U.S. media reports say the National Archives on December 15 made public nearly 1,500 documents related to the US government’s investigation into the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy.
The disclosure of secret cables, internal memos and other documents reportedly satisfies a deadline set in October by Joe Biden and is in keeping with a federal statute that calls for the release of records in the government’s possession. Additional documents are expected to be made public next year.
The Guardian notes that there was no immediate indication that the records contained revelations that could radically reshape the public’s understanding of the events surrounding the November 22, 1963 assassination of Kennedy in Dallas at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.
But the latest tranche of documents was nonetheless eagerly anticipated by historians and others who, decades after the Kennedy killing, remain skeptical that, at the height of the cold war, a troubled young man with a mail-order rifle was solely responsible for an assassination that changed the course of American history.
The documents reportedly include CIA cables and memos discussing Oswald’s previously disclosed but never fully explained visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City as well as discussion, in the days after the assassination, of possible Cuban involvement in the killing of Kennedy.
According to ABC News, one CIA memo describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would permit him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa. On Oct. 3, more than one month before the assassination, he drove back into the United States through a crossing point at the Texas border.
Another memo, dated the day after Kennedy's assassination, reportedly says that according to an intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Oswald communicated with a KGB officer while at the Soviet embassy that September.
The new files include several FBI reports on the bureau’s efforts to investigate and surveil major mafia figures like Santo Trafficante Jr and Sam Giancana, who are often mentioned in conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination.
Apart from the Kennedy investigation, some of the material will be of interest to scholars or anyone interested in the minutiae of 1960s counterespionage, with pages and pages of arcane details on such things as the methods, equipment and personnel used to surveil the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, according to The Guardian.
