From RT: JFK ASSASSINATION FILES TO BE OPENED AFTER ONLY 61+ YEARS, RFK AND MLK FILES TOO

 28 Jan, 2025 17:16

CIA, Israel and conspiracy theories: What to expect from the JFK files

Thousands of records about the US president’s assassination in 1963 still remain classified

FILE PHOTO. ©  Getty Images/Bettmann

US President Donald Trump has ordered the declassification of all remaining withheld records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Almost 5,000 documents are still veiled in secrecy.

Kennedy was killed in November 1963, while visiting Dallas, Texas. A congressional commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald was to blame. The CIA coined the pejorative term “conspiracy theory” to describe alternate scenarios regarding JFK’s death, which has not stopped many Americans from doubting the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

Trump’s order also applies to the remaining classified records about the 1968 assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights campaigner Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

READ MORE: Trump orders release of JFK, RFK and MLK files

How many documents are there?

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) says it has declassified 99% of some 320,000 documents related to the JFK assassination, as required by a law passed by Congress in 1992. The final deadline for declassification was October 2017, but the US intelligence community claimed it needed more time to review and redact the records.

According to multiple estimates, 2,140 documents remain fully or partially redacted, while another 2,500 records have been kept secret for other reasons, such as court orders or donor restrictions.

What is in the secret files?

One item of particular interest is a June 1961 memorandum written by White House adviser Arthur Schlesinger, outlining how JFK could accomplish his goal of “splintering the Agency [CIA] into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds.” One page is redacted in full, while two more have partial redactions. Kennedy was frustrated with the CIA after the botched invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April that year.

Another partially redacted record is the transcript of the testimony that CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton gave to the Church Committee in January 1976. Some scholars believe Angleton, who ran the CIA's Israel desk for years and was a friend of Soviet spy Kim Philby, had lied to Congress about Israel obtaining nuclear weapons in the 1960s – something the Jewish State has neither confirmed nor denied.

Other potentially revealing records relate to CIA surveillance activities in Mexico in the early 1960s, when Oswald visited the country, and the work of a CIA officer with Cuban exiles in Miami that intersected with Oswald.

What can be expected of the revelations?

Historians and researchers that have spoken to major US outlets seem to agree that there will be no “smoking gun” in the remaining documents.

“There will be some puzzle pieces that will be put back in that will tell a more robust and rich story,” Tom Samoluk, a board member of the JFK Library Foundation, has told CNN.

Journalist Gerald Posner has warned that “anybody waiting for a smoking gun that’s going to turn this case upside down will be sorely disappointed.”

READ MORE: JFK’s grandson slams Trump’s order to release assassination files

Kennedy’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has lauded the declassification as a step against the “60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation” used by the intelligence agencies to suppress “troubling facts” about the JFK assassination. He claimed that this “provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises – the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID – that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex.”

RFK Jr. has said that he believes there is “overwhelming evidence” tying the CIA to the assassination of both his uncle and his father.

When can we expect the release?

Trump’s executive order gave the US Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General 45 days to review the records and “present a plan” for their full and complete release. Both offices are currently held by acting officials, as the Senate still needs to confirm Pam Bondi as the attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI.

“We’re hoping this is going to be a mechanical plan,” Larry Schnapf, a New York-based attorney who has sued the government to compel the release of JFK files, told ABC News. If the government opts for a “substantive” review, going document-by-document, “it’s going to be a while,” he added.

PBS FRONTLINE (OFFICIAL LINE): LEE HARVEY OSWALD, 2013

Some Reflections about the program--------Hugh Murray

            There are some obvious questions that rise after viewing the PBS Frontline special on Oswald.  For example, Oswald was arrested in downtown New Orleans in 1963 when several anti-Castroites surrounded him as he distributed his pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets.  The program interviewed several NOPD officers who handled Oswald.  They wondered why he simply did not pay the $25 and leave.  Instead, he wanted to be finger-printed and booked.  What the program did not show, is that he also requested to be interviewed by the FBI.  That occurred.  Yet, there is no record in the files of what he said.

