The release of classified files about the assassination of John F Kennedy were released to the public yesterday, with more than 31,000 pages’ worth of 1,100 documents posted on the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website.
Their publication was announced just the day before by US President Donald Trump, who dropped the bombshell while visiting the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington.
“We have a tremendous amount of paper,” he said.
“You’ve got a lot of reading.”
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Trump promised that his administration would release about 80,000 pages, but ultimately, only a fraction of this materialised.
The documents relate to the 1963 assassination of former president JFK, who was killed on a visit to Dallas when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown.
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor.
Two days later, Oswald was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a jail transfer.
While investigations concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy, it has not stopped alternative theories from surfacing over the years.
This means that the release of the JFK files was highly anticipated – even though many people were admittedly slightly disappointed that around two-thirds of the files had not been published.
JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, meanwhile, was left upset for an entirely different reason, claiming nobody from his family was given advance warning that the files would be released.
He tweeted: “No – the Trump administration did not give anyone in President Kennedy’s family ‘a head’s up’ about the release.
“A total surprise, and not shocker!!”
Schlossberg, who is publicly outspoken about his cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr, added: “But Robert Kennedy Jr definitely knew.”
He also posted a video of himself stood in front of a TV news report on the files, shaking his head and saying to the camera: “You’re better than this. This is so f**king stupid. There’s so much actual news going on, why are you covering this?"
Files in the new release include a November 1991 memo from the CIA’s St Petersburg station, saying that, earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a US professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB.
The memo said the KGB official had reviewed ‘five thick volumes’ of files on Oswald and was ‘confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB’.
The memo added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted ‘that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR’.
It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.
Tyla has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.
Topics: Donald Trump, Politics, US News
Jess Hardiman