President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the unveiling of 2,800 documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy but yielded to pressure from the FBI and CIA to block the release of some information to be reviewed further. Congress had ordered in 1992 that all records relating to the investigation into Kennedy's death should be open to the public, and set a final deadline of Oct. 26, 2017, for the entire set to be made public.
Trump had confirmed on Saturday that he would allow for the opening of the documents, "subject to the receipt of further information." Administration officials told reporters on a conference call that Trump ordered government agencies to study the redactions in withheld documents over the next 180 days to determine whether they needed to remain hidden from the public. After the review, Trump expected such withholdings to be rare.
The White House said remaining records with redactions would be released "on a rolling basis" in the coming weeks. In a memo to government agency heads, Trump said the American people deserved as much access as possible to the records. "Therefore, I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted," he wrote, adding that he had no choice but to accept the requested redactions for now.
Trump added: "I hereby direct all agencies that have proposed postponement of full disclosure to review the information" and identify as much as possible what can be publicly disclosed without harming defense, intelligence, law enforcement and foreign policy operations. CIA Director Mike Pompeo was a lead advocate in arguing to the White House for keeping some materials secret, one senior administration official said.
While Kennedy was killed over half a century ago, the document file included material from investigations from the 1970s and 1990s. Intelligence and law enforcement officials argued their release could put at risk some more recent "law enforcement equities" and other materials that still have relevance, the official said.
Trump was resistant but "acceded to it with deep insistence that this stuff is going to be reviewed and released in the next six months," the official added. Academics who have studied Kennedy's slaying on Nov. 22, 1963, during a motorcade in Dallas said they expected the final batch of files to offer no major new details on why Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down the Democratic president.
They also feared that the final batch of more than 5 million total pages on the Kennedy assassination held in the National Archives would do little to quell long-held conspiracy theories that the 46-year-old president's killing was organized by the Mafia, by Cuba, or a cabal of rogue agents.
Thousands of books, articles, TV shows and films have explored the idea that Kennedy's assassination was the result of an elaborate conspiracy. None have produced conclusive proof that Oswald, who was fatally shot two days after killing Kennedy, worked with anyone else, although they retain a powerful cultural currency.
"My students are really skeptical that Oswald was the lone assassin," said Patrick Maney, a professor of history at Boston College. "It's hard to get our minds around this, that someone like a loner, a loser, could on his own have murdered Kennedy and changed the course of world history. But that's where the evidence is."
Kennedy's assassination was the first in a string of politically motivated killings, including those of his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., that stunned the United States during the turbulent 1960s. He remains one of the most admired U.S. presidents.
While many of the 2,891 records released by the National Archives were raw intelligence and uncorroborated, they were almost certain to reinvigorate rampant conspiracy theories about the November 22, 1963 slaying of JFK in Dallas, Texas.
An outlandish CIA plan to recruit the mafia to kill Fidel Castro, FBI foreknowledge of the plot to murder Kennedy's killer, and Kremlin suspicions of a homegrown rightwing conspiracy were among the highlights, even as some files were withheld for further review on national security grounds.
One document from 1975 detailed how in the early days of Kennedy's presidency the CIA offered $150,000 to Italian-American mob boss Sam Giancana to organize the killing of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Giancana in return sought the CIA's help to place a listening device in the room of his mistress - a Las Vegas entertainer - whom he thought was having an affair.
Other possible ideas to kill the Communist leader - said to be a keen diver - included contaminating his diving suit with disease causing bacteria, or booby-trapping a seashell with a bomb. The plan was scrapped when it was determined "there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive."
Another document included a transcript of a November 24, 1963 conversation with then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who said his agency informed police of a threat against the life of Kennedy's killer Lee Harvey Oswald the night before Oswald was murdered. Police, however, failed to act. While many theories over the years have related to Oswald's ties to Cuban or Soviet operatives, an FBI memo in 1963 indicated Kennedy's death was source of deep mourning in the USSR.
According to a source, "officials at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the 'ultraright' in the United States to effect a 'coup'." The Soviets feared the killing would be used as a pretext to "stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba, and thereafter spread the war."
The Warren Commission, which investigated the shooting of the charismatic Kennedy, 46, determined that Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, carried out the Kennedy assassination acting alone. The released files are vast in number and scope, covering everything from FBI directors' memos to interviews with members of the public in Dallas who came forward trying to provide clues after that singularly unforgettable moment in US history.
Trump said in a memorandum he had agreed to hold back for further review some records relating to the killing following pushback from intelligence agencies. "I have no choice - today - but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security," he said. Trump gave agencies six months - until April 26, 2018 - to make their case for why the remaining documents should not be made public.
The 2,891 records approved for release in compliance with a 1992 act of Congress are viewable on the National Archives website, in full and unredacted form. "The president wants to ensure that there is full transparency here," an official said, but "there does remain sensitive information in the records."
This includes, for example, the identities of informants and "activities that were conducted with the support of foreign partner organizations, either intelligence or law enforcement," the official said. The Warren Commission's formal conclusion that Oswald killed JFK has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind the murder of the 35th US president.
Hundreds of books and movies such as the 1991 Oliver Stone film "JFK" have fed the conspiracy industry, pointing the finger at Cold War rivals the Soviet Union or Cuba, the Mafia and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy assassination experts eagerly awaited the opportunity to look at the files but sought to tamp down expectations. Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed," which determined that Oswald did indeed act alone, said people who think the files will "have the solution to the case that everybody can settle on" are going to be disappointed.
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