March 21, 2025
The discharge of the John F. Kennedy papers units an ordinary for transparency that should even be utilized to the present administration.
As Donald Trump strolled by the Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts on March 17—marking his territory and advancing his hostile takeover of the enduring 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 imagine we’re going to redact something,” the president suggested the press pool. “Individuals have been ready many years for this.”
Certainly, 27 years after a particular declassification legislation often called the John F. Kennedy Assassination Data Assortment Act mandated the discharge of hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative and contextual paperwork—and eight years after the legislation’s ultimate deadline for full disclosure of probably the most delicate of these data—the Kennedy papers at the moment are lastly within the public area, uncensored. Kennedy assassination sleuths, historians, reporters, curious residents, and, fairly probably, overseas intelligence companies at the moment are sifting by the ultimate tranches of some 63,400 pages of data which have been haphazardly posted, to this point, on the website of the Nationwide Archives Data Administration (NARA). One other 17,000 pages might be added “within the coming days” as they’re digitalized, NARA famous in an announcement posted on X this week.
To this point, not one of the hundreds of PDF recordsdata have yielded any info that will problem the official historic narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald, appearing 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 absolutely declassified CIA covert operations. The ultimate revelations within the paperwork transform 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 nations, espionage methods, expenditures, and beforehand unknown clandestine actions. These operations embody how the CIA manipulated elections in quite a few nations, sabotaged economies, plotted to kill overseas 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 Sixties the CIA had virtually as many brokers working beneath diplomatic cowl because the State Division had precise diplomats overseas? Or that CIA director John McCone conducted furtive “dealings” at the Vatican with Pope John XXII and Pope Paul VI which, in line with one among McCone’s aides, “might and would elevate eyebrows in some quarters.”
The JFK papers reveal that the Company was working an enormous phone wiretap operation in Mexico—codenamed Undertaking Lienvoy—out of the workplace of Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos—who was himself a CIA collaborator and authorized the surveillance operations. They determine Mexico, together with 14 different nations whose intelligence companies had been “helping us” in covert efforts towards Cuba. In line with one declassified memo, López Mateos instructed the CIA station chief that he was “delighted {that a} choice had now been made to do away with Castro.” As a part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA managed to infect a complete cargo cargo of Cuban sugar certain for the USSR “with a chemical used within the technique of denaturing alcohol,” in line with one Mongoose replace. “When this cargo of sugar is refined within the Soviet Union the contaminated baggage will fully contaminate your entire cargo,” the key report continued, “making the sugar unfit for human or animal consumption in any type.” The paperwork additionally expose how the CIA financed and orchestrated the 1966 election of its chosen coup-plotting navy man, Gen. René Barrientos in Bolivia. They document 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 only a few of the various main revelations they include.
Present Problem
For Trump, the discharge of the paperwork performs effectively together 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 beneath his management, beneath the guise of restoring public confidence in these nationwide safety businesses. This high-profile declassification additionally permits Trump to say 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 data, and, general, cut back public entry to info. Given the escalating menace to the general public’s right-to-know, the usual of openness set by the discharge of the JFK papers, and the distinctive legislation that made it attainable, is arguably extra essential than the historic content material of the paperwork themselves.
Thank You, Oliver Stone!
Satirically, the declassification of the JFK data is the direct results of the mass advertising of maybe probably 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 popular 1991 movie, 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 fees, unsuccessfully prosecuted an area 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. Nevertheless it 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, hundreds of thousands of pages of CIA, FBI, and different authorities data associated to the assassination remained labeled. “Even the data created by the investigative commissions and committees had been withheld from public view and sealed,” famous the Government Abstract of the ultimate 1998 report from the Assassination Data Evaluate 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 basically 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 legislation mandated the overview and launch of all documentation associated to the homicide of the president and empowered an impartial five-member board with jurisdiction to drive prime secret data into the general public area.
Beneath 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 recordsdata of paperwork, together with these collected by prior federal and congressional investigations, relating particularly and broadly to all direct and oblique facets 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, beneath the act.
However lots of these pages confirmed blacked out redactions of data—principally sources and strategies—and a number of other thousand paperwork had been withheld in full on nationwide safety grounds—notably by the CIA and FBI. For these deferred data and nonetheless redacted pages, the Kennedy Assassination Data Act contained a particular mandate: With few exceptions, the businesses had been required to course of and declassify them in full—unredacted—by October 26, 2017.
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 shortage of time to completely overview the data, and the necessity to hold secret names and locations to guard brokers and informants from retribution. Even NARA itself accepted the necessity to redact private info within the among the paperwork—equivalent 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 dwelling individuals, the discharge of which “would trigger an identifiable hurt to legislation enforcement by rising the opportunity of identification theft and associated crimes.” For these paperwork, NARA requested “continued postponement of data within the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Data Assortment Act of 1992.”
As an assassination conspiracist himself—who can neglect Trump’s bizarre claim through the 2016 election that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Oswald—one among Trump’s many guarantees through the marketing campaign was to guarantee the ultimate launch of the Kennedy paperwork. “The long-anticipated launch of the #JFK recordsdata will happen tomorrow,” he tweeted on October 25. “So attention-grabbing.”
Some 2891 data had been certainly launched pursuant to the authorized deadline. However some had been redacted, and tons of extra had been withheld of their entirety. ”Based mostly on requests from government workplaces and businesses the President has allowed the non permanent withholding of sure info that will hurt nationwide safety, legislation enforcement, or overseas affairs,” NARA stated in a press release. In a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox Information, Trump admitted that he had yielded to arguments introduced 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 overview the JFK data; on the finish of that interval, he postponed full compliance of the JFK Act for one more three years, till 2021.
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By then, after all, Joe Biden was president. On his watch, additional data had been launched uncensored in 2021, 2022, and 2023. However Biden additionally accepted the arguments of the CIA and FBI that sure data, 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 greatest and only 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 Sixties, their authorities’s intelligence companies 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 Sixties. Nor for Parisians to know that 123 “diplomats” within the US embassy within the early Sixties had 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 data; as reporters and historians comb by the data, 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 information. And so they remind the worldwide neighborhood of the myriad abuses of energy the USA has dedicated previously—and is actually able to sooner or later.
Trump officers are already trumpeting the importance of the ultimate declassification of JFK data as proof of the president’s dedication to fact and transparency. “I think it’s a great move,” Robert Kennedy Jr. instructed 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 individuals 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 info over these final two months, nothing might be farther from actuality. But, by absolutely implementing the JFK Act, Trump has, maybe inadvertently, established a historic precedent for full disclosure of labeled documentation. That could be a normal of transparency and accountability to which he, too, have to be held. Sometime Congress will cross a DJT Act to completely expose the misconduct of the Trump period, and the key aspect of the darkish historical past we live as we speak might be absolutely 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 approach 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
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