What is inside the secret JFK assassination files?
Secret government documents to be released this week are expected to contain new information on what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
US president Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that he will allow the release of the documents, “subject to the receipt of further information.”
Federal law requires the National Archives to release all of its JFK files by Thursday this week, exactly 25 years after President George H.W. Bush signed the JFK Assassination Records Act.
The law lets Trump withhold part or all of the documents if he decides “identifiable harm” will occur if the documents are disclosed.
Investigative journalist Gerald Posner said the records may reveal what the CIA knew about Oswald’s trip to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
“There are these glitches in Oswald’s biography in which we don’t know what he is up to. One of those is Mexico City,” said Mr Posner, whose 1993 book Case Closed debunks the conspiracy theories surrounding Mr Kennedy’s assassination.
The secret documents may also shed light on ex-CIA officer and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s confession to two of his sons that he had knowledge of rogue CIA officers’ plans to kill Mr Kennedy.
However, many assassination experts believe Hunt’s confession soon before he died was too vague to really mean anything.
“Let’s see what the documents show,” said Posner.
The National Archives has five million pages of JFK material. About 88 per cent is already public, wit 11 per cent partly public with sensitive portions removed. Only one per cent of the records remain fully secret.
The US government’s conclusion that Oswald shot Mr Kennedy in a bid to attain fame is widely not believed in the US. A 2013 Gallup poll found 61 per cent of Americans believe Mr Kennedy’s assassination was in actual fact a conspiracy.
JFK conspiracy theorists offer a suspect list that includes rogue CIA agents, the FBI, the Mafia, pro-Castro Cubans, anti-Castro Cubans, Corsican mobsters, and Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president.
Mr Posner, whose book was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in history, doesn’t believe the new documents will reveal any secret plot though.
“If American intelligence had evidence of it, it would have been out a long time ago,” he said.
However researchers are nonetheless eager to see the documents.
“Things that didn’t look very exciting to them back in 1997 or 1998 might have relevance today,” said Mr Posner.