Trump ‘cover-up’ fuels Kennedy conspiracies
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 communiques 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 25year deadline to release all documents connected to the assassination, which expired on Thursday night.
But President Donald Trump still agreed to withhold some of the most sensitive following pressure from the CIA and FBI. The new revelations include:
÷The Soviet Union feared nuclear retaliation by a rogue US general if Washington believed it was responsible and blamed the killing on a conspiracy by 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 contact and assassination specialist during a trip to Mexico City just two months earlier.
÷The FBI received a tip-off about a plan to murder Oswald the night before he was shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
÷A reporter on a newspaper in england, the Cambridge News, may have been tipped off about President Kennedy’s assassination 25 minutes before it happened.
÷FBI chief J edgar Hoover expressed concern that America would always harbour doubts about Oswald’s guilt.
÷CIA officials attempted to recruit mobster leaders to help kill Fidel Castro among many bizarre assassination plots.
÷Hoover personally warned Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother, over Bobby’s ‘close relationship’ with Marilyn Monroe.
The partial release of remaining documents prompted a fierce row as President Trump was accused of ‘ covering up’ key information about the assassination. More than 300 documents, described by JFK experts as potentially the most important, were withheld after US intelligence and law enforcement agencies persuaded the president at the 11th hour that they were too sensitive to release.
‘I have no choice,’ Mr Trump said in a memo, citing ‘potentially irreversible harm’ to national security if he were to allow all the JFK files to be made public.
The remaining papers have been placed under a six-month review to allow the CIA and FBI to decide whether any of them are so sensitive they must remain in government vaults permanently.
Mr Trump himself has questioned the official version of events, claiming during last year’s election campaign that the father of one of his Republican rivals, Ted Cruz, was involved in the
‘The good stuff was held back’
assassination. The US Congress ordered in 1992 that all records relating to the investigation into Mr Kennedy’s death should be open to the public within 25 years, making Thursday the deadline.
Academics expressed anger that despite having so long to prepare the records, government officials dumped them online with no attempt to categorise, explain or decipher them. Some are not even legible. University of Virginia historian and JFK expert Larry Sabato claimed said it could take months or years to ‘put this million piece puzzle together’.
He added: ‘The good stuff was held back... what we got is raw intelligence, loads of rumours.’
The document release was ordered by Congress in an attempt to end rampant speculation that Oswald did not act alone, as a string of official investigations have concluded. Polls have shown that most Americans still believe that others must have been involved.
But the continued absence of the remaining documents will actually achieve the opposite, said critics. In one of the newly released memos, FBI chief Hoover pre- dicted the conspiracy theories would abound, despite being convinced that Oswald acted alone. ‘There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,’ he commented. ‘The thing that I am most concerned about is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.’
One of the newly released documents is certainly 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.