For the first time, the White House has ordered the release of thousands of documents related to the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.
The White House stated that with the release of 13,173 files online, more than 97% of the records in the collection were now publicly available.
The files are unlikely to reveal anything shocking, but historians hope to learn more about the assassination.
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated while visiting Dallas, Texas.
A 1992 statute compelled the government to divulge all assassination-related papers by October 2017.
President Joseph Biden signed an executive order authorizing the latest disclosure on Thursday.
However, he stated that some information would be kept secret until June 2023 in order to avoid “identifiable harm.”
According to the US National Archives, 515 papers will be suppressed entirely, while another 2,545 will be withheld in part.
The Warren Commission, a 1964 American investigation, concluded that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a US citizen who had previously lived in the Soviet Union, and that he acted alone. He was assassinated two days after his capture in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters.
JFK’s assassination spurred decades of conspiracy theories, but the CIA confirmed on Thursday that it “never engaged” Oswald and did not withhold information about him from American investigators.
Long-time JFK historians and theorists thought the latest release would provide additional light on Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met a Russian KGB officer in October 1963.
The CIA stated in its most recent statement that all information related to his travel to Mexico City had previously been revealed, adding, “There is no new information on this topic in the 2022 release.”
Nevertheless, researchers with the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit that sued the government to obtain the files, said that the CIA withheld information about Oswald’s time in Mexico.
According to the foundation, certain CIA records were never submitted to the archives and hence were not included in the batch that was recently disclosed.
According to one newly released document, Mexico’s president assisted the US in placing a wiretap on the Soviet embassy in Mexico without the knowledge of other Mexican government officials.
According to the BBC’s American partner CBS News, this piece of information was buried by redactions in a previously disclosed version of the material.
The White House stated that releasing the data will provide the public a better picture of the assassination probe.
In his order, President Biden stated that “agencies have conducted a comprehensive effort to evaluate the full set of over 16,000 records previously released in redacted form and determined that more than 70% of those information may now be shared in full.”
Thousands of pages were published by the Trump administration during his presidency, but others were blocked on the grounds of national security, despite a 1992 statute mandating the release of all information by 2017.
Mr. Biden released approximately 1,500 documents in October 2021, but stated that the remaining materials will remain sealed.
The additional papers, according to Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter and author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Assassination, could give light on whether the government was aware of Oswald’s plans.
“I feel there may be evidence in these documents indicating that other people knew before the Kennedy assassination that this man Lee Harvey Oswald was a risk and that he may have publicly discussed his desire to kill the president,” he tells BBC News.
“And the question has always been, did the government agencies, the CIA and FBI, have any inkling that this man was a threat to President Kennedy, and if they had acted on that information, could they have saved the president?”
