By Susan Ferrechio – The Washington Times – Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The Trump administration Tuesday posted online thousands of previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, fulfilling a top promise to let the public see the long-hidden material.
The National Archives and Records Administration began posting 80,000 pages of material on its website shortly after 7 p.m. None of the material is hidden under redactions.
The documents include information about Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union and at least one letter in which a person claimed to have tried to warn federal agents in July 1963 that Oswald planned to assassinate Kennedy.
Mr. Trump ordered the documents to be fully released in an executive order signed shortly after he took office, calling the continued withholding of the material, “not consistent with the public interest.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said additional documents withheld from public access under court seal or grand jury secrecy and those subject to IRS privacy laws “must be unsealed before release,” and the National Archives is working to expedite the unsealing of those records.
“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Ms. Gabbard said. “Today, per his direction, previously redacted JFK Assassination Files are being released to the public with no redactions. Promises made, promises kept.”
The documents are largely an assortment of government memos and correspondence about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Oswald was arrested as the assassination suspect. The government determined that he fired two lethal shots at the president as his open motorcade passed by a book depository where Oswald was employed and in which he had stationed himself with a rifle. A third shot missed the president.
Later, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, but many Americans believe the president’s murder was part of a larger conspiracy. Although many of the documents related to Kennedy’s assassination have been made public, the withheld material fed conspiracy theories that the government has been hiding something.
Parsing through all the documents could take weeks, but the material includes an array of information about those connected to Oswald or who may be concealing ties to Oswald.
One declassified document from the CIA includes information about how the agency works with the Secret Service to protect the president.
Another is a 1968 CIA memo recommending against the declassification of an Australian investigation into “anonymous telephone calls to the Canberra Embassy before and after the assassination of President Kennedy.”
Another previously secret government memo addresses the theory that Oswald, who had visited the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman, was acting on behalf of the Soviets when he killed Kennedy.
The memo, addressed to “Moscow info director,” outlines a 1991 interview with a U.S. professor who met in Moscow with Slava Nikonov, who had served as deputy director of Soviet Union’s KGB and was the grandson of former Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
According to the memo, Nikonov personally reviewed the KGB files to determine whether Oswald had acted as a KGB agent when he killed Kennedy.
“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” the memo reported. “From the description in the files, he doubted anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”
Nikonov noted that Oswald “had a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly.”
In one eyebrow-raising detail, the KGB file reported that Oswald “was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR.”
People who believe Oswald had an accomplice, or perhaps was innocent, often zero in on the difficulty even a good marksman will have getting the rifle in question to fire three shots on a moving target in the required time.
Among the unsealed documents is correspondence from Sergyj Czornonoh, who claims that in August 1963 he warned the American vice consul in Sofia, Bulgaria, about Oswald’s plan to assassinate Kennedy.
Czornonoh said he was given information about Oswald by Wasilev Consul, who worked in the Soviet embassy in Bulgaria. He said Consul’s girlfriend “came to my room and repeated that Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald is [sic] assassin. He will kill President Kennedy.”
Czornonoh said he told a U.S. State Department official on Aug. 19, 1963, that Oswald had a weapon and to go see him. The officials shrugged off the warning, he claims.
“Director told me you too can have a weapon — so what if Oswald got a weapon,” Czornonoh recounted in a letter to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.
Some of the released documents pre-date the assassination but are related to foreign intrigue, including Kennedy’s most significant foreign policy failure as president.
A 1959 memo recounts a tape-recorded conversation with William D. Pawley, a former U.S. ambassador to Brazil who met with two Cubans in Miami who wanted U.S. support to overthrow the communist regime of Fidel Castro.
“The Cuban said his group needed two things — moral backing and money. He pointed out that Cubans in Cuba are afraid to start an underground movement and there was no way to raise funds, etc.” Pawley is cited as saying.
Mr. Kennedy, less than two years later, tried to help anti-Castro Cubans overthrow the government in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
