Latest news with #JFKFacts'
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Latest batch of JFK assassination documents show Kennedy's distrust of the CIA
The newly released tranche of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy includes a memo that for decades helped fuel speculation that the CIA was somehow involved in the killing of the president. Known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page document, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK's aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his ability to direct foreign policy. The memo's existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, but with large chunks of text blacked out for security reasons. The entire unredacted memo was one of the thousands of now-declassified documents that the National Archives and Records Administration released Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 documents that Trump promised to release have been posted online. And if anybody was expecting to find proof in the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they will not find it. The information the government had blacked out had to do with CIA staffing, including the specific number of CIA operatives stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and how they 'sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities," as well as the number of CIA sources in countries like Austria and Chile. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who runs the 'JFK Facts' blog and has been pressing the government for decades to release the records, was undeterred. 'There's a sensational story here that people need to know," Morley said in an MSNBC interview. "This is not a nothing-burger, as people will tell you. There is an amazingly interesting and pregnant story in these JFK files.' The memo and other documents are more evidence that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald under surveillance long before Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley said. 'We got a memo yesterday about Kennedy's plans to reorganize the CIA, and a lot of that memo had been redacted before,' Morley said. 'We now understand why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a mistrust, to be sure, that was returned by CIA officers who did not like his liberal policies.' Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It was not until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all of them public. Morley, who is affiliated with the foundation, said that in all the documents 'we see a new window into the CIA's pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.' The late James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald under surveillance starting in November 1959 and was 'monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts,' Morley said. Angleton had a 180-page file 'on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas' in November 1963, Morley said, citing government documents that had been released earlier. 'So what this story raises is the question: Was the CIA incredibly, atrociously, incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?' Morley said. 'We don't have the answer to that question because there's still some relevant records to come out. For example, one file of another CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald is still kept secret. This is a great first start.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
19-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Latest batch of JFK assassination documents show Kennedy's distrust of the CIA
The newly released tranche of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy includes a memo that for decades helped fuel speculation that the CIA was somehow involved in the killing of the president. Known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page document, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK's aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his ability to direct foreign policy. The memo's existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, but with large chunks of text blacked out for security reasons. The entire unredacted memo was one of the thousands of now-declassified documents that the National Archives and Records Administration released Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 documents that Trump promised to release have been posted online. And if anybody was expecting to find proof in the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they will not find it. The information the government had blacked out had to do with CIA staffing, including the specific number of CIA operatives stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and how they 'sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities," as well as the number of CIA sources in countries like Austria and Chile. Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who runs the ' JFK Facts' blog and has been pressing the government for decades to release the records, was undeterred. 'There's a sensational story here that people need to know," Morley said in an MSNBC interview. "This is not a nothing-burger, as people will tell you. There is an amazingly interesting and pregnant story in these JFK files.' The memo and other documents are more evidence that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald under surveillance long before Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley said. 'We got a memo yesterday about Kennedy's plans to reorganize the CIA, and a lot of that memo had been redacted before,' Morley said. 'We now understand why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a mistrust, to be sure, that was returned by CIA officers who did not like his liberal policies.' Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It was not until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all of them public. Morley, who is affiliated with the foundation, said that in all the documents 'we see a new window into the CIA's pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.' The late James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald under surveillance starting in November 1959 and was 'monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts,' Morley said. Angleton had a 180-page file 'on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas' in November 1963, Morley said, citing government documents that had been released earlier. 'So what this story raises is the question: Was the CIA incredibly, atrociously, incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?' Morley said. 'We don't have the answer to that question because there's still some relevant records to come out. For example, one file of another CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald is still kept secret. This is a great first start.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Government releases latest batch of JFK assassination documents
More than 60 years after President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, the federal government on Tuesday began releasing what could be the final trove of documents delving into the assassination that shocked the nation and spawned countless conspiracy theories. The National Archives and Records Administration started posting the long-awaited files just before 7 p.m. — a day after President Donald Trump announced that 80,000 pages related to the fatal shooting on Nov. 22, 1963, were about to be released. 'In accordance with President Donald Trump's directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released," the administration's statement read. Within minutes, thousands of documents that had been hidden from the public for decades appeared on the site. It wasn't immediately clear whether the trove of documents contains any bombshells or evidence to counter the conclusion the Warren Commission reached in 1964 that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository. 'You got a lot of reading,' Trump said Monday as he visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. 'I don't believe we're going to redact anything.' Trump was cagey about what would be in those files. Historians contend that around 4,700 documents haven't yet been released. "The origins of the 80,000 pages of material are unknown," Jefferson Morley, an expert on the JFK assassination and the CIA, wrote on his 'JFK Facts' blog before the new batch of documents was released. Justice Department lawyers worked all night to review hundreds of pages of classified documents before they were released, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News. It also remained to be seen whether the document drop would finally put to rest the widespread public skepticism of the government's official explanation that Oswald acted alone. 'People have so many doubts,' presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. 'There are so many theories that are conflicting. It's very hard for me to imagine that there will be one piece of evidence that will make everyone agree on what happened here. What most people do agree is that the killing of John Kennedy changed history, and mainly in a bad way.' When Trump was campaigning last year and trying to win the endorsement of JFK's nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he renewed his promise to release the files. Hours after he snagged RFK Jr.'s endorsement in August, Trump vowed that if elected, he would establish a commission on assassination attempts in honor of RFK Jr., who is now his secretary of health and human services. Shortly after he began his second term, Trump signed an executive order mandating the release of all records related to President Kennedy's assassination, as well as the 1968 assassinations of RFK Jr.'s father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Sr., and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time. Trump released some JFK-related documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files. It wasn't until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country's largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all the documents public. But Biden released only about 98% of all the documents related to the killing that remained in the National Archives, which controls the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. 'It's high time that the government got its act together and obeyed the spirit and the letter of the law,' Morley, who is also the vice president of the nonpartisan Mary Ferrell Foundation, said at the time. 'This is about our history and our right to know it,' he said. The 4,700 or so records that were kept under wraps were believed to have included more information about accused Oswald's sojourn in Mexico City before the assassination. Among those documents were 44 related to CIA agent George Joannides and a covert Cuba-related program he ran that came into contact with Oswald less than four months before Kennedy was shot, according to calculations made by JFK researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation. In a memorandum explaining why some documents weren't being released, Biden noted that the records act 'permits the continued postponement of disclosure of information ... only when postponement remains necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.' Prominent historians didn't buy that explanation. 'We're 59 years after President John Kennedy was killed, and there's just no justification for this,' U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board from 1994 to 1998, said when Biden released the records. This article was originally published on
