Unredacted JFK Assassination Files Released, Sending History Buffs Hunting For New Clues

FILE - President John F. Kennedy waves from his car in a motorcade approximately one minute before he was shot, Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is “an encouraging start.” Complete versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been made public, he said, an estimate of over 1,100 of about 3,500 documents. The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification.” But Morley said what was released Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files or any of the recently discovered FBI files. The memo said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.” The memo added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted “that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.” It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union. “Some of it’s about Cuba, some of it’s about what the CIA did or didn’t do relevant to Lee Harvey Oswald.” Some of the previously released documents have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.