New JFK assassination files: What was revealed about Oswald and CIA plots?

Al Jazeera

20-03-2025

The Trump administration on Tuesday released more than 2,000 files related to the assassination of former United States President John F Kennedy — a case that has fuelled conspiracy theories for more than 60 years.
While there is limited evidence to suggest that the initial explanation surrounding JFK's death was inaccurate or misleading, the released documents shed light on how the US gathered intelligence during the Cold War. They also detail intelligence reports about Kennedy's killer.
Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald, a then 24-year-old former US marine, who shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was killed just two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a jail transfer.
In the aftermath of Kennedy's death, President Lyndon B Johnson established the Warren Commission, named after then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the investigation. In 1964, the commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and found no credible evidence to suggest the involvement of anyone else.
Do the newly released documents cast any doubts about that conclusion? What new information do these documents reveal? And is the timing of their release significant?
Do the released documents shed new light on JFK's death?
For decades, many Americans have not believed the official narrative on Kennedy's death. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans rejected the Warren Commission's conclusion.
But Tuesday's document dump did not support the validity of any conclusion other than the commission's findings, according to experts who spoke to Al Jazeera.
'I didn't really see anything to change the narrative indicating that Oswald as the lone gunman was the person who killed John F Kennedy and that it was not the result of a conspiracy,' Marc Selverstone, professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia, told Al Jazeera.
'The documents that I saw were, in some ways, tangential to the assassination itself,' Selverstone added.
Did we learn anything more about Oswald?
The documents confirm that the assassin visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City before killing JFK.
One document included intelligence reports with some details on Oswald's time in the Soviet Union — he had moved there in 1959, defecting and renouncing his US citizenship, before returning to the US in 1962. The document mentioned a KGB agent named Nikonov, who had reviewed files from the Soviet security service to determine whether Oswald had ever been an agent of the agency.
Surveillance reports indicate that intelligence agencies in the US also closely monitored Oswald after his return. A report from the 1990s, also included in the document release, suggested that Oswald may have been a poor shot.
Did the documents tell us more about CIA operations?
Other documents revealed details more broadly about the US intelligence gathering and foreign policy efforts in the Cold War era, including a top-secret campaign dubbed 'Operation Mongoose', which was designed to destabilise Cuba's communist government.
Another memo showed that the CIA had placed 1,500 agents overseas who posed as State Department officials, including 128 at the US embassy in Paris. A key aide to Kennedy, named Arthur Schlesinger Jr, warned that the practice could undermine the State Department's role in foreign policy.
The document drop also included details about the involvement of US intelligence agencies in attempting to overthrow foreign governments — though many of these details only expand on already known efforts by the US to orchestrate assassinations or coups. For instance, they detail communication in 1963 between the CIA director's office and operatives in Cuba who were plotting to overthrow the Fidel Castro government that had come to power in 1959.
'We are seeing a lot relating to assassination plots against leaders of other countries like Castro in Cuba,' David Barrett, professor of political science at Villanova University, told Al Jazeera.
Another document — a CIA memo — reveals details about covert activities dubbed E4DEED, aimed at removing the government of Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo. 'One segment of E4DEED was known as EMSLEW, the cryptonym for the operation to remove Trujillo by violent action,' the document notes, before going on to list the names of the CIA officers and others involved in these initiatives.
Trujillo was assassinated in May 1961 — the US had severed diplomatic ties with the Dominican Republic in 1960 — by gunmen on a highway while he was in a car with a chauffeur headed to San Cristobal to meet his mistress. Trujillo, the CIA note observed, was known to leave behind his security detail for these secret rendezvous.
How many JFK files have been released?
According to the National Archives, prior to Tuesday's release, authorities had already published more than 99 percent of the approximately 320,000 documents reviewed under the 1992 JFK Records Act.
During Trump's first administration, he promised to disclose all outstanding records on the assassination but ultimately released only about 2,800 documents after the CIA and the FBI requested that thousands of pages of material be withheld pending review.
Former President Joe Biden's administration released about 17,000 more records, leaving fewer than 4,700 files withheld in part or in full. Last month, the FBI discovered an additional 2,400 documents previously withheld.
On Monday, President Donald Trump said 'people have been waiting for decades' for the documents. However, many of the documents released were also duplicates of previously released documents that are already in the public domain — though some documents that were released included unredacted versions of previously redacted information.
What about the JFK killing conspiracy theories?
None of the documents released appears to give any legitimacy to the decades of conspiracy theories that sprang up around the former president's death.
'I'm not hearing about anything yet that's sort of earth-shaking,' Barrett said.
The 2023 Gallup poll found that 20 percent of those surveyed believed Oswald conspired with the US government to kill Kennedy, while 16 percent suspected he worked with the CIA. However, no evidence has been released this week to support either of those claims.
Other conspiracy theories range from claims of multiple attackers to suspicions that foreign adversaries orchestrated the assassination, to claims that his vice president, Johnson, was involved amid alleged desires to assume power, or that it was a mafia hit. The documents did show that intelligence agencies investigated these theories, which turned out to be hollow.
Even Trump has fuelled conspiracy theories about JFK's death. During the 2016 campaign, he suggested that then-rival Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination, referencing a story in the National Enquirer. In 2024, David Pecker, the former publisher of the publication, testified that the story was fabricated.
Transparency or PR stunt?
The latest document release follows comparable actions from previous administrations. This is the second mass release of secret documents, and the administration claims this is aimed at ushering in more transparency.
Jack Schlossberg, Kennedy's grandson, said on X that the Kennedy family was not given any 'heads up' this was coming. He also suggested the Trump administration was dismantling Kennedy's legacy by undoing his grandfather's work on civil rights and equality, and in standing up to Moscow by instead rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and partnering with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, experts still believe that the document dump is a positive step.
'I think it's [the document release] a very good thing for transparency. The US government finally, very belatedly, released these documents,' Barrett added.
Still, other document dumps under Trump have not been lauded as transparent. Last month, the president released files related to financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker with ties to some of the globe's richest and most powerful people.
Trump came under fire for the initial release of the documents, which were only given to a small group of fringe conservative influencers and which turned out to consist of information already available in the public domain.
Even some of Trump's Republican allies in Congress expressed disappointment with how the Epstein files were handled and pushed for more transparency.