Why We Still Don’t Have the JFK Assassination Files

The Archives paperwork shows that the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have fought particularly hard to protect the identity of informants in organized-crime investigations — an argument that will intrigue conspiracy theorists who believe the Mafia was behind Kennedy’s death. Many assassination researchers argue that the assassination was blowback for the so-called war on organized crime waged by the president’s brother, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

In fact, the correspondence shows the overwhelming majority of the documents that the FBI has withheld from the public in recent years somehow involved organized-crime investigations. Of the nearly 7,500 documents that the FBI kept classified at the time of the 2017 deadline, 6,000 were from “various files of members of organized crime or La Cosa Nostra.”

The DEA made a special plea to black out the names of six confidential informants identified in assassination-related files involving organized-crime investigations: “Given the well-documented propensity for violence by the Mafia, it is reasonable to expect the individuals, if alive, remain in significant danger of retaliation for their assistance,” the agency said in a 2018 letter to the Archives.

The internal correspondence and emails from the Archives were provided to POLITICO Magazine by Larry Schnapf, a New York lawyer who filed a federal lawsuit last month against President Biden and the National Archives, demanding release of all the still-classified assassination documents. Schnapf, whose clients in the lawsuit include the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an assassination-research group, obtained the internal correspondence from the Archives under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Even though he is now suing the National Archives, he said in an interview he was impressed by the aggressiveness of Archives officials in trying to force the CIA, FBI and other agencies to abide by the 1992 law, which called for the declassification of all assassination-related documents within 25 years — a deadline reached in October 2017. The fact that so much information remains classified today “only feeds a lot of the more bizarre conspiracy theories” about Kennedy’s death, he said.

The 1992 law, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, was adopted by Congress in hopes of controlling a firestorm of conspiracy theories whipped up the year before by the release of Oliver Stone’s popular, conspiracy-soaked film JFK, which suggested Kennedy was killed in a coup d’etat involving his successor, President Lyndon Johnson. Opinion polls have shown consistently since the late 1960’s that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death — that Oswald, assuming he was the assassin in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, did not act alone.

As a result of the law, millions of pages of documents were made public in the 1990’s that rewrote elements of the history of the assassination. The declassified files did not offer conclusive proof of any sort of conspiracy in the president’s death. But they did reveal how much evidence — especially about Oswald — had been withheld by the CIA and FBI from the Warren Commission, the White House panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that concluded in 1964 that Oswald had almost certainly acted alone.

Some files declassified as a result of the 1992 law strongly suggested, for example, that the CIA’s Mexico City station covered up evidence of its aggressive surveillance of Oswald during his mysterious trip to the Mexican capital just several weeks before the assassination, including the fact that Oswald boasted there of his intention to kill Kennedy. The documents show that, if the CIA station in Mexico had acted quickly on what it learned in September and October 1963, Kennedy might have survived his trip to Dallas on Nov. 22. According to a bare-bones index at the Archives, several of the still-classified assassination documents are drawn from the files of the U.S. embassy in Mexico — the CIA station, in particular.

In 2013, the CIA’s in-house historian concluded that the spy agency had conducted a “benign cover-up” during the Warren Commission’s investigation in 1963 and 1964 in hopes of keeping the commission focused on “what the Agency believed was the ‘best truth’ — that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.”

Other government agencies have offered different justifications for withholding information in the still-classified assassination files, the newly disclosed Archives correspondence shows.

The Defense Department told the Archives in 2018 that it would continue to black out portions of 256 classified Pentagon documents since they identify “active U.S. war plans, foreign government information, sensitive nuclear weapons information and U.S. prisoner of war personal and debriefing information.” Even so, the Pentagon assured the Archives, “the records identified are not directly related to the assassination.”

In its 2018 correspondence with the Archives, the State Department requested that portions of 31 documents be kept secret because of “national security and foreign affairs concerns,” although it noted that “none of the department’s redactions relate directly to the JFK assassination.”

The correspondence shows that the Archives, which has housed the assassination records for decades, has long warned the CIA, FBI and other agencies that they are failing to abide by requirements of the 1992 law, which allowed JFK-assassination information to remain classified only if there was “clear and convincing evidence” of a “substantial risk of harm” to national security or foreign policy.

In a memo in August 2017, William J. Bosanko, chief operating officer of the National Archives, protested the FBI’s decision to continue to withhold the names of confidential sources from the 1960’s, especially those that came directly out of the case files on Oswald and Ruby. “These files clearly relate directly to the assassination,” he said. Besides, he noted, “it is difficult to imagine circumstances under which an individual could be harmed by the release of their name in a file in the JFK collection.”

But the protests by the Archives were overruled at the last minute by Trump. His decision in October 2017 to waive the deadline surprised many in the government since the former president has been an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist for decades, including about the Kennedy assassination, and had once promised “great transparency” in releasing the documents.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promoted a conspiracy theory that the father of one of his Republican opponents, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, was somehow tied to the assassination — a claim, denied by the Cruz family, based on a grainy 1963 photograph that showed Oswald standing next to a man who resembled Cruz’s father as both handed out fliers supporting Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In deciding to withhold thousands of documents, Trump said he was convinced they contained information about national security and foreign policy “of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.” But he offered no specifics about his reasoning; nor did the CIA, the FBI and other agencies that urged him to block the release.

Under the 1992 law, only the sitting president of the United States has the power to withhold documents beyond the 2017 deadline, which means the power now rests entirely with President Biden. Last October, Biden ordered the archives to begin a comprehensive review of the still-classified records, with a goal of releasing as many as possible by a new deadline of this Dec. 15.