What are the John F Kennedy assassination files?
These are previously classified files relating to the assassination of former US president John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. The Warren Commission found that the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone, yet two-thirds of Americans remain sceptical about the commission’s conclusions and not all of them are conspiracy theorists.
Why now?
US president Donald Trump promised that, if re-elected, he would release all the files to the public. He wanted to release all the files in 2017, but was persuaded by the intelligence services to hold back some for national security reasons. He has decided that now is the time for them all to be released.
As often with Trump, there was chaos. On Monday, he gave the US National Archives 24 hours to open the files.
[ Unredacted JFK assassination files released as history buffs hunt for cluesOpens in new window ]
What has been released?
The files relate not only to the assassination of Kennedy but also to that of his brother Robert F Kennedy in 1968, the father of Trump’s health secretary Robert F Kennedy jnr, and the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King jnr – also in 1968.
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On Tuesday, 1,123 documents containing some 64,000 pages were released. The papers are not sorted or catalogued, so researches and casual readers have to click on each one to see if they are of interest to them.
The New York Times’ national political reporter, Adam Nagourney, who is leading the paper’s coverage, says the manner the files were released may be a deliberate ploy on the part of the CIA to make it as difficult as possible for researchers to find out how the agency really operates.
What has been discovered to date?
There’s an intriguing finding in one state department paper: a CIA agent, Gary Underhill, left Washington a day after the Kennedy assassination in a “very agitated” state, claiming to a friend that a CIA clique was behind the murder. Fewer than six months later Underhill was found dead in his Washington apartment, apparently having died by suicide. The confidential memo states that Underhill alleged the CIA clique was carrying on a “lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband”.
Another document reveals the KGB had investigated Oswald and found that at no time was he one of its agents. Oswald lived in the USSR between 1959 and 1961, when he tried unsuccessfully to become a Russian citizen. But he got bored with the grimness of living in a communist state.
The KGB official noted that Oswald was a “poor shot when he tried firing in the USSR”.
Given the incredible accuracy of the shots that killed Kennedy, this is likely to strengthen the belief that there was more than one shooter on that fateful day in Dallas.
