THE JFK FILES: Did LBJ order the President’s assassination?
But in a move that will fuel conspiracies, 300 stay secret
THE US government opened the floodgates yesterday to a new round of fevered speculation over the assassination of President John F Kennedy by releasing thousands of previously unseen papers.
Running to tens of thousands of pages, the documents published by the US National Archives offer tantalising new details as well as bolstering existing conspiracy theories about one of the most hotly debated mysteries of modern times.
The previously top secret material included communiqués about the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Mafia and even Marilyn Monroe as US government officials attempted to discover the truth behind the president’s killing in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, and whether assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Congress had given the US government a 25-year deadline to release all documents connected to the assassination, which expired on Thursday night.
But US president Donald Trump still agreed to withhold some of the most sensitive following pressure from the CIA and FBI.
The new revelations include: ÷The USSR feared nuclear retaliation by a rogue US general if Washington believed it was responsible and blamed the killing on America’s ‘ultra-right’. ÷The KGB claimed to have evidence that Vice President Lyndon Johnson organised the killing of the 46-year-old president. ÷Oswald was recorded speaking in ‘broken Russian’ to a KGB assassination specialist during a trip to Mexico City. ÷The FBI received a tip-off about a plan to murder Oswald before he was shot by Jack Ruby. ÷A reporter on a newspaper in England, the Cambridge News, may have been tipped off about Kennedy’s assassination 25 minutes before it happened. ÷CIA officials attempted to recruit mobster leaders to help kill Fidel Castro. ÷FBI chief J Edgar Hoover personally warned Bobby Kennedy over his affair with Marilyn Monroe.
The file release prompted a row as Mr Trump was accused of ‘covering up’ key information on the assassination. Over 300 documents, described by experts as potentially the most important, were withheld after US intelligence persuaded the president they were too sensitive to release.
‘I have no choice,’ Mr Trump said in a memo, citing ‘potentially irreversible harm’ to national security. The remaining papers ere placed under a six-month review.
One of the documents is likely to fuel conspiracy theories. In a 1975 deposition, former CIA director Richard Helms, was asked if there was any information that Oswald was ‘in some way a CIA agent or agen…’ The document ends there.