The JFK Files

In October 2017, 2,800 files about the 1963 murder were made public for the first time, bringing to the fore revelations that an alleged Cuban intelligence officer met Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, and praised his shooting ability, and that the Soviet spy agency KGB believed then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson may have conspired to assassinate Kennedy. On April 26, 2018, the U.S. Government released 19,000 newly declassified government documents on the Kennedy assassination. It is said that investigators learned little, except that the government’s ideas about what needs to be secret, and what doesn’t, are cryptic and unpredictable. Some stuff in the documents that had been open for years is now classified again, and some stuff that had been classified and is now open is so innocuous that nobody can figure out what the point was. In some cases, the documents had re-redacted material that had already been declassified in previous versions. Often that seemed to reflect Trump administration sensitivities to the feelings of foreign governments. A 1975 CIA report on the surveillance of shooter Lee Harvey Oswald during his visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City just a few weeks before Kennedy’s death was released years ago identifying a particular photo as coming from “a Mexican police surveillance camera.” In the same document, re-released April 26, the words “Mexican police” had been covered over. Why are these documents even more redacted than previously known versions of the same document? What astonishing information was released by the documents, if any? Why aren’t all of the documents released in their entirety without any information redacted? Are the intelligence agencies afraid they will look incompetent and unable to protect the President? Or do they further confirm that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was involved in the assassination as earlier documents suggested?