March 21, 2025
The discharge of the John F. Kennedy papers units a regular for transparency that should even be utilized to the present administration.
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President John F. Kennedy smiles on the crowds lining his motorcade route minutes earlier than he was assassinated on November 22, 1963.(Bettmann / Getty Pictures)
As Donald Trump strolled via the Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts on March 17—marking his territory and advancing his hostile takeover of the long-lasting cultural monument—he casually introduced that 80,000 pages of TOP SECRET paperwork on JFK’s assassination would lastly be launched—the very subsequent day. “I don’t consider we’re going to redact something,” the president suggested the press pool. “Folks have been ready many years for this.”
Certainly, 27 years after a particular declassification regulation generally known as the John F. Kennedy Assassination Data Assortment Act mandated the discharge of tens of millions of pages of investigative and contextual paperwork—and eight years after the regulation’s ultimate deadline for full disclosure of essentially the most delicate of these information—the Kennedy papers are actually lastly within the public area, uncensored. Kennedy assassination sleuths, historians, reporters, curious residents, and, fairly probably, international intelligence providers are actually sifting via the ultimate tranches of some 63,400 pages of information which were haphazardly posted, up to now, on the web site of the Nationwide Archives Data Administration (NARA). One other 17,000 pages shall be added “within the coming days” as they’re digitalized, NARA famous in a press release posted on X this week.
To date, not one of the hundreds of PDF information have yielded any data that may problem the official historic narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald, performing on his personal, shot and killed President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. As an alternative, the smoking weapons of historical past are rising from granular particulars of now totally declassified CIA covert operations. The ultimate revelations within the paperwork grow to be the CIA’s most guarded of secrets and techniques: sources and strategies, agent identities and international targets. The unredacted paperwork identify names—of officers, operatives, property, informants and collaborators. They determine locations, collaborating international locations, espionage methods, expenditures, and beforehand unknown clandestine actions. These operations embrace how the CIA manipulated elections in quite a few nations, sabotaged economies, plotted to kill international leaders and overthrew undesirable governments overseas—whereas additionally busily conducting unlawful operations at dwelling.
Who knew, for instance, that the CIA was secretly spying on Washington’s well-known muckraking newsman Jack Anderson? And that within the early Nineteen Sixties the CIA had virtually as many brokers working below diplomatic cowl because the State Division had precise diplomats overseas? Or that CIA director John McCone performed furtive “dealings” on the Vatican with Pope John XXII and Pope Paul VI which, in keeping with one among McCone’s aides, “may and would increase eyebrows in some quarters.”
The JFK papers reveal that the Company was operating an enormous phone wiretap operation in Mexico—codenamed Challenge Lienvoy—out of the workplace of Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos—who was himself a CIA collaborator and permitted the surveillance operations. They determine Mexico, together with 14 different nations whose intelligence providers have been “helping us” in covert efforts towards Cuba. In accordance with one declassified memo, López Mateos advised the CIA station chief that he was “delighted {that a} resolution had now been made to eliminate Castro.” As a part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA managed to infect a complete cargo cargo of Cuban sugar sure for the USSR “with a chemical used within the strategy of denaturing alcohol,” in keeping with one Mongoose replace. “When this cargo of sugar is refined within the Soviet Union the contaminated baggage will utterly contaminate your complete cargo,” the key report continued, “making the sugar unfit for human or animal consumption in any kind.” The paperwork additionally expose how the CIA financed and orchestrated the 1966 election of its chosen coup-plotting army man, Gen. René Barrientos in Bolivia. They file in better element than beforehand understood how company operatives financed—at $10,000 a day—avenue protests in British Guiana that pushed the liberal authorities of Cheddi Jagan from energy in late 1964.
And people are just some of the numerous main revelations they include.
Present Challenge
For Trump, the discharge of the paperwork performs properly along with his conspiracy-minded base, reinforcing suspicions concerning the so-called “deep state.” This presumably will help his efforts to purge the FBI and the CIA and produce them below his management, below the guise of restoring public confidence in these nationwide safety businesses. This high-profile declassification additionally permits Trump to assert the mantal of the Transparency President—whilst his administration strikes systematically and autocratically to erase authorities databases, intestine Nationwide Archives staffing, burn and shred federal information, and, general, scale back public entry to data. Given the escalating risk to the general public’s right-to-know, the usual of openness set by the discharge of the JFK papers, and the distinctive regulation that made it potential, is arguably extra necessary than the historic content material of the paperwork themselves.
Thank You, Oliver Stone!
Sarcastically, the declassification of the JFK information is the direct results of the mass advertising and marketing of maybe essentially the most discredited and disreputable of all assassination conspiracy theories—the New Orleans witch hunt performed by district lawyer Jim Garrison and immortalized in Oliver Stone’s fashionable 1991 film, JFK. Performed by Kevin Costner within the movie, Garrison initially claimed that the assassination of the president was “a gay thrill-killing”—and, on trumped-up costs, unsuccessfully prosecuted a neighborhood businessman for the crime; Garrison subsequently expanded his conspiracy pool of alleged assassins to incorporate the CIA and FBI.
Like Garrison’s malevolent and baseless investigation, Stone’s film was full fiction. But it surely generated widespread public outrage over the US authorities secrecy that continued to encompass the Kennedy assassination. A dramatic scroll on the finish of the film famous that, virtually 30 years later, tens of millions of pages of CIA, FBI, and different authorities information associated to the assassination remained labeled. “Even the information created by the investigative commissions and committees have been withheld from public view and sealed,” famous the Government Abstract of the ultimate 1998 report from the Assassination Data Overview Board (ARRB) created by Congress within the aftermath of the film. “The suspicions created by authorities secrecy eroded confidence within the truthfulness of federal businesses generally and broken their credibility.”
