The declassification of 63,000 pages of documents relating to the 1963 assassination of then US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has been made by Donald Trump, as he announced in the first days after taking office.
A total of 2,200 files were posted on the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration website. “We have a staggering number of documents. You have a lot to read,” Trump said in a statement.
Several of the documents are blurry and difficult to read likely because of the years that have passed and the quality of the photocopies.
The first sense conveyed by the international media is that the documents do not contain any startling revelations that would refute the claim that JFK was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. However, a comprehensive study of the documents will take some time.
The vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which maintains a public database on the Kennedy assassination, called it “the most positive news since 1990” explaining that it “sheds light on JFK’s distrust of the CIA, Fidel Castro’s assassination plans, Oswald’s surveillance in Mexico City and the CIA’s propaganda about Oswald.”
One of the documents describes the investigation into Oswald’s possible links to the Russian KGB. Oswald lived in the then-Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962 with conspiracy theorists believing that JFK’s assassin was acting on behalf of Moscow.
In this document, American Professor E.B. Smith describes that his long-time Russian friend Slava Nikonov, who was a KGB official, described to him “five large volumes” that the Russian secret service had on Oswald and told him that “he is convinced that Oswald was in no way a KGB-controlled agent.”
This document, which is a memo from the CIA station in St. Petersburg in November 1991, describes that based on what was contained in these files, the KGB official had his doubts that “someone could have been controlling Oswald, yet the KGB was watching him closely and continuously while he was in the USSR.”
In those files that formed the basis for this memo, Oswald was described as a poor marksman when he had tried to shoot during his years in the Soviet Union.
Included in the documents was a memo from then FBI Director, Edgar J. Hoover, expressing concern that Oswald was killed two days after the Kennedy assassination which made it difficult “to convince the public that Oswald is the real killer.” This memo was written on November 24, 1963, the day Oswald was shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby while he was in the process of being transported by police.
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