JFK files: government releases classified assassination documents
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FBI 'warned Dallas of death threat to Oswald'
The FBI had warning of a potential death threat to Lee Harvey Oswald, according to a memo by director J Edgar Hoover, which reveals some of the bureaus reactions to the assassination.
“There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,” Hoover begins. “Last night we received a call in our Dallas office from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organized to kill Oswald.
“We at once notified the chief of police and he assured us Oswald would be given sufficient protection. This morning we called the chief of police again warning of the possibility of some effort against Oswald and again he assured us adequate protection would be given. However, this was not done.”
Hoover admitted that he does not have “firm” information about the man who shot Oswald dead, Jack Ruby, but nonetheless declared that his real name was Rubenstein, noted rumors of “underworld activity” suggested he had “the reputation of being a homosexual”.
The FBI sent an agent to Oswald’s deathbed in the hopes of a confession, to no success. Ruby denied making any phone call.
But then Hoover said that he and Nicholas Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, already feared the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories. He noted that Oswald had visited Mexico City, called the Cuban embassy there, and sent a letter to the Soviet embassy about a visa.
“The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,” Hoover said.
h/t to reader Michael White, in New Jersey, for alerting us to the memo.
In two other memos, dated to August and September 1963 – before the assassination – an agent with the FBI’s New Orleans division wrote that agents had lost track of Oswald and were looking for him, especially in the Dallas area.
h/t to reader Jess O’Neill, in Australia, for the find.
Updated
In a mirror of his American counterparts, one Soviet leader, in particular, was convinced that the KGB needed to get to the bottom of some kind of wide-ranging plot to destabilize the US.
In 1965, a source told the FBI that the KGB had “data purporting to indicate president Johnson was responsible for the assassination” – meaning at least some Soviets were convinced of a conspiracy years after Oswald’s death and the Warren Commission.
The FBI pressed a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, for more information about what relation Oswald may have had with the with the USSR. Nothing worth anything, Nonsenko told them.
1966 FBI doc: Soviets declared Oswald 'maniac'
In one particularly striking FBI document, from director J Edgar Hoover, the agency details everything it has learned about the Soviet reaction to the JFK’s assassination, and what its agents might have known about Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Soviets, like many Americans, were convinced of a conspiracy.
They were also frightened that a panicked, reactive military would lash out at the USSR, and desperately wanted to learn more about what kind of person Lyndon Johnson was.
Our source further stated that Soviet officials were fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the Untied States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union. It was the further opinion of the Soviet officials that only maniacs would think that the “left” forces in the United States, as represented by the Communist Party, USA, would assassinate President Kennedy, especially in view of the abuse the Communist Party, USA, has taken from the “ultraleft” as a result of its support for the peaceful coexistence and the disarmament policies of the Kennedy administration.
They declared Lee Harvey Oswald a “neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else”. They disclaimed him entirely.
Updated
A huge swath of the CIA files are receipts and financial accounts for clandenstine projects: tens of thousands of dollars paid out for anti-communist activities, supplies, and weapons, especially to people in Latin America.
Many of the documents read first and foremost as the 1960s artifacts they are: obsessed with communism, civil rights, and Vietnam.
In one, the CIA takes note of an article declaring that Martin Luther King “was right” about the Vietnam war. Another describes a “black power conference” that civil rights activist Adam Clayton Power wanted to hold, but “no one showed up”. A third concerns Stokley Carmichael,’s remarks of solidarity with a Latin American group.
There is are multiple transcripts of interrogations of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB defector. In one, Nosenko and his interrogator discuss Stalin, and rumors that the Soviet leader had his wife murdered, and then visited her grave.
Updated
Returning to the CIA report on plans to overthrow the Castro regime in the 1960s, the agency outlined a proposal to airdrop leaflets encouraging the killings of various communist officials.
“Leaflets will be designed to indicate phases. For example, the first leaflets will contain only names of communist leaders; the next leaflets will revise the names by job; i.e. cell leader, informer, party members, etc.; any of the above or subsequent leaflets will announce the amount of the reward, how and where it may be collected. One final leaflet may be deemed advisable and that one announcing a .02c reward for the delivery of Castro.”