            Frontline interviewed Dallas FBI Agent Hosty a number of times on the program.  Yet, no one asked Hosty about the time in November 1963 when Oswald visited and left a note at the Dallas FBI office.  After Oswald’s arrest on November 22, J. Edgar Hoover ordered that all such records be destroyed, and Agent Hosty dutifly flushed Oswald’s note down the toilet.

            Another authority interviewed by Frontline was staunch supporter of the Warren Commission’s basic thesis, Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed.  In that book, Posner showed that because of the different dates of activities, David Ferrie could not have been active in the Civil Air Patrol when Oswald was active.  With the photograph showing Oswald and Ferrie, and testimony of former members, it is clear that Posner can be wrong on some things.  Missing were questions about Ferrie as a powerful influence on some youngsters.  The isolation of the young Oswald in New York (discussed by social workers), may have ceased once the teen joined the CAP in NO.  I knew someone who believed his whole life had been turned around for the better because of Ferrie.  Ferrie was gay, but my friend was quite straight.  Still, Ferrie helped to mold him so he would become a success, and today there is a building named after my old friend.  Might Ferrie’s patriotism have inspired the young Oswald to quit Warren Easton High to join the Marines.

            When Oswald left for the USSR, others have noted he was allegedly going to a university in Europe, he flew to Finland on a plane when there were no commercial flights, and so on.  Yet, the CIA asserts he was not an agent.  Of course, some of the files still under wraps are those of the CIA re Oswald.

            Frontline showed Oswald distributing FPCC leaflets in NO.  He was not alone.  He was paying some to leaflet with him.  How many leftists PAY to have others leaflet?  It is absurd.  Just like religious people distribute literature on the street, the point is also to speak and convert the passers-by.  A church would not have an atheist leafleting.  A leftist, who believes in the cause, would want other believers to leaflet, not simply neutrals.  And where did Oswald get the money for the fellow leafleters?  Why were they not interviewed?  Or, were they possibly some of the gay Latinos who accompanied Oswald to the office of Attorney Dean Andrews?  (The attorney who spoke about a Clem Bertrand, whom some think was Clay Shaw).  And some of the leafleting pictured on Frontline just happens to be in front of the old International Trade Mart, whose leader just happened to be Clay Shaw – not mentioned on Frontline.

            There was no discussion of the possibility that Oswald was at a training camp in 1963 in Louisiana for those planning another invasion of Cuba to oust Castro.

            Once Oswald was arrested, he was paraded occasionally before the reporters.  When someone mistakenly linked Oswald by mistake, not with the FPCC, but with a group that was anti-Castro, who corrected the error?  Jack Ruby, in the police station knew the politics of the Cuban groups, and immediately corrected the speaker, that Oswald was not in the anti-Castro group, but was pro-Castro.

            For much of the proof of Oswald’s guilt, Frontline relied on the words of Priscilla McMillan.  After the assassination, when Marina Oswald was probably one of the most hated women in America, McMillan spent much time with her.  McMillan had been in the Soviet Union, too.  There are many who believe she was CIA.  Marina did not partake in the program, but on other programs, she has stated that Oswald was innocent.  Immediately after the assassination, she may have been so frightened she told McMillan what McMillan and the US government wanted to hear.  Marina’s absence should be considered.

            The grassy knoll hardly exists in Frontline.  When people rushed up the hill, they were met by a Secret Service Agent, showing his credentials.  Later, the Secret Service denied having any agent there.  The autopsy questions were sloughed over; NO District Attorney Jim Garrison’s trial placed one of the autopsy doctors, Pierre Finck, under oath, and he admitted when he went to probe the path of a bullet in Kennedy, he was ordered not to do so by the big brass in the room at Bethesda Hospital.

            Frontline, with its emphasis on the defenders of the official line – Posner, Hosty, McMillan, has produced one more defense of the lone-nut theory.  It ignored most of the major critics.  It was a disappointing program.