(Washington) The U.S. government on Wednesday released thousands of FBI and CIA documents relating to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, which continues to fuel conspiracy theories despite the official finding that the president was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Declassified reports show that investigators have been pursuing multiple leads, from Soviet intelligence services to communist groups in Africa to the Italian mafia, to determine whether Oswald had benefited from complicity in this murder committed on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, USA. Texas, and which had caused a shock around the world.
In particular, they show that the United States has stepped up its activities of espionage and influence over the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro, with whom Oswald had contact and whom the Kennedy government wanted to overthrow.
PHOTO JON ELSWICK, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Part of a CIA file, dated October 10, 1963, relating to “a reliable and sensitive source in Mexico” which confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald had had contact with the Soviet Union embassy in Mexico City prior to l assassination of President John Kennedy. This document was published on November 3, 2017 by the National Archives.
The 1,491 documents were released to 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 findings of the so-called “Warren Commission” which determined in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Oswald was killed on November 24, 1963 by Jack Ruby.
PHOTO -, AFP
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 25 years.
President Biden, who had promised to abide by the law, however postponed declassification of new documents for a year in October.
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.