Why JFK files won’t stop the conspiracy theories

Files’s account of events on that sunny day in Dallas on November 22, 1963, which challenged the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone-wolf gunman, has been widely dismissed over the years.

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The 83-year-old former hitman for the Chicago mob served 25 years in jail for the attempted murder of two police officers and made his claim to be JFK’s assassin only after converting to Christianity in prison.

Kennedy in the car with his wife, Jackie, and the Texas governor John Connally

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New details and allegations about the assassination continue to emerge, as a divided nation debates how many gunmen were involved, how many bullets struck the president, who orchestrated the killing and why.

In his first week back in the White House, President Trump moved to lay the conspiracy theories to rest and ordered the release of all records linked to the JFK assassination. The president has also demanded the disclosure of all files linked to the 1968 murders of JFK’s brother, Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights icon Martin Luther King.

“That’s a big one, huh?” Trump said as he signed the order. “A lot of people have been waiting for this for years, for decades. Everything will be revealed.”

The president’s directive has sparked feverish excitement among conspiracy theorists and historians. Many suspect the involvement of US intelligence agencies in all three assassinations and the mutual antipathy between JFK and his spy agency has long been viewed as motive for the CIA to orchestrate the assassination.

Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe the CIA, FBI, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cuban groups, the mafia, the Soviet Union, or all of the above were somehow involved in the assassination.

All files related to the assassination were supposed to be handed over to a review board and then to the National Archives under the 1992 JFK Records Act. Some 320,000 documents have been released, but an estimated 4,000 remain withheld or redacted, most in the archives of the CIA.

The foot-dragging under successive presidencies has fuelled allegations of a conspiracy. Trump himself delayed the disclosure of some records during his first term as president on the advice of the CIA in 2017.

The CIA has always denied that it had any connection to Oswald before the assassination, despite his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his abrupt return three years later with a Russian wife in tow.

That claim has long been disputed and documents setting out the agency’s covert operations and relationship with Oswald are argued to be the most explosive material still concealed from the public.

Jefferson Morley, vice-president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation — an online archive of records linked to the killing, has spent decades examining public records and sued the CIA for the release of more.

Three years ago he obtained documents that he alleges revealed a still-classified covert CIA operation three months before Kennedy’s death, which suggested that Oswald was an informant for the agency before the shooting. If true, it would flatly contradict a 1975 deposition by Richard Helms, the CIA director between 1966 and 1973, who testified that Oswald was “never used” by the agency.

Lee Harvey Oswald upon his arrest on the day of the assassination. He was shot dead two days later

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Federal agencies are still alleged to be holding the personnel file of George Joannides, the chief of covert action at the CIA station in Miami and the case officer for a New Orleans-based group of Cuban exiles. The group collected intelligence on Oswald and clashed with him as he handed out leaflets supporting Castro in the summer of 1963. Joannides was accused of misleading a congressional committee and obstructing the investigation by failing to disclose that Oswald was being watched by the CIA in the weeks leading up to the assassination.

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The secret files are also thought to contain heavily-redacted 1975 testimony to congressional investigators by James Jesus Angleton, a senior CIA counterintelligence officer, and prison recordings of the former New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, who claimed he was involved in the assassination.

Also missing is a redacted page from a 1961 memo by Kennedy’s aide Arthur Schlesinger, in which they discussed breaking up the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The debacle prompted Kennedy to famously declare he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds”.

Members of Fidel Castro’s militia during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion

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CIA fears that Kennedy planned to disband the agency and pull the US out of Vietnam were the basis for Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK. Released in 1991, the polemical thriller reignited public interest in the assassination and the allegations of a vast government conspiracy at its heart.

Trump’s order to release the JFK files has thrown up new twists in the saga.Earlier in February it emerged that the FBI had uncovered some 2,400 previously unknown documents linked to the assassination.

“What it shows you is that these records should have been produced in the 1990s. Why weren’t they produced before?” Morley said. “It just goes to show you that [at] these big government organisations, JFK material could have survived and stayed secret all this time … We’re getting closer.”

Senior figures in the Trump administration are also pushing to unlock the secrets of Dallas. Robert F Kennedy Jr — nephew of JFK, son of Robert Kennedy and now Trump’s health secretary — has long accused the CIA of conspiring in his uncle’s murder.

“What is so embarrassing that they’re afraid to show the American public 60 years later?” Kennedy said in 2023.

Morley hopes that Kennedy will be a powerful voice for full disclosure from within the administration. “It’s personal for Robert Kennedy [Jr],” he said, though he cautioned that “high hopes also have to be tempered with hard experience. People want to talk about smoking guns, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle is a better one.”

Despite Trump’s directive, intelligence agencies are still reported to be seeking redactions from their final cache of hidden documents, to the fury of the White House. “This is total deep state bulls**t,” one Trump administration official told Axios last week.

Files has no expectation that his claim will be vindicated. The record of his debrief with CIA handlers at Chicago’s Midway airport ten days after the assassination remains buried in agency files, he said.

“The government tells a lie, they have to live the lie. I don’t think Trump will get any further than what’s already been disclosed,” he said. “The CIA has lied to the American public for 61 years. Does anyone really think the CIA is going to say, ‘We’re sorry, we lied to you’? A hundred years from now they will still say that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy.”

Many historians of the assassination reluctantly agree. Tom Samoluk, deputy director of the federal Assassination Records Review Board, has pored over every JFK document released by the government since the 1990s. He no longer believes that the remaining files contain a “smoking gun” that will fundamentally alter the official narrative that Oswald was the lone gunman.

Flaws in the original investigation probably mean the whole truth will never be known, he said.

“There were leads that were not followed immediately in the aftermath of the assassination that could have … put closure on an American tragedy that has now lingered for nearly 62 years,” Samoluk, who is 67, said. “Unfortunately, I think the truth was lost to history a long time ago.”