Lost in the Kennedy Files

On 18 March 2025 the US government began to make good on Donald Trump’s promise to release all federal records related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King. ‘People have been waiting decades for this’, Trump said on the day of the files’ release; as a biographer of both Kennedy and King, I was among them. But although the decision to make the files public is intriguing, it should also be regarded with a dose of cynicism: if JFK was killed by the CIA in an elaborate plot that used Lee Harvey Oswald as a distraction and allowed  the actual hitman to escape, would the same personnel be likely to meticulously preserve evidence of their guilt?

Probably not, but that does not mean that there are no interesting things to learn from the released records. The US National Archives has pulled them together so that they are available online as PDF files. This has happened relatively quickly because of previous investigations. The 1964 Warren Commission Report, which concluded that a lone gunman, Oswald, shot Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963, left multiple volumes of evidence. The House Committee on Assassinations probed both the Kennedy and King murders between 1976 and 1979, and much of the recently released material came originally in response to its congressional subpoenas. The Committee suspected organised crime figures who felt that the Kennedy brothers had not kept their side of a bargain that involved mobsters helping to swing the 1960 election in return for favours once Kennedy won the White House. Unfortunately, key witnesses tended to die (often violently) before they could testify, so the Committee’s final report, published in January 1979, concluded that, while there was a conspiracy, they could not say definitively who was behind it. Many of the newly released records are memos from the FBI or CIA confirming that someone’s file has been made available to the Committee. Frustratingly, they don’t include the file itself.

The new release also includes documents previously made available to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, which was established by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, itself a response to Oliver Stone’s film JFK. The Act stated that all records relating to the murder should be made public no later than 2017. Stone’s film argued that Kennedy was killed by CIA agents who feared that he would not endorse a hardline stance in Vietnam because he had failed to sufficiently back the Agency’s efforts to topple Fidel Castro in Cuba. Stone, a Vietnam veteran, also believed that the war had been fought to enrich the corporate moguls of the military-industrial complex. The Records Review Board employed professional historians to determine whether a document related to the JFK case and therefore should be released.

Obstacles

The National Archives can be frustrating. The federal government has literally miles of files and unless you can define your enquiry precisely you will get an avalanche of material. From a sceptical perspective, it seems that efforts to investigate a sensitive topic can be delayed by overloading the would-be researcher with thousands of documents. To narrow your search you need names, since most files are held under these descriptors. Obviously, the name ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’ will produce lots of hits, but if you think others were involved, you need their names, too.

Another obstacle is the practice of redaction, where words are blacked out, usually to protect an employee’s identity or to conceal Agency activities from malicious parties. Trump’s initial JFK release was mostly documents that had been released before, but with redactions. The hurried new release ran into trouble because, without redactions, it publicised both names and social security numbers, a move that made those still alive vulnerable to identity theft. This mistake led to a partial and less trumpeted recall. It was also obvious that many documents were about CIA operations more generally. Here, the unredacted documents identified people in other countries who had assisted American intelligence. In some places, this might cause embarrassment, but in others it could have very serious consequences.

In a similarly hurried process, the July release of more than 243,000 documents, nominally related to the King assassination, actually included many related to JFK’s murder. They also confirmed how carefully the CIA had managed access to materials for the Assassinations Committee, and subsequently to the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. A benign interpretation of such wariness would be that the CIA recognised the information could inadvertently do harm, and did not want to jeopardise personnel, or, indeed, future operations. Who would agree to cooperate in a future secret operation if others had been exposed? A more hostile interpretation would be that the Agency had something to hide. For those convinced of the CIA’s complicity in JFK’s death, any withheld information is suspicious; and so, too, is burying material in thousands of documents supposedly relating to a different assassination.

File 00398011

Specific documents present their own difficulties. The July MLK release has a file labelled ‘00398011’. It was previously released to the Assassination Records Review Board in 1998 when its original classification number was ‘104-10014-10071’. Confusingly, you now have two reference numbers for the same document. Its readers immediately face a multiple disclaimer. You are told it is an unredacted portion of a much larger document, previously examined in its entirety for the Records Review Board by historian William Joyce, who died in 2021. Joyce concluded that only this portion was relevant to the JFK assassination. The full document originated from a foreign government ‘that does not wish to be identified’. While we are informed that the document is a translation, we are not told from which language. Were it Spanish or French, it might come from many countries, but if it were Russian – well, that might be a giveaway. Since it is a foreign government’s document, the CIA warns that it cannot guarantee its accuracy.

Professor Joyce helpfully notes that the last two paragraphs on page five of the five-page document were a later addition to the entire document and thus alerts the reader that they did not previously appear immediately after the four-page section he had selected for release. The document reports that there has been a KGB disinformation campaign to promote JFK assassination conspiracy theories using sympathetic United Nations’ contacts and others, especially in New York. It specifically identifies Mark Lane, an early critic of the Warren Commission, and Genrikh Borovik, a Soviet journalist who encouraged Lane’s continuing efforts to shift the blame from Oswald to the CIA. Some $2,000 has been funnelled indirectly to Lane, we learn, but at the same time, his efforts to visit the Soviet Union were blocked to protect his credibility.

The document goes on to claim that other ‘assassination buffs’ have also been supplied with money and ‘circumstantial evidence’ to bolster their claims of ‘a well-concealed political conspiracy’. In 1975 this so-called ‘Arlington Project’ generated a fake document purportedly from Oswald to former CIA agent Howard Hunt, who, by that stage, had been convicted for his part in the Watergate scandal. They used phrases from letters written by Oswald from Minsk between 1959 and 1960 after his defection to the Soviet Union, and even some paper obtained from Oswald’s home in Texas, all designed to thwart verification tests.

A covering note reports that a copy of the letter had previously been sent to the then FBI director Clarence Kelly, anticipating a public outcry when he denied having it. Copies were also sent to other Kennedy conspiracy theorists, and the success of the operation by 1977 was gauged by press coverage and particularly the decision to extend Congress’ investigation by a further two years due to ‘new evidence received’. The document notes that based on this success, the Kremlin reauthorised the project.

Should we therefore conclude that for half a century we have been misled by a KGB disinformation campaign? We know that disinformation remains a feature of Russian intelligence operations. However, we also know that the CIA and other intelligence agencies realise that ‘every significant world event’ can be reinterpreted, as the document phrases it, ‘through its own prism’. The document the CIA presented to Professor Joyce may just as well have been their own disinformation effort.

Distractions

President Trump seldom gives the sense that he enjoys life’s little ironies. Hence, my guess is that he would not take kindly to the suggestion that by making the above document available, he is either extending the success of a KGB campaign or enabling the CIA to use its dark arts to protect the past actions of the ‘deep state’. More pertinent, perhaps, one can observe the contrast between Trump’s actions in 2017 and 2025. The start of his first term in 2017 coincided with the deadline for the release of all documents under the 1992 Act, and Trump had promised to publish them while on the campaign trail. Instead, he accepted Agency advice that there were operational reasons not to do so. But Trump in 2025 has ordered not just the JFK files, but those related to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King to be published at once. The resulting avalanche will keep supporters happy, scholars busy, and distract from other matters; and the last may be Trump’s recurring priority.

Peter Ling is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham.