More than 31,000 pages related to the assassination of former president John F Kennedy have been released after an order from President Donald Trump – revealing new pieces of information about the famous killing.
Trump promised on the campaign trail last year that he would order the declassification of all remaining documents on the assassination – and last night, the US National Archives and Records Administration obliged.
Many of the files released had already been public, but versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been released in full, providing new details about vital events relating to JFK’s murder.
Speaking to reporters about the release, Trump said: ‘We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading.’
Here are some of the biggest revelations from the new files.
An alleged tip-off about JFK’s killer
One new document detailed the account of Bulgarian Sergej Czornohoh, who lived in California.
A letter he wrote to the British Ambassador in Washington on March 15, 1978, detailed how he claimed to have warned border patrol officers about JFK’s killing on July 18, 1963 – months before the plot would unfold.
There in London, he alleged that he warned Lee Harvey Oswald was heading back to America to kill JFK.
In later letters, he alleged the FBI used anaesthesia gas to ‘freeze me, drug me and keep amnesia’.
A CIA informant’s ‘suicide’
Another piece of information was an article from a 1967 magazine, detailing how CIA informant Army Captain John Garrett Underhill Junior left Washington ‘in a hurry’ the day after JFK was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.
The article read: ‘Late in the evening, he showed up at the home of a friend in New Jersey. He was very agitated.
‘A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.’
The death is made more suspicious given that Underhill had been shot behind his left ear.
An automatic pistol was found under his left side – but Underhill was right-handed, the document says.
Friends recalled Underhill as ‘rational and objective’, and said they didn’t take his account and worries about the CIA’s responsibility for JFK’s assassination seriously, the document read.
The friend said: ‘He attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics and other contraband, and manipulating political intrigue to serve its own ends.
‘Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could ‘blow the whistle on it’.’
Lee Harvey Oswald was a ‘poor shot’ – and not ‘controlled’ by the KGB
Files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a US professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB.
The memo said the KGB official had reviewed ‘five thick volumes’ of files on Oswald and was ‘confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB’.
It added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted ‘that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR’.
It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.
Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies weeks before the assassination
Metro viewed some of the documents and found many detailed espionage assignments, which were likely released due to rumours about Oswald being a member of the KGB).
One document revealed that on September 126, 1963, weeks before killing Kennedy, Oswald visited both the Soviet Union and Cuban embassies in Mexico City.
While at the Soviet Embassy, he spoke to Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a known member of the KGB.
It’s worth noting that Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, before later coming back to the US with his Russian wife, Marina Nikolaevna Pusakova and his child.
He had asked for a visa to the Soviet Union before later driving back to Texas.
What happened to JFK?
Interest in details related to Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, with countless conspiracy theories spawned.
He was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But that did not quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
When did Trump release the JFK files?
Trump first said he would release 80,000 pages of unredacted files from the JFK case when he took office in January.
While touring the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on March 17, he announced they would be released on March 18.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration.
The collection was required to be opened by 2017, barring any exemptions designated by the president.
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Mr Trump, who took office for his first term in 2017, had said that he would allow the release of all of the remaining records but ended up holding some back because of what he called the potential harm to national security.
And while files continued to be released during former president Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.
Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in July 2023 that 99 per cent of records associated with Kennedy’s assassination were available for public consumption via NARA.
Biden declassified more than 16,000 documents related to the assassination between 2021 and July 2023.
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