked for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told The Washington Post he had no idea why his name, date of birth and social security number were in the JFK files. He described the government’s release as “sloppy, unprofessional” and “absolutely outrageous”.

In the past, diGenova said he had received threats he felt compelled to report to the FBI. He also fears criminals would use the information to defraud him. “You’re opening people up to identity threat,” he said, “but also the nuts out there who could go after you.”

The Washington Post

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