New documents haven’t quelled JFK conspiracy theories

MINNEAPOLIS — Does the key to unlocking the enduring mystery of the Kennedy assassination lie abroad, in Belarus, Cuba or Mexico?

A review board created in the 1990s to declassify U.S. government assassination secrets tried to secure important information from those countries. It was unsuccessful.

But as the window for the 25-year-long declassification of John F. Kennedy assassination documents closes on April 26 — with experts warning that a smoking-gun document is unlikely to turn up in the remaining files to be released — pursuit of definitive answers is likely to shift overseas.

“The biggest cache of records that are still out there, the real treasure trove, are the Oswald KGB surveillance records,” said John R. Tunheim, now a federal district judge in Minnesota, who from 1994 to 1998 headed the Assassination Records Review Board.

That bipartisan body was created after Congress passed a law in 1992 starting the clock for release of all JFK assassination records. The action was prompted by an outcry after Oliver Stone's hit movie “JFK” discredited the official version of Kennedy's assassination.

In the 1990s, Belarus was still home to a 5-foot-high stack of KGB surveillance documents on alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The 20-year-old Marine defected to the Soviet Union soon after he was discharged in 1959 and was given a factory job in Minsk, the capital of what today is Belarus. He worked there until returning to the United States in 1962.

Tunheim and colleagues declassified tens of thousands of U.S. documents in those four years, and set a timetable for complete release of documents that had been redacted. Many have trickled out over the past 25 years under schedules set by the board.

Then last year came four large document releases by the National Archives. The veil was supposed to be fully lifted by October 2017, but President Donald Trump extended the deadline to April 26.

More than 34,000 documents were posted online by the National Archives last year, many with redactions. More than 22,000 documents still have not been released in full.

But most of those at least partially released have not been complete surprises, dampening anticipation of a big reveal by the end of April.

When Tunheim's panel began declassifying the documents almost 30 years after JFK's death, many were missing. Some of those had been under the control of the powerful CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton.

“I am convinced he destroyed everything because he knew it was coming. He knew he was going to get fired,” Tunheim said in an interview in January. “I don't know how he did it but he got rid of just about everything before he was gone because there were huge gaps in the record.”

That view is shared by Jefferson Morley, author of a new biography of Angleton called “The Ghost.” In an interview, Morley called “defunct” the official version that Oswald was a lone-wolf gunman who came out of nowhere to kill an American president.

“Oswald was under counterintelligence surveillance from 1959 to 1963,” Morley said. “Everywhere he went he touched CIA collection operations, codenamed secret intelligence operations, whose product was delivered to Angleton.”

In the 1970s, congressional hearings showed how the CIA had misled the Warren Commission, which issued its report in 1964. The CIA again came under fire for misleading the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Those missteps by the CIA, ostensibly aimed at hiding from public view how it carried out spy craft and meddled in the affairs of foreign governments, helped fuel today's theories of “conspiracy and cover-up,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Now, virtually every alternative theory of possible culprits and motive for the JFK killing seems to get new life with each release of documents.

Fidel Castro? Government documents show how the CIA sought to kill him, giving him a motive to retaliate. The mob? Files prove the agency worked closely with mobsters in Cuba and Chicago as they plotted to kill Castro. Texans in the CIA? Documents released last year showed that Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas at the time of the killing, had been a CIA asset since 1956. His brother Charles was a top CIA official forced by Kennedy to resign less than a year before the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.