Thousands of documents relating to the assassination of former President John F Kennedy were released on Thursday by the US National Archives.
The latest release of 13,173 documents means 97% of documents related to the assassination have now been made public. It follows a similar release of files in 2021 and 2017 by the Trump administration.
However, the White House still withheld thousands of documents at the request of unspecified government agencies.
In a memorandum on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said the National Archives and relevant agencies “shall jointly review the remaining redactions in the records that had not been publicly disclosed.”
He said that “any information withheld from public disclosure that agencies do not recommend for continued postponement” will be released by June 30, 2023.
Documents released concern Oswald
The bulk of the documents released on Thursday concerned Lee Harvey Oswald, who was convicted of assassinating Kennedy in November 1963.
Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 before returning to the United States in 1962.
A 1963 document describes how CIA officials in Mexico City “intercepted a telephone call” Oswald made to the Soviet Embassy there “using his own name” and speaking “broken Russian.”
Also among the newly released files was one 1990 document that recounts a debriefing of a former KGB officer. The officer said Oswald was recruited by the KGB after defecting but was considered to be “a bit crazy and unpredictable.”
The officer said the KGB had no further contact with Oswald after he returned to the United States and denied any official mission to assassinate the president.
Another document from 1991 cites a different KGB source who said Oswald was “at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”
US rocked by Kennedy’s assassination
The United States was rocked by JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas Texas. Kennedy was riding in a motorcade with his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, when assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from above, killing the president instantly.
Oswald, who was a former US Marine, was perched in the Texas School Book Depository waiting for the president to pass as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
Oswald was shot and killed just two days after the assassination took place by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby as he was being moved to county jail.
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, more commonly known as the Warren Commission, was established the following year to investigate Kennedy’s assassination.
Although the Commission decided that the assassination was the product of a single individual’s actions and not a wider conspiracy, these findings have been heavily criticized.
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