JFK files: President Kennedy assassination documents released unredacted - sparking hunt for clues

More than 1,100 files, including more than 31,000 pages about the 1963 assassination were posted on the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website last night. It comes after an order by US President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.

The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of more than million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artefacts related to the assassination have previously been released.

Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. Oswald was shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days later. After an inquiry it was found that that Oswald acted alone, but suspicions of Russian involvement have never gone away as Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.

Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century, said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.

“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.

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Mr Trump announced the release on Monday while visiting the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, saying his administration would be releasing about 80,000 pages.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You’ve got a lot of reading,” Mr Trump said.

Researchers had estimated that the number of files still released either in whole or in part was around 3,000 to 3,500. And last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is “an encouraging start”.

Complete versions of about a third of the redacted documents held by the National Archives have now been made public, he said, an estimate of more than 1,100 of about 3,500 documents.

“Rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document,” Mr Morley said.

The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification”.

But Mr Morley said what was released on Tuesday did not include two-thirds of the promised files or any of the recently discovered FBI files.

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.

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”.

The memo 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.

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.

Around 500 documents, including tax returns, were not subject to the 2017 disclosure requirement.

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 Joe Biden’s administration, some remained unseen.