Newest batch of JFK assassination paperwork present Kennedy’s mistrust of the CIA
The newly launched tranche of paperwork on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy features a memo that for many years helped gas hypothesis that the CIA was one way or the other concerned within the killing of the president.
Often known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page doc, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK’s aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his potential to direct international coverage.
The memo’s existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, however with giant chunks of textual content blacked out for safety causes.
All the unredacted memo was one of many 1000’s of now-declassified paperwork that the Nationwide Archives and Information Administration launched Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 paperwork that Trump promised to launch have been posted on-line.
And if anyone was anticipating to seek out proof within the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK’s murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they won’t discover it.
The knowledge the federal government had blacked out needed to do with CIA staffing, together with the precise variety of CIA operatives stationed on the U.S. Embassy in Paris and the way they “sought to monopolize contact with sure French political personalities,” in addition to the variety of CIA sources in international locations like Austria and Chile.
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Put up reporter who runs the “JFK Details” weblog and has been urgent the federal government for many years to launch the data, was undeterred.
“There’s a sensational story right here that folks have to know,” Morley stated in an MSNBC interview. “This isn’t a nothing-burger, as individuals will let you know. There’s an amazingly attention-grabbing and pregnant story in these JFK recordsdata.”
The memo and different paperwork are extra proof that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald below surveillance lengthy earlier than Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley stated.
“We bought a memo yesterday about Kennedy’s plans to reorganize the CIA, and plenty of that memo had been redacted earlier than,” Morley stated. “We now perceive why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a distrust, to make sure, that was returned by CIA officers who didn’t like his liberal insurance policies.”
Beneath the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Information Assortment Act of 1992, all of the paperwork associated to the assassination had been alleged to have been launched by 2017, when Trump was president the primary time.
Trump launched some paperwork then, however he additionally gave the intelligence companies extra time to evaluate the remaining recordsdata.
It was not till December 2022 that President Joe Biden launched greater than 13,000 data after the Mary Ferrell Basis, the nation’s largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination data, sued the administration to make all of them public.
Morley, who’s affiliated with the muse, stated that in all of the paperwork “we see a brand new window into the CIA’s pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.”
The late James Jesus Angleton, one of many founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald below surveillance beginning in November 1959 and was “monitoring his politics, his private life, his international travels, his contacts,” Morley stated.
Angleton had a 180-page file “on Oswald on his desk per week earlier than Kennedy went to Dallas” in November 1963, Morley stated, citing authorities paperwork that had been launched earlier.
“So what this story raises is the query: Was the CIA extremely, atrociously, incompetent in terms of Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton truly operating an operation involving Oswald?” Morley stated. “We don’t have the reply to that query as a result of there’s nonetheless some related data to come back out. For instance, one file of one other CIA officer who was concerned within the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald continues to be saved secret. This can be a nice first begin.”
