For years, the assumption — held by conspiracy theorists and many historians alike — was that the final tranche of documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy was being kept under wraps because it might reveal damning evidence showing that Kennedy was not assassinated by a lone gunman in Dallas.
But with the release over the past 24 hours of what the Trump administration said was the last of the documents held by the National Archives, including many no longer obscured by redacted paragraphs and sentences, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decision to keep them from public view: protecting the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence gathering operations.
The roughly 63,400 documents released in two phases on Tuesday night are still being reviewed, so it’s an open question if they contain undiscovered information about the assassination.
But judging by one standard — those items that are no longer redacted — the government’s real concern seemed to be more pedestrian: masking the names of C.I.A. agents and informants, agency intelligence gathering operations directed at U.S. allies, and the location of various C.I.A. stations and even their budgets.
The C.I.A. has always been very protective of the way it works. That is understandable given the nature of its mission — but also because of its history of at times unsavory practices. (Case in point: the Bay of Pigs.)
This protectiveness could help explain the shambolic nature of the document release. Piles of uncategorized documents — including many that were blurred, illegible or merely difficult to read — were dumped into the public arena in two tranches after President Trump abruptly announced on Monday that they would be released the next day.
“The holdup was not because of the smoking guns that would help us understand Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in the assassination,” said Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a former director of the Nixon presidential library. “It’s because ensnared in these documents were the sources and methods.
“We were intercepting message from Egypt,” he said, adding, “That has nothing to do with who killed Kennedy.”
Here’s what else to know:
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King assassination: The release of the Kennedy documents could yet produce unrelated revelations about another figure whose assassination was also covered by the declassification order signed by President Trump in January: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Justice Department on Wednesday moved to unseal F.B.I. surveillance records of King, about two years before their court-ordered release. The move came over the objections of the civil rights organization he founded, which fears that details of King’s private life will be used to tarnish his legacy. Read more ›
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Kennedy criticism: Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, criticized the release of the new trove of government files about the assassination and the news media’s coverage of it in a series of social media posts. He also said that the Trump administration did not give anyone in President Kennedy’s family a “head’s up” before the documents were released. Read more ›
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Persistent doubts: Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and nothing in the archives is going to dispel the swirling fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation. Read more ›
