The White House has ordered the release of thousands of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy for the first time in their entirety.
With the release of around 13,173 papers online, the White House announced that more than 97% of the collection’s documents are now accessible to the public.
No major findings are anticipated, but historians hope to learn more about the assassination from the papers.
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot during a visit to Dallas, Texas.
A statute from 1992 compelled the government to divulge all assassination-related papers by October 2017.
President Joe Biden issued an executive order on Thursday authorizing the most recent disclosure.
However, he stated that certain files would be kept secret until June 2023 to prevent “identifiable harm.”
The National Archives of the United States stated that 515 papers would be withheld in full and 2,545 items would be withheld in part.
The Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1964, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone. Two days after his arrest, he was murdered in the Dallas police headquarters basement.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy spurred decades of conspiracy theories, but on Thursday the CIA stated that it had “never engaged” Lee Harvey Oswald and did not withhold information about him from US investigators.
Longtime JFK historians and theorists thought that the most recent release will provide more information concerning Oswald’s activities in Mexico City in October 1963, where he met a Soviet KGB officer.
In its most recent statement, the CIA stated that all information held by the agency about his travel to Mexico City had been previously released, adding, “The 2022 release contains no new information on this subject.”
Researchers from the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit organization that sued the government to release the data, claimed that the CIA withheld information about Oswald’s time in Mexico.
According to the foundation, some CIA papers were never submitted to the archives and were therefore not included in the most recent release.
A recently disclosed document indicates that the president of Mexico helped the United States wiretap the Soviet embassy in Mexico without the knowledge of other Mexican government officials.
This piece of information was concealed by redactions in a previously disclosed version of the document.
The White House stated that the release of the data will enhance the public’s understanding of the assassination probe.
President Biden stated in his order that “agencies have conducted a comprehensive effort to analyze the complete collection of almost 16,000 records previously released in redacted form and have determined that more than 70 percent of this information may now be shared in full.”
Thousands of pages were disclosed by the Trump administration during his presidency, but others were withheld on the premise of national security, despite legislation passed in 1992 mandating the release of all the information by 2017.
Mr. Biden disclosed the release of approximately 1,500 documents in October 2021 but stated that the remaining records will remain classified.
According to Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter and author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, the new files could provide insight into whether or not the government knew of Oswald’s plans.
“I feel there may be evidence in these documents indicating that others knew before the assassination of President Kennedy that Lee Harvey Oswald was a threat and that he may have publicly discussed his desire to kill the president,” he tells.
“The question has always been whether the CIA and FBI had any inkling that this individual posed a threat to President Kennedy, and whether, if they had acted on this information, they could have rescued the president.”
