President Trump has made good on his commitment to release the last JFK files. Unfortunately, they don't reveal anything significantly new about the assassination. However, they do provide a deeper understanding of the historical context and the CIA's operations during the 1960s.
The files I've had the opportunity to examine provide a deeper understanding of the intricate web of international espionage and subversion orchestrated by the CIA during the tumultuous 1960s, a period that continues to fascinate and intrigue us.
Approximately 80,000 files relating to the JFK assassination have been uploaded to the National Archives website. The physical JFK papers and artifacts are housed in the National Archives in College Park, MD, a 20-minute drive from JFK's autopsy in Bethesda.
The files, identified only by numbers on the website, are readily available for public scrutiny in PDF format. It's worth noting that these are just a fraction of the estimated 5 million files related to the assassination, a fact that underscores the extensive research potential for those interested in this historical event.
From what I've viewed so far, there are a lot of pages that detail clandestine CIA operations in Cuba and Mexico City. These operations, which included anti-Castro subversion and surveillance in Latin America, were part of the CIA's efforts to counter communist influence during the Cold War. There are familiar names throughout many of the files, such as Lee Harvey Oswald and William King Harvey.
File number 104-10103-10079, dated November 27, 1962, talks about the Intelligence Exploitation of [Cuban] Refugees. William King Harvey writes it—the man responsible for carrying out the CIA's role in Operation Mongoose—a series of terrorist attacks on Cuban civilians carried out by John F. Kennedy, approved this operationally on November 4, 1961.
Harvey wrote:
"As you know, with the quarantine and the cessation of air travel, the heavy flow of Cuban refugees has dwindled almost to nothing. Given this and in connection with the contingency planning for supporting any possible military action in Cuba, the Opa-Locka Interrogation Center as much was dismantled, although the personnel of the Center have been retained intact. To re-establish the flow of intelligence from refugees, it is proposed that Pan American Airways and KLM be induced to reinstate their regular flights from Havana to Miami. This should be done as soon as possible after the current negotiations and UN discussions are settled. Coincident with this, the Opa-Locka refugee interrogation center will be re-established with the same personnel."
The memo also discusses how the operation recruited 131 agents in Cuba.
At the end of the memo, Harvey stated, "It is recommended that the Mongoose operational mechanism be abolished" (this was one year after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and one year before JFK's assassination).
According to another file just released, 02-10001-10187, we see other reminders of Operation Mongoose's depravity. It shows the CIA discussing the sabotage of Cuba's crops by using "biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin" in 1962.
These files might not shine any new light on the assassination, but it is a window into how the CIA's function seems to be how to subvert foreign nations—as well as the American people and corporations.
File 124-90060-10015 shows a memo about Lucein Conein from June 2, 1966. It discusses how Conein was a covert CIA employee in Saigon, South Vietnam, "on an extremely sensitive assignment."
The memo aimed to ensure the French government was not made aware of Conein's affiliation with the CIA. A French court had convicted Conein for not paying child support.
It had already been made public that after Conein left the CIA in 1972, President Nixon appointed Conein as chief of covert operations for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
There are strange documents like 124-10163-10134, which tell the story of a Swedish man who walked into the US Embassy in Sweden and said his friend, Riddserstrale, predicted the JFK assassination. They never told the Embassy officers this story on November 29, 1963. A week after the assassination, he claimed that the prediction was made "while drunk on November 15, 1963, [Riddserstrale] predicted that within two weeks President Kennedy would be assassinated while on a trip among his people."
The memo points out that Riddserstrale was a member of the Swedish nobility, a left-winger, and a strong supporter of Fidel Castro. The last two points are underlined, showing that the CIA wasn't so much interested in a psychic in Sweden as they were a well-connected man with ties to Castro sympathizers who might've overheard a Cuban plot to kill Kennedy. This demonstrates the thoroughness of the CIA's investigation, but also raises questions about the extent of their resources and whether they were sometimes misdirected.
During President Trump's first term, he decided not to release certain portions of these JFK files because they allegedly posed a risk to national security. I would like to know what those files were or if they even made the cut.
RFK Jr. has previously said President Trump told him that Mike Pompeo begged him not to release the rest of the JFK files. Maybe whatever Pompeo was worried about hasn't been found yet in the new release, or there are some missing files.
Skepticism of so-called answers to the JFK assassination is nothing new. The Warren Commission investigated the assassination from 1963 to 1964. Many were concerned that Allen Dulles was a part of the Commission. Dulles had been fired as the Director of the CIA by JFK (JFK reportedly said he wanted to splinter the CIA and scatter it into the wind after he felt like they misled him into the Bay of Pigs disaster).
Even if the latest batch of files has yet to offer any big surprises, previous releases have shared some significant discoveries.
In November 1997, the JFK Records Review Board shared files that contained information regarding Operation Northwoods. General Lemnitzer, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented this idea to President Kennedy in 1962.
The goal of Northwoods was to kill US citizens by way of mass shootings and plane hijackings to incite a war with Cuba. JFK rejected this proposal and fired General Lemnitzer (Lemnitzer would be hired by the US Government twelve years later to work on the Rockefeller Commission, officially known as the United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. This is as suspicious as Dulles serving on the Warren Commission).
The recent files show us what we already know: the agents of the military-industrial complex sit around plotting how to destroy and collect anything they want. They show us that national security doesn't mean the security of the American people; it means the security of the military-industrial complex's friends. The files portray the military-industrial complex's tentacles reaching everywhere and into everything.
I can appreciate President Trump pushing for transparency for some of America's most significant fear rituals, like the JFK assassination, but I don't think there will be anything the government can release that will ever satisfy the American imagination. Each of these catastrophes has become a Rorschach test.
People will see what they want to see. Even the doctors who performed and reviewed JFK's autopsy have different interpretations. Despite that, I'd still like to see this administration release all the Epstein files in the same fashion as these JFK files, as well as everything related to the attempt on President Trump's life in Butler, PA.
Please turn the government inside out and let the Internet sort out the information. We've been lied to enough to trust third parties trying to tell us what's true. We might not get the big reveals we want from all the files, but the more we pull back the curtain of the military-industrial complex, the more we can hope to end its out-of-control greed and bloodlust. If we can't abolish these agencies, maybe we can at least scale them down to do what they intended: protect the American people.