Certainly, the general public uproar generated by the movie over this inexplicable lack of transparency mobilized Congress to cross the “JFK Act” in 1992. This distinctive regulation mandated the assessment and launch of all documentation associated to the homicide of the president and empowered an unbiased five-member board with jurisdiction to drive high secret information into the general public area.
Below the supervision of the ARRB, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the White Home, and all different related authorities and law-enforcement businesses spent 4 years finding, reviewing and releasing huge information of paperwork, together with these gathered by prior federal and congressional investigations, relating particularly and broadly to all direct and oblique elements of the assassination. By the point the ARRB submitted its ultimate report back to President Clinton and closed its doorways, over 5 million pages had been declassified, below the act.
However a lot of these pages confirmed blacked out redactions of data—principally sources and strategies—and several other thousand paperwork have been withheld in full on nationwide safety grounds—notably by the CIA and FBI. For these deferred information and nonetheless redacted pages, the Kennedy Assassination Data Act contained a particular mandate: With few exceptions, the businesses have been required to course of and declassify them in full—unredacted—by October 26, 2017.
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Trump’s Deferral
When the deadline arrived for the ultimate and full launch of the JFK papers, Donald Trump had been president for eight months. Throughout that point, a bureaucratic battle performed out behind the scenes, with NARA officers urgent the CIA and the FBI to adjust to the JFK Act, and officers there pushing again on the dearth of time to totally assessment the information, and the necessity to maintain secret names and locations to guard brokers and informants from retribution. Even NARA itself accepted the necessity to redact private data within the a number of the paperwork—similar to social safety numbers. In a letter to Trump one month earlier than the deadline, NARA chief archivist, David Ferriero, suggested the President that some 211 paperwork contained social safety numbers of residing individuals, the discharge of which “would trigger an identifiable hurt to regulation enforcement by rising the potential for identification theft and associated crimes.” For these paperwork, NARA requested “continued postponement of information within the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Data Assortment Act of 1992.”
As an assassination conspiracist himself—who can overlook Trump’s weird declare in the course of the 2016 election that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Oswald—one among Trump’s many guarantees in the course of the marketing campaign was to guarantee the ultimate launch of the Kennedy paperwork. “The long-anticipated launch of the #JFK information will happen tomorrow,” he tweeted on October 25. “So attention-grabbing.”
Some 2891 information have been certainly launched pursuant to the authorized deadline. However some have been redacted, and tons of extra have been withheld of their entirety. ”Primarily based on requests from government places of work and businesses the President has allowed the non permanent withholding of sure data that may hurt nationwide safety, regulation enforcement, or international affairs,” NARA acknowledged in a press launch. In a latest interview with Sean Hannity on Fox Information, Trump admitted that he had yielded to arguments offered by then–CIA director Mike Pompeo that there have been sure secrets and techniques the CIA needed to defend. Trump gave the businesses a six-month extension to additional assessment the JFK information; on the finish of that interval, he postponed full compliance of the JFK Act for an additional three years, till 2021.
Fashionable
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By then, after all, Joe Biden was president. On his watch, additional information have been launched uncensored in 2021, 2022, and 2023. However Biden additionally accepted the arguments of the CIA and FBI that sure information, and parts of others, wanted to stay secret for the sanctity of nationwide safety.
For the discerning researcher, the extraordinary nature of this week’s launch reveals what sort of ultimate secrets and techniques the CIA was decided to safeguard. The CIA didn’t need the American public to know that it was spying on US journalists; it didn’t need Mexicans to know that their president had actively collaborated in one of many company’s largest and handiest phone faucet operations; it didn’t need residents in Canada, Britain, Israel, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile to know that, within the early Nineteen Sixties, their authorities’s intelligence providers secretly assisted CIA espionage operations to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba; it didn’t need Bolivians to know that covert money had purchased and paid for the election of a CIA-chosen candidate within the mid Nineteen Sixties. Nor for Parisians to know that 123 “diplomats” within the US embassy within the early Nineteen Sixties have been, in truth, undercover spies. However now we all know.
Most Transparency?
These are only a handful of tons of of revelations contained within the JFK information; as reporters and historians comb via the information, many extra will undoubtably floor, lifting the shroud of secrecy that has stored this historical past hidden for many years. Merely acknowledged, they supply the American public with a far better understanding of what has been completed in our identify, however with out our data. And so they remind the worldwide group of the myriad abuses of energy the USA has dedicated up to now—and is actually able to sooner or later.
Trump officers are already trumpeting the importance of the ultimate declassification of JFK information as proof of the president’s dedication to fact and transparency. “I feel it’s an important transfer,” Robert Kennedy Jr. advised reporters when Trump issued his directive to launch the remainder of the JFK papers on January 23. “(We) have to have extra transparency in our authorities and he’s preserving his promise to have the federal government inform the reality to the American folks about every part.” The president “is ushering in a brand new period of most transparency,” the director of nationwide intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, claimed this week.
Given Trump’s open assault on entry to data over these final two months, nothing may very well be farther from actuality. But, by totally implementing the JFK Act, Trump has, maybe inadvertently, established a historic precedent for full disclosure of labeled documentation. That may be a customary of transparency and accountability to which he, too, should be held. Sometime Congress will cross a DJT Act to totally expose the misconduct of the Trump period, and the key facet of the darkish historical past we live right this moment shall be totally revealed.
Donald Trump’s merciless and chaotic second time period is simply getting began. In his first month again in workplace, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the opposite method round?) have confirmed that nothing is secure from sacrifice on the altar of unchecked energy and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Writer, The Nation
Peter Kornbluh
Peter Kornbluh, a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba, is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Again Channel to Cuba: The Hidden Historical past of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Kornbluh can also be the writer of The Pinochet File: A Declassified File on Atrocity and Accountability.
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