US releases new batch of documents about JFK assassination
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Archives on Wednesday made public nearly 1,500 documents related to the U.S. government's investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The disclosure of secret cables, internal memos and other documents satisfies a deadline set in October by President Joe Biden and is in keeping with a federal statute that calls for the release of records in the government's possession. Additional documents are expected to be made public next year.
There was no immediate indication that the records contained new revelations that could radically reshape the public's understanding of the events surrounding the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of Kennedy in Dallas at the hands of gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
But the latest tranche of documents was nonetheless eagerly anticipated by historians and others who, decades after the Kennedy killing, remain skeptical that, at the height of the Cold War, a troubled young man with a mail-order rifle was solely responsible for an assassination that changed the course of American history.
The documents include CIA cables and memos discussing Oswald’s previously disclosed but never fully explained visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City as well as discussion, in the days after the assassination, of the potential for Cuban involvement in the killing of Kennedy.
One CIA cable describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would permit him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa. On Oct. 3, more than one month before the assassination, he drove back into the United States through a crossing at the Texas border.
Another memo, dated the day after Kennedy's assassination, says that...