President Trump declassified 64,000 pages of government information related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and more secret papers will be made public in the coming days.
The latest batch of documents came from the government’s investigation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union. Hundreds of pages chronicle the U.S. government’s efforts to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other memos show the growing power of the CIA.
The new files include random, seemingly unrelated materials, among them an odd letter to then-Sen Joseph R. Biden, signed by someone claiming to be John F. Kennedy Jr.
A man claimed he warned the federal government of Oswald’s plans.
Letters from Sergyj Czornonoh claimed that in August 1963 he told U.S. officials that the Soviets told him Oswald planned to assassinate Kennedy.
Czornonoh said he was given information about Oswald by the Soviet Consul in Sofia, Bulgaria, and that the consul’s girlfriend “came to my room and repeated that Mr. Lee Harvey Oswald is an assassin. He will kill President Kennedy.” The Soviets told Czornonoh that Oswald would be killed after the assassination.
Czornonoh said on August 19, 1963, he warned the director of the State Department’s “special counselor service,” that Oswald had a weapon and planned to kill Kennedy and that someone should investigate him. The officials shrugged off the warning, he said.
“Director told me you too can have a weapon – so what if Oswald got a weapon,” Czornonoh wrote to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.
Oswald had terrible aim.
The Warren Commission that investigated the Kennedy assassination concluded Oswald acted alone, firing a rifle at the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. But according to a report from a former KGB agent, the KGB watched him closely while he was in the USSR from 1959 until 1962 and they noted Oswald “was a poor shot when he tried target firing.”
Oswald’s wife Marina was tough on him.
While in the USSR the KGB noted that Oswald “had a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly.”
The FBI and Dallas Police were warned Oswald would be killed.
A Nov. 24, 1963 memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes a Nov. 23 call to the FBI field office in Dallas “from a man talking in a calm voice and saying he was a member of a committee organized to kill Oswald.”
Hoover said he immediately alerted the Dallas police, who assured him Oswald would be protected.
Later on Nov. 23, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the stomach as he was escorted through the police station. Oswald died hours later at the hospital. Mr. Hoover described Ruby as having “the reputation of being a homosexual,” and said Ruby told authorities he acted alone and “guessed his grief over the killing of the president made him insane.”
Hoover was surprisingly incurious about Oswald after he died, leading off his Nov. 24 memo by stating: “There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead.”
The CIA had opened an investigative file on Oswald long before the assassination.
The CIA was monitoring Oswald’s travels in Mexico and the Soviet Union but never concluded Oswald posed a significant threat.
Kennedy was warned against the secretive CIA’s growing influence.
The files include a 15-page memo from aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a former intelligence analyst during World War II. Schlesinger warned the president that the CIA was taking over U.S. foreign policy using tactics that were anti-American.
He called the agency “a state within a state,” and said the problem with the CIA’s doctrine “is the extent to which its various clandestine missions are compatible with a free and open society.”
The CIA had a staff of 300 people in New York opening U.S. mail addressed to the Soviet Union.
The CIA was secretly screening mail to the USSR, indexing and examining more than 4,000 letters a day sent from within the United States. The purpose “was to identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who might have some ties to the U.S. and who could be approached in their countries as contacts and sources for CIA.”
CIA agent Gary Underhill claimed in the days following the Kennedy Assassination that “a small clique within the CIA” was responsible for the president’s murder.
Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death inside his apartment in the District of Columbia. His death was ruled a suicide but his friends suspected he may have been murdered.
The CIA opened a file on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, shortly after King’s murder.
One CIA memo mixed in with the JFK assassination material describes Ray as a drifter who was kicked out of the Army “as inept and unable to adjust.” Ray was “once confined to a mental hospital,” worked in various jobs and was a drifter with a long criminal record. The CIA said Ray went missing from a Missouri state penitentiary in April 1967 and was not recaptured. A year later, Ray assassinated King.
President Kennedy’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was no fan of Biden, or that was the sentiment of someone pretending to be him.
A single document in the newly released files includes a letter dated August 1994 and addressed to President Biden, who was then a U.S. Senator representing Delaware.
The handwritten letter said, “Dear Sen. Biden: You are a traitor.” It was signed “John F. Kennedy Jr.” The letter’s return address is Worcester, Mass. and it was sent to Biden’s Senate office.
Mr. Kennedy, who died in 1999, was living in New York City at the time, suggesting someone may have been impersonating him.
Biden’s Senate staff gave the letter to the FBI Washington Field Office, which delivered it to FBI headquarters.
In an FBI memo describing the letter, Mr. Biden is identified as “VICTIM.”
