What the JFK Files Reveal

Some highlights from nearly 2,800 classified files on the John F Kennedy assassination

The FBI warned Dallas police of ▪ a death threat to assassin Lee Harvey Oswald but the police failed to protect him

The Dallas division of the FBI was trying to track Oswald in October 1963

Soviet Union leaders believed Oswald was a “neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else”

Soviet officials feared a

▪ conspiracy was behind the death of Kennedy, perhaps organised by a rightwing coup or Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson.

They also feared Kennedy’s death could trigger a war, thinking “some irresponsible general in the

US might launch a missile at the Soviet Union”

Oswald was at the Soviet

▪ embassy in Mexico City on September 28, 1963 and spoke with a consul who was a KGB officer and a member of a unit “responsible for sabotage and assassination”

A reporter from UK’s

▪

Cambridge Evening News received an anonymous call telling him to ring the US embassy in London for some big news 25 minutes before the assassination Jack Ruby, the man who

▪ shot and killed Oswald, had “good in” with the Dallas police and ran “a B-girl operation” with no interference from police

Cuban leader Fidel Castro told ▪

US lawmakers his country was not involved in the plot

FBI tried to locate a stripper ▪ named Kitty. Another stripper named Candy Cane said Kitty had been an associate of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald on November 24, 1963. It was told that a stripper named Kitty Raville committed suicide in New Orleans in August or September 1963.