US President Donald Trump released material related to the 1963 assassination of former president John F. Kennedy on Tuesday, seeking to honour his campaign promise to provide more transparency about the shock event in Texas.
An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website with a total of more than 80,000 expected to be published after Justice Department lawyers spent hours scouring them.
The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the State Department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.
The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.
Other documents played down Oswald’s Soviet connection. One dated November 1991 cited a report from an American professor named E.B. Smith who reported he had talked in Moscow about Oswald with KGB official “Slava” Nikonov, who said he had reviewed five thick files about the assassin to determine if he had been a KGB agent.