In a set of 1967 CIA documents, the agency lays out a report on Martin Luther King Jr.
In it, the agency considers whether there might be links between the civil rights movement and communism. It notes that a 4 November 1964 Washington Post article “stated that subject [King] was planning a visit to the Soviet Union. He reportedly had been invited to the USSR, but Rev Ralph Abernathy, spokesman for subject, refused to comment on the source of the invitation.
Another CIA document about a “black militant situation” in Chicago, says that one of its sources, “A”, believed King “sought at least constructive, positive projects”.
Updated
Many of the documents pertain to anti-Cuban efforts by the US government in the 1960s and 70s, including “Operation Mongoose”.
In this 1962 file, the CIA considers “the possibility of producing crop failures by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin.”
Archives release documents
Trump: I have no choice but to keep files secret
Hello and welcome to our rolling coverage of 2,800 previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of president John F Kennedy, a publication with over half a century of speculation, films, novels and conspiracy theories riding along.
A White House official told reporters that the president blocked the release of few hundred records, at least temporarily. Earlier on Thursday president Donald Trump approved requests, mostly by the FBI and CIA, to keep those documents hidden “because of the national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs concerns,” the official said.
Trump ordered the agencies to review those redaction over the course of six months, the official said, to ensure more documents reach the public. The official said he had “no choice” but to accept the agencies’ concerns for the time being, but that he wanted “the veil finally be lifted”.
The National Archives release was mandated by a 1992 law, which set a deadline of 26 October 2017, 54 years after Kennedy was killed by a sniper in Dallas, Texas. Donald Trump has chosen not to block the release of thousands of documents, unless intelligence agencies “provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise,” the White House said.
The president seemed excited about the release on Wednesday evening, tweeting:
The documents, numbering around 3,150, are largely a mystery. But researchers do not think they will change the findings of the Warren Commission, tasked in 1963 and 1964 to investigate the assassination. That panel found that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US marine and then defector to the Soviet Union, was the sole gunman. Oswald was himself murdered while in custody, by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
A House panel, in 1979, cast skepticism on the thoroughness of the first investigation, and considered it “likely” that some kind of conspiracy was at work, perhaps involving a second shooter on “the grassy knoll”. The committee’s findings opened the door for theories about the CIA, Cuban or Soviet agents and the mafia.
Officials said on Thursday that they would not comment on conspiracy theories, including one propagated by Trump, about the father of a sitting senator. “Honestly we’re not going to comment on the content of the files,” the official said. “It’s the practice of the National Archives to leave it up to the researchers.”
But the panels’ findings have not deterred private sleuths, the president’s preferred tabloid among them. Many citizen investigators point to Oswald’s six-day excursion to Mexico City, to meet with Cuban and Soviet agents before the assassination, or the short “Zapruder film”, a video made by the handheld camera of Abraham Zapruder. The ambiguity within that video other circumstances of Kennedy’s death have led to a film by Oliver Stone, a novel by Don DeLillo, and scores of documentaries and citizen conspiracies.
The president espoused one such conspiracy theory during his 2016 campaign, telling Fox News in an interview that the father of a rival, senator Ted Cruz, “was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot.”
“The whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said. “What is this, right, prior to his being shot, and nobody brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible.”
Before and during the campaign, Trump also spread the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born a US citizen, and the internet myths that an American general fought Islamic terrorists by dipping bullets in pig’s blood and that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.
Conspiracies aside, the newly released documents could provide a trove of new information for historians to pore over, as formerly secret documents related to Kennedy’s presidency have already done in recent years. We’ll be poring through the material here, with expert assistance and reporting from Tom Dart in Dallas.
We’d like your help too. The JFK files will be published online here. If you’re reading through the documents and you spot an interesting fact or snippet you think we’ve missed, it would be great if you could let us know. We’ve set up a form here for contributions.
