NEW files regarding the assassination of President John F Kennedy were released on Wednesday.
While 1,500 files were released today, more have been delayed until the same date next year – with some accusing President Joe Biden of continuing a government “cover-up”.
New files regarding the assassination of President John F Kennedy were released today
More secrets will be unveiled on December 15, 2022
The previously classified files about the killing were made public Wednesday, which included documents relating to Lee Harvey Oswald‘s contact with a KGB agent a month before the shooting.
The documents reveal that in October 1963, Oswald met with KGB agent Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov in Mexico City.
“Oswald called the Soviet Embassy on 1 October, identifying himself by name and speaking broken Russian, stating the above and asking the guard who answered the phone whether there was ‘anything concerning the telegram to Washington,” said a memo written by CIA officer Tennent H. Bagley on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination.
The first time Oswald appeared on US radar before the assassination was during a technical operation in Mexico City on October 9, 1963.
Between September 27 and October 3, he is believed to have visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City multiple times for a visa to Cuba where he would wait to be picked up by the USSR.
On October 3, 1963, Oswald traveled back from Mexico to the US through Texas.
Oswald’s wife Marina, who was Russian, is referenced throughout the files.
One document details how a Moroccan student contacted the CIA after the shooting and claimed he had been Marina’s boyfriend.
The relevance of that to the investigation is not known.
OSWALD TRIES TO RENOUNCE HIS US CITIZENSHIP
There are also memos detailing interviews with communist activists in Mexico, who Oswald had met with, and details of how he tried to renounce his US citizenship to become Russian four years before the assassination.
The documents claim Oswald had been in contact with the Russian Consul and Silvia Duran, a secretary at the Cuban Consulate.
On September 27, 1963, the CIA’s Mexico City station found a phone call from Duran to the Soviet Consulate, where she stated that there was an American citizen at the Cuban Consulate who had previously visited the Russian Consulate.
During the final phone call between Duran and the Soviets, which occurred on October 3, 1963, there CIA found where the “alleged” Oswald identified himself.
The CIA’s Mexico station requested the Mexican government to arrest Duran – who was a Mexican citizen – because she “might shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the assassination.”
On November 27, 1963, the Mexican government forwarded a copy of Duran’s signed statement to the CIA where it said: “Upon learning about the assassination Silvia Duran and her husband speculated that President Kennedy might have been assassinated for racial reason.
“When she became aware that the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, she ascertained that it was the same man who approximately two months prior had been to the Cuban Consulate to solicit an intransit visa to Russia.”
The document continued: “Having taken his name from the special documentation he presented she knew that he was married to a Russian woman and belonged to the ‘Fair Play for Cuban Committee.’
“She checked the data in the Consulate archives and became certain that it was the same individual who was blonde, short, dressed elegantly and whose face turned red when angry.”
The docs go on to state that the Cuban consulate had denied Oswald’s request.
The CIA’s reported surveillance of Kostikov, and Cuban and Soviet intelligence officials after the assassination showed “nothing unusual.”
The trove of declassified documents also included anonymous phone calls to the US embassy in Canberra, Australia, a year before the shooting, where the caller said the Soviet government was planning to assassinate Kennedy.
On November 24, 1963, two days after the shooting, another phone call was made, claiming that the Russians were behind it.
In the November call, someone claiming to be a polish chauffeur with the Soviet Embassy said “the ‘Iron Curtain Countries’ paid $100,000 to assassinate JFK.”
JFK’S ASSASSINATION
The US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, as he traveled in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza.
Shortly after, Oswald, a 24-year-old self-proclaimed Marxist, was arrested in a nearby cinema after police hunted a killer of one of their fellow officers.
He denied shooting anybody, claiming to reporters that he was a “patsy.”
Later, he was accused of shooting the president dead with his $21 mail-order rifle from a window of the sixth floor of a nearby school textbook warehouse.
Two days after the assassination and his arrest, as Oswald was being escorted from Dallas Police Headquarters to country prison in front of the world’s media, a man named Jack Ruby stepped forward and shot him dead.
Ruby was later found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
He appealed but died of an illness in jail before his new trial could take place.
The Warren Commission in 1964 reported that Oswald had been the lone gunman, and another congressional probe in 1979 found no evidence to support the theory that the CIA had been involved.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
But some say this was a cover-up.
Conspiracy theories include a CIA plot, a mafia hit job and a covert operation by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
For decades, the existence of secret government files linked to JFK’s assassination has helped fuel conspiracy theories that others besides Oswald were involved in his murder.
The government was required by Thursday, October 26, 2017, to release the final batch of files related to Kennedy’s assassination.
The collection includes more than 3,100 documents comprising hundreds of thousands of pages that have never been seen by the public.
However, in October, President Biden delayed the scheduled release to “protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in the immediate disclosure.”
In 2017, former President Donald Trump released several thousand secret files on the assassination but withheld others on national security grounds.
About 30,000 documents were released previously with redactions
Original Article:https://www.the-sun.com/news/4276966/jfk-assassination-documents-released-biden-keeping-more-classified/
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