Secrets From the JFK Assassination Files: What Can We Expect?

In one of his first acts upon reassuming the presidency last month, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing officials to present a plan for the “full and complete release” of all records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

For decades, documents pertaining to these national tragedies have been withheld—or heavily censored—by the US government. Last week, pursuant to the president’s executive order, intelligence officials reportedly submitted a proposed file-release plan to the White House. While the itinerary is still unknown, the JFK records will come first; a plan to unseal heretofore withheld RFK and MLK documents will follow. Already though, FBI officials say that 2,400 records from the bureau’s files (some thought to be previously undisclosed) have allegedly just surfaced. Nothing yet is known about this new cache, but as Axios has reported, one Trump adviser has predicted that the documents might “just suddenly wind up online.”

The first JFK tranche should be relatively straightforward with respect to approximately 3,500 records that have been collected but are highly redacted. To “un-redact” them, evidently, is not a heavy lift. Other files will presumably be made public in the months to come. (The authoritative Mary Ferrell Foundation—dedicated to declassifying memoranda from these three national tragedies—has an in-depth accounting of what we currently know about this material.)

Since I have recently spent time studying the history of 1963—President Kennedy’s last year alive–I am intrigued, above all, by the pending release of the JFK files. (I have written three pieces for Vanity Fair on President Kennedy. Links to those stories appear near the end of this article.)

Many may wonder: Why does the JFK assassination still transfix us, even 62 years later? And why does the MAGA crowd bring new and vigorous energy to the prospect of the final release of all the JFK records? If you doubt that this controversy still has legs in 21st-century America, think of the Warren Commission’s report, in 1964; the House investigation on assassinations, released in 1978; Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, in 1988; Oliver Stone’s film JFK, in 1991; and the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, created by an act passed by Congress, with the target for a complete public airing of the entirety of the JFK assassination archive by October 2017.

And yet, despite the release of a substantial number of files—including batches made public by Trump in 2017 and then Joe Biden during his term in office—both presidents, at the behest of the intelligence services, further delayed full declassification. Little wonder that US citizens still want to know why there has been a delay, what’s left to disseminate, and which agencies have been the most resistant to compliance. (Again, the Mary Ferrell Foundation website is a useful resource for a listing of all of the dispensed records through 2025.)

So who to turn to for the best take on the forthcoming release? I asked JFK assassination expert Jefferson Morley to explain the significance of the executive order, what discoveries might come to light, and why MAGA-world seems to regard this as an important issue for our current age. Since 1992, Morley has been leading the charge for full release of the JFK files. He brings a journalist’s skills to the task and is the curator of the highly respected JFK Facts podcast and Substack blog.

While some knowledgeable observers continue to believe that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, many contend that there are other potential conspirators who could have had their own motives for wanting to see the president removed from power. Among the suspects are Fidel Castro (whom American operatives had previously tried to kill); the Soviets (then engaged in a cold war with the US); the Mafia (whose leadership was under investigation by the FBI and JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy); and even JFK’s own vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson. And then there was the Central Intelligence Agency. It is the CIA’s unreleased files, in particular, that are of keenest interest to Morley. Herein, he explains why.

(When Vanity Fair asked the CIA to address several of Morley’s assertions, an official agency spokesperson responded, “CIA is working with the appropriate stakeholders to comply with the Executive Order.”)

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

James Robenalt: What is it that we expect from this round of documents?

Jefferson Morley: I think the most important thing that we’ll find out, if we get to full disclosure, is more about CIA operations involving the [agency’s] targeting of Lee Harvey Oswald while President Kennedy was still alive. The whole story of how closely top CIA officials knew about Oswald’s movements, his personal life, his political contacts was hidden from the [1963] Warren Commission and the [1976] House Select Committee on Assassinations. And it really only began to emerge in the 1990s after the passage of the JFK Records Act. So what we’ve seen in the last 20 years is that this small group of CIA officials knew perfectly well who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and [apparently] never made any effort to detain him or to ask the FBI to take action about him.

