The whole world is in for a new era of truth and maximal transparency about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, also known as JFK, who served as the 35th president of the United States until his assassination in 1963.
On March 18, 2025, President Trump authorized the release of approximately 80,000 pages of previously classified documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In line with this directive, the JFK Assassination files that were previously censored are now being made public without any redactions. Promises made, pledges fulfilled.
Around 2,200 files of John F Kennedy’s assassination were made available to the public. The files include records that mention CIA agent Gary Underhill, who made claims of CIA involvement in the assassination and was later found dead under suspicious circumstances. These documents also reveal CIA communications about potential threats and discussions on redactions, particularly involving Israel.
We now know some information on Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, who was thought to have committed the assassination.
Oswald was shot dead during a jail transfer by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after Kennedy was slain.
The former Texas Marine who defected to the Soviet Union is thought to have fired several shots from the Texas School Book Depository building on November 22, 1963, as a motorcade bearing Mr. Kennedy and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy passed through the crowded street.
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which was established to investigate the event, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that a singular bullet had struck the former president from behind before exiting from the front of his throat and hitting Texas governor John Connally Jr (this would become known as the ‘magic bullet theory’).
The newly released files contain memos from the CIA that describe how a KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident” that he was at “no time an agent controlled by the KGB”.
Another report, dated the day after Kennedy’s murder, claims that Oswald spoke with a KGB officer at the Soviet Embassy in September of that year based on a phone call that was intercepted in Mexico City.
According to experts, the releases have also improved knowledge of the Cold War era.
A top-secret project known as “Operation Mongoose,” or simply “the Cuban Project,” was described in a January 1962 memo. Authorized by President Kennedy in 1961, it was a CIA-led campaign of clandestine operations and sabotage against Cuba with the goal of overthrowing the Fidel Castro dictatorship.
The primary conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, which range from directly accusing the US government to many gunmen being involved, have not yet been refuted or proven by the archives.
Historians are cautiously hopeful that more information will surface when they thoroughly examine each document, a process that is anticipated to take a significant amount of time.
“We should prepare to be surprised,” Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard University, told the New York Times, while Jefferson Morely, vice president of charity the Mary Ferrell Foundation, added it was an “encouraging start”.
Historian Alice L George said American’s curiosity about assassinations and questions about government transparency add “to a sense that there must be important evidence hidden away in these files”.
A government commission in the aftermath of the killing determined that President Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran and self-described Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the US.
The case has long been plagued by unresolved issues, leading to more outrageous allegations as well as ideas of the involvement of government agents, the mafia, and other evil figures.
A law requiring the publication of all investigation-related records within 25 years was passed by Congress in 1992.
Piles of JFK-related documents were made public by both President Joe Biden and President Trump during their first terms, but thousands of them were kept hidden or only partially so.
Two months ago, Trump issued an executive order requesting that government archivists make public documents pertaining to the 1968 shooting deaths of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.