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Obsessed, intrigued or otherwise interested in minute details concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
If so the U.S. National Archives has a gift for you – thousands of newly de-classified pages of documents from CIA and FBI files, available online and downloadable for free. The material includes transcripts and recordings of interviews with a former KGB agent who worked with documents in the USSR related to Lee Harvey Oswald.
(Download them yourself at https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release)
But experts on the JFK assassination interviewed in national and world media say you should not expect to discover any smoking guns. And local academics appear to agree.
About 5 million documents are held by the U.S. government related to the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of Kennedy, almost all of them now public. And that, according to a Nicholls State University professor whose courses include aspects of presidential assassinations and how they shape out history, is part of the problem.
“There is so much evidence, it is so hard to draw anything conclusive, specifically because there is so much evidence,” said Dr. Joseph Thysell Jr., when asked by The Times how significant the new release might prove to be. “The Kennedy assassination has been a cottage industry. Everybody has their book, everybody had their theory. But nobody has ever changed the fact that the Warren Commission said Lee Harvey Oswald is the assassin.”
A Boston Globe examination of available records published in 2013 – the 50th anniversary of the assassination – includes a succinct summary of the issue that refuses to die:
“Was the murder of the nation’s 35th president the work of a lone assassin or a conspiracy, and did elements of the US government know about it, or cover it up, or knowingly destroy evidence to prevent other dirty laundry from being aired?”
The newly released documents include 17 audio files, all held secret until now in accordance with the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
The audio files contain interviews of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the United States in January 1964. Nosenko claimed to have been the officer in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union. The interviews were conducted in January, February, and July of 1964.
This set of 3,810 documents includes 441 documents previously withheld in full and 3,369 documents previously released with portions redacted. In some cases, only the previously redacted pages of documents will be released. The previously released portions of the file can be requested and viewed in person at the National Archives at College Park, Md.
The Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 states: “Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that continued postponement is made necessary by specific identifiable harm.”
The act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and defined five categories of information that could be withheld from release.
The act also established the Assassination Records Review Board to weigh agency decisions to postpone the release of records.
President Donald Trump has the task of deciding in October whether the remaining records should continue to be withheld.
Dr. Thysell is not himself an assassination aficionado, but as a historian does have an opinion on the continuing controversy.
“Based on the evidence already presented and in the public domain, a very strong case can be made that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman,” Thysell said. “Whether other people were also involved in the act that will always remain a mystery. So much time has passed since 1963 and so many conflicting stories and most of all, no smoking gun.”