Oswald, we now know from his pre-assassination file, was not a lone nut. Therefore, one of the key files is that of a CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald. Other key documents concern James Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence who controlled the Oswald file from 1959 to 1963, and CIA surveillance operations in Mexico City that picked up on Oswald’s visit there. So those are documents that are all known to exist, heavily redacted, but should come out if the president’s order is really enforced. [Editor’s note: Angleton, a legendary CIA spymaster, spent years in pursuit of Russian moles who might have penetrated the agency. The 2006 film The Good Shepherd was partially based on his life and career.]

Let’s talk about some of the documents that have been collected but are highly redacted. Those include, as I understand it, a memo from JFK presidential aide and “court historian” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to the president about the CIA.

One of the records that the JFK research community thinks is very important is a memo that Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs in June 1961. [Editor’s note: The Bay of Pigs is the name given to the botched CIA-devised plot to invade Cuba and overthrow its Soviet-aligned leader, Fidel Castro.] Kennedy was furious at the CIA. He felt he’d been handed a bad plan and he was being forced to go into a war he didn’t want. He felt that the CIA was doing foreign policy by that fait accompli. So he asked Schlesinger to come up with ideas about reorganizing the CIA.

People say Kennedy wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Well, that was his very pungent explanation when he was very mad at the agency. When he calmed down, he went to the office and he told Schlesinger, “Give me a plan for reorganizing the CIA,” which is a polite way of saying the same thing. He wanted to solve what he perceived as a problem in the CIA by changing it. And so we have Schlesinger’s memo [see a copy here], but in the middle of it, there’s a page—an entire page—that is completely blacked out. [More than] 60 years later, that’s absurd. This is the type of thing that has to be released soon.

Could you talk more about what the CIA knew about Oswald and his trip to Mexico City—and his meetings with individuals at the Cuban and Russian embassies there—two months before the assassination? What might we be able to figure out if details about that visit are fullydisclosed?

The documents that are the most redacted are related to Mexico City. One in particular may be the key one. It’s a [79]-page CIA summary of two surveillance operations. These were physical and phone surveillance operations conducted against the CIA’s enemies in Mexico City by the CIA station chief, Winston Scott [an American Central Intelligence Agency officer who served as Mexico City station chief from 1956 to 1969]. These two operations picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald when he visited Mexico City. The CIA story [was] that, “We didn’t know anything about Oswald and didn’t care who he was.” That’s no longer credible. We now know that when Oswald showed up in Mexico City [it] was a national security event that was referred to top officials in the CIA who were well informed about Oswald. So everything about CIA surveillance operations in Mexico City is highly sensitive and that’s why it’s still redacted and highly relevant to the JFK story.

Who was involved in those surveillance ops?

Winston Scott. There were CIA surveillance operations pointed at the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City, both wiretap operations and photo surveillance operations. Oswald visits both of those offices, six weeks before President Kennedy is killed. The CIA’s original story was, “We weren’t paying attention to him, and we just didn’t know anything about it until after the assassination.” That was a lie. Win Scott knew right away that Oswald was there and his people attached importance to him. Oswald was picked up on wiretaps. Scott sent a memo, a cable, to Washington that said, [in effect,] “We picked up someone named Oswald, who is he?”

The CIA officials get together in Washington and they pulled Oswald’s file. And we’re talking top, top officials, including first assistants to Deputy Director Richard Helms [later director of the agency under LBJ and Nixon] and Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton. And they look at the Oswald file and the top assistants write a cable back to Scott.

Why was Oswald in Mexico City?

He was trying to go to Cuba and the Soviet Union. So he was applying for a visa at both embassies. And when he went to the Cuban embassy, where he wanted to go first, they said you have to get your visa to the Soviet Union also. So he goes to the Soviet embassy and asks for a visa there. They say, “No, you’re an American. You have to apply for a visa in Washington.” The answer is, “No. Period.” So Oswald is thwarted in his efforts to travel to Cuba. But all of these conversations are [supposedly] picked up by these CIA surveillance operations.

What conclusions do you draw?

It looks like the CIA was manipulating him and hiding it afterward. That’s what the record we’ve got to date strongly suggests: It was manipulating Oswald, perhaps to make him into a patsy for the assassination or somehow to set him up in some way. He’s being used for some kind of operational purpose. So hopefully these records will shed some light on it.

How would such evidence indicate the CIA was manipulating Oswald?

