The US government released thousands of FBI and CIA documents on Wednesday December 15 in connection with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. According to the official conclusion of the investigation, the president was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald.
The declassified reports show that the investigators multiplied the leads, of the Soviet intelligence services to the communist groups in Africa while passing by the Italian mafia, to determine if Oswald had benefited from complicity in this assassination committed on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, au Texas, and which had caused a shock around the world.
According to the documents, the United States has stepped up its espionage and influence over the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, with whom Oswald had contact and whom the Kennedy government wanted to overthrow. The 1,491 documents were released on the National Archives website, which already contains tens of thousands of files relating to Kennedy’s death and the investigation that followed.
The assassination has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories, fueled by hundreds of books and films like that of Oliver Stone. JFK (1991). They refute the conclusions of the commission of inquiry, known as the “Warren commission”, which had determined in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine commando having lived in the Soviet Union, had acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy. Oswald was killed on November 24, 1963 by Jack Ruby.
Other files made public by December
Some believe that Oswald was used by Cuba or the USSR. Others believe that the assassination was sponsored by the Cuban opposition with the support of the US secret service and the FBI, or by opponents of JFK in the United States.
In 2017, Donald Trump made public records in this case, in accordance with a 1992 law of Congress requiring that all documents related to President Kennedy be released within twenty-five years.
President Biden, who had promised to respect the law, however, postponed for a year, in October, the declassification of new documents. The White House is now under pressure to make the other documents public before December 15, 2022, unless it has reason to keep them secret.
Philip Shenon, specialist in the assassination of Kennedy, estimated, Wednesday, in the magazine Politico that certain documents would never be published for security reasons, and that this would continue to fuel conspiracy theses. According to him, 15,000 documents remain in secret, most of them from the CIA and the FBI.