Files expose Cold War plots, not JFK’s killing
Assassination plots aimed at Fidel Castro involving exploding seashells and poisoned swimsuits. Bounties on the heads of high-profile Cuban communists. A secretive investigation that tracked John F. Kennedy’s assassin into Mexico.
As scholars, journalists and the merely curious pored Friday through a trove of nearly 3,000 newly released secret documents related to the 35th president’s assassination, there were few if any major plot twists about what happened that day in Dallas in 1963.
Instead, the files — which include secret FBI memos, handwritten notes from top White House officials and CIA field reports — tell the story of America’s paranoid underworld in the 1960s, where shadowy figures chased secrets at home and abroad and hatched plots to change the course of history.
According to a top-secret Dec. 1, 1966, memo from then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Soviet officials suspected that Kennedy was killed by “some wellorganized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States,” part of what analysts in Moscow believed was an attempt to stage “a coup” in order to heighten tensions with the Soviet Union and communist Cuba.
The Russians described Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had visited the Soviet Union in 1959 and sought citizenship there, as too “mentally unstable” to defect and a “neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country and everything else.”
One FBI file shows how agents also tracked Oswald’s bus trip to Mexico City in October 1963.
It included information that Oswald was wearing a “short sleeve light colored sportshirt and no coat” — seemingly innocuous information that had been classified to protect the FBI’s “operations in foreign country.”
For all that the new documents reveal, the reality is that the government’s most-sensitive assassinationrelated documents have yet to be released.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump, apparently relunctantly, ordered some records to remain secret for the next 180 days until they can be reviewed and redacted.
Intelligence and lawenforcement officials had protested that some information in the records could compromise sources or America’s relations with other nations.
The most tawdry accounts in the files only loosely involve Kennedy’s assassination, focusing instead on the U.S. government’s own plots to kill foreign-government leaders and politicians.
One top-secret White House document detailed a proposal to create “Operation Bounty” to assassinate prominent Cuban communists — suggesting up to $20,000 to kill communist informers, up to $100,000 for Cuban-government officials, and a morbidly cheeky 2 cents for the death of Fidel Castro.
One CIA plot was based on Castro’s fondness for diving, and proposed “to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus.”
Another one involved a “booby-trap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skindived. The seashell would be loaded with explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted.” But plotters dejectedly discovered that “there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive.”
Other highlights in the files:
Just a few hours after Oswald was killed in Dallas, Hoover dictated a memo saying the government needed to issue something “so we can convince the public” that Oswald killed Kennedy.
The FBI director composed the memo on Nov. 24, 1963 — two days after Kennedy was killed and just hours after nightclub owner Jack Ruby had fatally shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.
Hoover said that the FBI had an agent at the hospital in hopes of getting a confession from Oswald, but Oswald died before that could happen.
According to one document released on Thursday, President Lyndon B. Johnson believed that Kennedy was behind the assassination of the South Vietnamese president during a coup, and that Kennedy’s assassination weeks later was payback, the newly released documents say, citing a 1975 deposition by CIA Director Richard Helms.
In a 1966 letter to a presidential assistant, Hoover wrote that KGB officials claimed to have information “purporting to indicate” Johnson had a role in the assassination.
Johnson has long been a focus of some conspiracy theorists, but no credible information has been revealed linking him to the assassination.
The Cambridge News in Great Britain received an anonymous call about “big news” in the United States minutes before the assassination.
A memo to Hoover indicates the caller said a “reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.”
The memo says Britain’s MI5 intelligence service calculated the call came 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot.