President Trump releases JFK assassination documents

WASHINGTON: The US President Donald Trump released material related to the 1963 assassination of former president John F Kennedy on Tuesday, seeking to honour his campaign promise to provide more transparency about the unfortunate event in Texas.

An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website in the evening with a total of more than 80,000 expected to be published after Justice Department lawyers spent hours scouring them.

The digital documents, including PDFs of previously classified memos, offer a window into the climate of fear at the time surrounding US relations with the Soviet Union shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 nearly led to a nuclear war.

The release is nonetheless likely to intrigue people who have long been fascinated with a dramatic period in history, with the assassination and with Kennedy himself.

Many of the documents reflected the work by investigators to learn more about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's time in the Soviet Union and track his movements in the months leading up to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

An initial review of the papers did not show deviations from the central narrative.

Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a son of Robert Kennedy and nephew of John F Kennedy, has said he believes the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless.

Kennedy Jr declined to comment when contacted by Reuters on Tuesday.

Jack Schlossberg, JFK's grandson, said on X on Tuesday: "The Trump administration did not give anyone in President Kennedy's family 'a heads up' about the release."

Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor whose books include "JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-56," said in an email the new documents may help fill in the picture.

"It’s valuable to get all the documentation out, ideally in unredacted form. But I don’t expect dramatic new revelations that alter in some fundamental way our grasp of the event," he said.

One document with the heading "secret" was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the State Department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.

Oswald was married to a Soviet woman, Marina Oswald, at the time of the shooting.

Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro's support of communist forces in other countries.

The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point "that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime."

"It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America," the document reads.

One document released in January 1962 reveals details of a top-secret project called "Operation Mongoose," or simply "the Cuban Project," which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba, authorised by Kennedy in 1961, aimed at removing the Castro regime.

Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release of the documents, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

In the scramble to comply with Trump's order, the US Justice Department ordered some of its lawyers who handle sensitive national security matters to urgently review records from the assassination, according to a Monday evening email seen by Reuters.

"President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency," Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X.

Alice L George, a historian whose books, including The Assassination of John F Kennedy, explore modern America, 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."

But she said government records were unlikely to resolve questions people still have.

"I think there may continue to be more record releases," she said. "I seriously doubt that any will include great revelations. The Warren Commission report was done well, but it was done when many of the key players were alive.

It's much harder to find the truth when most of the people involved are dead."

Kennedy's murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Oswald. The Justice Department and other federal government bodies have reaffirmed that conclusion in the intervening decades. But polls show many Americans still believe his death was a result of a conspiracy.

Trump has also promised to release documents on the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Robert Kennedy, both of whom were killed in 1968.

Trump has allowed more time to come up with a plan for those releases.