Well, you have to understand the prelude to that. Look at how they collected information on Oswald in his short life; he only lived to be 24. Yet six CIA code-named, intelligence-collection operations tracked him. The first one came right after he moved to the Soviet Union in 1959. [The CIA started] reading his mail. Over the next four years, five more operations come to touch on Oswald. One operation intercepts his mail and another publicizes Oswald’s pro-Castro activities in New Orleans. Another captures Oswald’s phone calls to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. And a CIA photo surveillance operation takes his picture there. It wasn’t just people looking at him and saying, “Where did this guy come from and what’s going on here?” They had multiple streams of intelligence on this guy.

So put it together for me. Do these facts indicate that the intelligence agencies actually knew there was an assassination plot involving Oswald? Or that people within the CIA itself may have been involved in it? What could explain the discrepancies in the agency’s stance over the years?

The larger context is important. Kennedy is moving in a liberal, leftist, dovish direction in 1963, chastened by the near nuclear-war experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He’s looking for ways to wind down the Cold War because he does not want to be put in that position again of being forced to, you know, push the button and launch a war that’s going to kill millions of people, millions of innocent people.

Famously, he addresses this in his June 1963 peace speech at the American University.

Right. So he gives a speech and he says, “Look, we need a strategy for peace. We can’t regard the Russians as simply enemies.” He says, “We are all mortal.” And he follows that up with the first arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, a limited test ban treaty, not a huge step forward, but a kind of confidence-building measure at a time when these two superpowers are like eyeball to eyeball and very hostile, you know, with these hair-trigger weapons system. And Kennedy’s saying, “Let’s step back.” And [Nikita] Khrushchev [the USSR premier and first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] agrees. And there’s a little bit of a thaw in the Cold War.

Kennedy follows up in September. He says, “Look, let’s not compete with the Russians to go to the moon. Let’s do it together. This is for the benefit of all mankind.” Behind the scenes, he’s telling aides to explore working something out with Castro to kind of wind down that confrontation. Many in the Pentagon are [pushing to stay in Vietnam, if not escalate]. Kennedy’s dragging his feet. He’s not saying no, but he’s not saying yes. So that’s the foreign policy situation.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] are very alienated. This is in the official [Pentagon] history: Relations between Kennedy and the JCS after the missile crisis were at an all-time low. Relations between the White House and the generals had never been so bad. And in the CIA, the same thing. There was a lot of hostility to Kennedy that he had failed to get rid of Castro and that he was weak, and, you know, he was a problem. He was a threat. And that perception was very common in the upper ranks of the national security community, not just that Kennedy policy was weak, but that it was a danger. So that’s what’s going on as we come into November 1963.

How does Cuba play into this?

The Pentagon has a plan to provoke a war with Cuba, which is its preferred policy solution. Operation Northwoods is [first proposed by the JCS in March 1962 and later resurrected] in May 1963, and the idea of Operation Northwoods is what they called an engineered provocation—a false flag operation [see memo here], in other words. The idea was to stage a spectacular attack on a US target and arrange it so that the blame falls on Cuba, that Cuba is held responsible for this attack. Then the president will have the authority and the justification under international law to order an invasion. So [the removal of Castro is] the solution that the Pentagon wants, and that’s supported by people in the CIA too.

Were the plans detailed?

Yes. The types of things that were considered: stage a terror attack in Miami and Washington and blame it on the Cubans; sink a boatload of Cubans and blame it on Castro; hijack an airplane and blame it on Castro. These plans were very well worked out, and [a revised version was] approved by the Joint Chiefs on May 1, 1963. So on November 22, somebody staged a spectacular attack on the president. And what we see is CIA assets immediately try to tie the crime to Cuba, just as was called for under Northwoods.

So to me, Northwoods looks like it might have been a template for the people who organized the ambush in Dealey Plaza [in Dallas]. Kennedy is killed by a Communist, Cuban Communists. This crime was carried out by a Castro supporter named Oswald. And Oswald says. “I didn’t do it. I’m a patsy.” He didn’t just say, “I didn’t do it. I’m innocent.” He said, “I’m a patsy, a fall guy for other people who perpetrated the crime.” [Two days after the assassination, Oswald himself was killed at point-blank range by Jack Ruby, a Dallas thug with underworld connections.]

How does that tie into these CIA surveillance operations of Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963?

