WASHINGTON – One of the world’s foremost JFK assassination experts thinks there’s nothing in the mountains of classified government files that President Donald Trump ordered released this week that points away from Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman that sunny day in Dallas 61 years ago.
Another thinks something quite different; that the thousands of pages of newly unredacted material make the case that the CIA had Oswald under such close surveillance in the months before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination that it can no longer argue it simply didn’t know what he was up to.
Researchers continue to plow through the 77,000 pages of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration began releasing Tuesday night to crowdsource and compare notes, while social media posts by conspiracy theorists pushed unproven angles.
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They are racing to find out what the newly unredacted portions mean, and what they might show that could help solve, finally, one of the most confounding mysteries in modern American history: Did Oswald really act alone in assassinating JFK during that Cold War climate of fear, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 nearly led to a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war?
Here’s what we know so far:
No direct challenge to Oswald lone-gunman narrative
The consensus appears to be that the files do little if anything to challenge the official findings that Oswald, a disgruntled former Marine and returned Soviet defector, shot and killed Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963. Arrested that day, Oswald was killed two days later on live TV, shot while in police custody by a mob-associated strip club owner, Jack Ruby.
Two high-level investigations found Oswald fired three shots from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository using an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5-millimeter rifle. One shot missed one passed through Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally, who survived, and the third fatally struck Kennedy’s skull.
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The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald and Ruby had each acted alone. But the later House Select Committee on Assassinations maintained another unknown person fired at Kennedy in what was “probably” a conspiracy.
“The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy,” the committee also said.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to really understand what’s in these files for days, weeks, months, because there’s just so much” material, said Philip Shenon, author of the 2013 book, “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.”
“But from first glance,” he said, “there don’t seem to be any bombshells, nothing that fundamentally rewrites the history of the assassination in any way – nothing that points away from Oswald as the only gunman in Dallas.”
Shenon did say the material offers a rich new history on the CIA’s sources and methods at the height of the Cold War − information the CIA has tried to keep secret since the assassination but that Trump has ordered released in the name of transparency.
The National Archives released 63,000 pages on Tuesday night, a day after Trump’s surprise order prompted a mad scramble to un-redact the documents. Another 17,000 pages were released Thursday night.
‘Breakthrough’ raises troubling questions about CIA
JFK files expert Jefferson Morley, on the other hand, thinks he has found information in the documents that amount to “a breakthrough” in the public’s understanding of Kennedy’s assassination.
“We now have sufficient evidence to the question was the CIA atrociously incompetent when it came to JFK’s assassination? Or legally complicit?” Morley, the author of three books on Kennedy and the CIA, said in one of a series of posts on X. “The new JFK files enable a verdict of complicity.”
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In particular, Morley told USA TODAY, the new information raises significant questions about the CIA’s close surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City and New Orleans in the months before the assassination.
At the very least, he said, it shows that the CIA likely knew enough about Oswald’s propensity for political violence that it should have warned the FBI and other agencies − and possibly prevented Kennedy’s assassination.
“What we’re learning about the surveillance of Oswald is now much deeper and much more troubling than it was a week ago,” Morley, who is also the author of the popular JFK Facts newsletter.
Rumors have swirled since the assassination that the CIA was somehow involved in Kennedy’s assassination, possibly in anger over his foreign policy, including his lack of full support for the spy agency’s ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The CIA has vigorously denied having anything to do with the Kennedy assassination. There’s nothing in the government files, or in past investigations, to suggest it did.
But Morley said some of the recently unredacted files shed troubling additional light on Oswald’s meetings in Mexico City, for instance, where he met with Cuban and Soviet spies – including a Soviet assassination expert – while the CIA was conducting audio and photographic of surveillance on him.
“They were not incompetent when they were doing this. That’s what the new record shows us,” Morley said. “They were running operations involving Oswald that resulted in the death of the President, and they hid it.”
Asked if he was sure he wanted to make such a politically explosive comment, Morley told USA TODAY, “Yes. And I’m saying it for the record.”
Kennedy White House didn’t like some CIA covert ops
The new release includes hundreds of CIA records as well as White House and National Security Council documents relating to covert operations abroad, “particularly in Latin American nations such as Cuba and Mexico which are fixtures in the history of the Kennedy assassination,” according to the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
“For the first time, these records on CIA covert operations are being released uncensored,” the archive said.
One of the more explosive things to come out of the new release is the fully unredacted version of a “Top Secret” June 1961 memorandum sent to Kennedy by White House aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
It said that one the day of Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS,” or intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources.
The U.S. Embassy in Paris alone had 123 “diplomats” who were actually CIA undercover officers, and 11 of the 13 embassy “political officers” in Chile – a hotbed of Cold War spying − were undercover CIA as well, Schlesinger wrote. He said the CIA was undermining Kennedy’s diplomats, and thus undermining his foreign policy.
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One key document, the National Security Archive wrote, described “examples of activities exceeding the CIA’s charter.”
That included a CIA counterespionage operation against the French embassy in Washington, D.C., that involved “breaking and entering and the removal of documents from the French consulate,” it said. Then-CIA chief John McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including with Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.”
Also released in full were a series of summaries of briefings by McCone to members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that provide more details about known CIA political action programs and previously unknown details about “the Agency’s covert financial support to political parties in the fight against communism” around the world, according to the National Security Archives report.
It also cited a CIA Inspector General’s report on the 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot.
Josh Meyer is USA TODAY’s Domestic Security Correspondent. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @joshmeyerdc.bsky.social.
