The National Archives published thousands of pages of declassified records related to the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The records were published on the National Archives website, joining the recently published records published in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2017-2018.
“This launch consists of approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified records that will be published without writings,” said the announcement of the National Intelligence Director’s office. “Additional documents retained under the seal of the Court or for the secret of the Grand Jury, and the records subject to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code must be revealed before liberation.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 23 directing the release of all the remaining records related to the murder, saying that it was of “public interest” to do so.
The initial launch of Tuesday contained 1,123 records that comprise 32,000 pages. A subsequent launch on Tuesday night contained 1,059 records that comprise 31,400 additional pages.
Among the material was the long -awaited text of a June 1961 memorandum in the CIA, sent to President Kennedy by the assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The memorandum contained hard criticism of the espionage agency only a few months after the CIA supported the invasion of the Fidel Pigs Bay of Fidel Cuba of Fidel Castro.
The previously released versions of the 63 -year -old memorandum had contained more than a full page of writings: classification brands that generated a great interest between researchers and conspiracy theorists, particularly those who have the vision without foundation that the CIA could have played a role in Kennedy’s murder.
President John F Kennedy, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, the governor of Texas, John Connally, and others smile at the crowds that cover their caravan route in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Schlesinger had argued to Kennedy that the dependence of the CIA in “controlled American sources” had been invading the traditional functions of the State Department, and that the CIA could have been seeking to infiltrate the policy of the allies of the United States.
“The CIA today has almost as many people under official coverage abroad as the State,” Schlesinger wrote in 1961, adding that in certain countries, the presence of the CIA “surpasses the regular staff of the State Department.”
The previously classified part of the memorandum cites the specific number of CIA personnel that had been parked at the United States embassy in Paris, where “the CIA has even tried to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities, including the president of the National Assembly,” said the memorandum.
Schlesinger also details the number of CIA sources in Austria and Chile, information in the note that had been classified so far.
Several of the recently launched pages detail how the CIA managed to play phones in Mexico City between December 1962 and January 1963 to monitor the communications of the Soviets and Cubans in their diplomatic facilities, which Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer visited in the months prior to the murder.
The previously written pages explain specific instructions for the CIA operations on how you exchange, including the use of certain chemicals to create brands on telephone devices that other spies could only see under UV light.
In this file photo dated November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, is seen during a press conference after his arrest in Dallas.
Stringer/AFP through Getty Images
For decades, the CIA has urged the continuous secret of these details for fear of revealing the methods of the agency’s spy ship.
A 79 -page record contains 15 recently written pages, although several of them remain illegible due to the degraded quality of the letter after many photocopy duplication rounds.
The recently revealed portions detail the surveillance of the CIA of the Soviet embassies in Mexico City and the efforts to recruit double agents of the Soviet Agency staff, and reveal the names and positions of the recruits. The CIA officials who write these memoranda promote the effectiveness of their efforts, with a trumpet: “I cannot avoid feeling that we are buying a great offer for our money in this project.”
The memorandum also details the surveillance of the CIA of an American man described as a communist who lives in Mexico. Most of the memo is a list of telephone numbers that were used by the United States government. Researchers have long searched this file due to Oswald’s visits to Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, but the document does not include any mention of Oswald by name.
“The first launch of the JFK files of 2025 is an encouraging start,” said Jefferson Morley of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non -profit organization that operates a database of government records about Kennedy’s murder, in X. Now we have complete versions of approximately one third of the written documents of JFK of the national files (approximately 1,124 approximately 3,500). Trivial information has been eliminated and it seems that there are no writings, although we have not seen all the documents. “
“Seven of the ten JFK files held by the archives and searched by JFK researchers are now in the public registry. These long -term records show new light on the distrust of JFK of the CIA, the Murder plots of Castro, Oswald’s surveillance in Mexico City and the operations of the CIA propaganda that involve Oswald,” Morley published. “The launch does not include two thirds of the promised files or any of the more than 500 IRS records, nor any of the 2,400 FBI files recently discovered. However, this is the most positive news about the declassification of the JFK files since the 1990s.”
Many of the documents have long been in the public domain, with the exception of minor writings, such as the blackening of the identifiable personnel of sources or employees of the CIA that the CIA had fought fiercely to keep secret.
One of those documents in August 1966 recommends a “certificate of distinction” for a CIA official who directed the technical division of the Espionage Agency. The previous releases of the same document contained shocking writings that described how this individual led a team that “conceived and developed” the use of “fluoroscopic scan” and radiographs, which allowed the CIA “to detect hidden technical listening devices” for the first time. The official, James McCord, would become head of security of the re -election campaign of Richard Nixon in 1972, and would win infamy for his role as one of Watergate’s thieves whose robbery precipitated the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.
The launch of the JFK materials occurs a day after Trump announced to journalists that the administration would begin publishing the records on Tuesday, which caused a fight within the Department of Justice to free lawyers to help with the declassification process.
The Congress voted in 1992 to demand the Government to release and declassify all records related to murder and subsequent investigations for 2017, but Trump and President Joe Biden repeatedly delayed that deadline due to national security concerns.
The launch of Tuesday represents a small outstanding section of the more than six million pages of Kennedy murder records collected by the national archives, most of which have already been declassified and are available online or in person for revision, according to the agency.
It was also published on Tuesday 14 documents related to the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King Jr., totaling around 1,050 pages and 21 documents with respect to Robert F. Kennedy, with a total of approximately 2,500 pages.
Of the published RFK documents, only one directly mentioned his murder in 1968. An intelligence document of 1968, previously published in 2018, discusses how the murder of RFK fueled the interest in the murder of his brother and the investigation of the Prosecutor of New Orleans Jim Garrison about the matter.
“It can be expected that Sirhan’s next trial, accused of the murder of Senator Kennedy, causes a new wave of criticism and suspicions against the United States, once again claiming the existence of a sinister conspiracy of political murder,” the office said.
Some of the other documents detailed operations to overthrow Castro in Cuba. According to a 1964 document, two intelligence assets argued that they potentially murder Castro under the administration of Lyndon Johnson.
“The CIA was supposedly in favor of such a plan; however, to the extent that Attorney General Robert Kennedy would not have part of him, he was filed. Now the plan has supposedly been mentioned again for consideration,” said the document.
Another document previously published RFK detailed that is reported on the possible plans to kill Castro.
“RFK asks them to tell him before the CIA returns to work with the mafia,” said a note to the foot of the document.
Some of the documents seem to have originated in the commission of the president of the United States on CIA activities within the United States, also known as the Rockefeller Commission. In a 1964 intelligence document, a station leader pointed out an interest in developing a source whose daughter is a secretary in the RFK Senate office. That document was released in 2018.
John Parkinson, Ely Brown and Peter Charalambous of ABC News contributed to this report.