The first media reaction to the assassination is that Oswald and Castro are the presumed assassins. It’s the first [JFK assassination] conspiracy theory to reach public print, and it’s put out by paid CIA agents. That’s beyond dispute. What I [will] look for when I look at the JFK files is: How did that happen? How did a CIA operation generate this propaganda about Oswald before and after the assassination? And here’s where I come back to another key JFK document, the Joannides file.

[Editor’s note: George Joannides joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 and later became chief of the psychological warfare branch of the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami. In this role he worked closely with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy group.]

George Joannides in 1963 is the chief of covert action operations in Miami. That means he’s running operations on behalf of people at CIA headquarters against the Castro regime. In August 1963, his agents in the Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Student Directorate, which was funded by the CIA, have a series of encounters with Oswald in New Orleans, and they generate publicity about Oswald’s pro-Castro ways, such as [Oswald] handing out pamphlets on the street. We’ve seen that [TV] footage. He’s talking on the radio, defending the Cuban revolution. This CIA program is capturing all of that and making an issue of it on the TV station, on the radio in New Orleans. All of that information was generated by the CIA front group, who then releases it after the assassination—making it look like Oswald had acted at Castro’s behest.

And it generates a lot of headlines. “Pro-Castro sniper kills JFK,” “pro-Castro marksman,” “pro-Cuban marksman.” Headlines all over the country. Very effective propaganda. Well, George Joannides, the man who was running that operation, his files are obviously related to the assassination. It was his guys who were all over Oswald before and after November 22, 1963. So one of the files that has long been sought is his personnel file, [along with] the documents [detailing] what he was doing in 1963, in 1964.

Joannides later surfaces during the House investigation on assassinations in 1978, right?

He’s called out of retirement in 1978, and he’s made the CIA’s liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the very group whose records President Trump’s order makes public. Joannides lies in 1978 about what he knew in 1963. So when we get the Joannides personnel file we’ll understand what is going on with this guy. Is he running an operation involving Oswald? Is he called out of retirement to protect the CIA’s Oswald operations?

Many Americans, to some degree, are very interested in the JFK assassination. But this possible narrative of the CIA essentially setting up Oswald as a fall guy has animated many in the MAGA-verse. Why do you think that’s so? Or do you think that is so?

I do think that. I get more phone calls and requests for comment from right-wing media than from liberal media in recent years.

For example, you’re talking to Tucker Carlson.

Yes. There’s more interest over there because, like you say, there’s more enthusiasm. I think because the JFK story is—it’s a fundamental question of whether you believe the government or not. And if you say, “I don’t believe the JFK story,” that’s a way of saying, “I don’t trust the establishment.” And if you say it really loud and really often, as Trump is starting to do, you know, people are like, “Yeah, I’ll get behind that” because that’s a way to, you know, say, F-you to the establishment and to the CIA—and that we don’t believe you.

It’s another version of the deep state argument.

Yeah, it’s like, “We don’t believe you. You’re trying to trick us and our guy is going after you.” So that’s why, you know, they’re excited about it.

Now, I’m not a supporter of President Trump, and he has dangerous authoritarian tendencies. Okay. I say that straight out to my MAGA friends. But this move to declassify all the JFK records, that’s not authoritarian. That’s an antiauthoritarian move. And so I support it. I never expected the JFK thing to be an issue in the 2024 campaign, but I wasn’t surprised that Trump harnessed it because he knows it’s like this symbolic thing that can work for him and he doesn’t have to deliver on the details.

Do you think this had anything to do with how he reeled in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be on his side?

Yeah, I think so. And at that rally in August [2024] where he said, “We will release all the JFK records,” listen to the crowd reaction. It’s spontaneous and big. And, you know, Trump heard that, and knew he had a good line.

So let me conclude with what I thought was a quote attributed to you—that the JFK assassination is the Rosetta Stone to postwar American history. What does that mean?

No, it wasn’t me. A colleague said that to me. And I thought it was a striking formulation. Because if you understand that event, you understand so much more about the world, the power-political world from which it came. And we’ve always had this confusion, this blind spot at the heart of our own history, our own sense of history was like, “What was that?” And because the government has no credible explanation and the whole thing is surrounded by mad conspiracy theories and disinformation and stupid apologetics, it’s a sore point. But that’s why it still matters in the political culture, because somehow that event still resonates in our politics today.