Government releases thousands of declassified pages related to JFK assassination

The National Archives on Tuesday released thousands of pages of declassified records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The records were posted to the National Archives’ website, joining recently released records posted in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2017-2018.

“This release consists of approximately 80,000 pages of previously-classified records that will be published with no redactions,” said the announcement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Additional documents withheld under court seal or for grand jury secrecy, and records subject to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, must be unsealed before release.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 23 directing the release of all remaining records related to the assassination, saying it was in the “public interest” to do so.

Tuesday’s initial release contained 1,123 records comprising 32,000 pages. A subsequent release on Tuesday night contained 1,059 records comprising 31,400 additional pages.

Among the material was the long-awaited, unredacted text of a June 1961 memo on the CIA, sent to President Kennedy by aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The memo contained harsh criticism of the spy agency just months after the CIA backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Previously-released versions of the 63-year-old memo had contained more than a full page of redactions — classification markings that generated a great deal of interest among researchers and conspiracy theorists, particularly those who hold the unsubstantiated view that the CIA may have played a role in Kennedy’s killing.

Schlesinger had argued to Kennedy that the CIA’s reliance on “controlled American sources” had been encroaching on the traditional functions of the State Department, and that the CIA may have been seeking to infiltrate the politics of America’s allies.

“CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as State,” Schlesinger wrote in 1961, adding that in certain countries, the CIA’s presence “outnumbers regular State Department personnel.”

The previously-classified portion of the memo cites the specific number of CIA personnel that had been stationed at the U.S. embassy in Paris, where “CIA has even sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities, among them the President of the National Assembly,” the memo said.

Schlesinger also details the number of CIA sources in Austria and Chile, information in the memo that had been classified until now.

Several of the newly-released pages detail how the CIA went about tapping telephones in Mexico City between in December 1962 and January 1963 to monitor the communications of the Soviets and Cubans at their diplomatic facilities, which Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald visited in the months before the assassination.

The previously-redacted pages spell out specific instructions for CIA operatives on how to wiretap, including the use of certain chemicals to create markings on telephone devices that could only be seen by other spies under UV light.

For decades, the CIA has urged the continued secrecy of these details out of fear that they would reveal the methods of the agency’s spy craft.

One 79-page record contains 15 newly unredacted pages — though several of them remain unreadable due to the degraded quality of the typeface after many rounds of photocopy duplication.

The newly-disclosed portions detail CIA surveillance of Soviet embassies in Mexico City and efforts to recruit double agents from Soviet agency personnel — and reveal the names and positions of those who were recruited. The CIA officials writing these memos tout the efficacy of their efforts, with one trumpeting, “I cannot help but feel that we are buying a great deal for our money in this project.”

The memo also details the CIA’s surveillance of an American man described as a Communist living in Mexico. The bulk of the memo is a listing of phone numbers that were tapped by the U.S. government. This file has long been sought by researchers due to Oswald’s visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, but the document includes no mention of Oswald by name.

“The first JFK files release of 2025 is an encouraging start,” Jefferson Morley of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that operates a database of government records on the Kennedy assassination, said on X. “We now have complete versions of approximately a third of the redacted JFK documents held by the National Archives (1,124 of approximately 3,500 documents ). Rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document.”

“Seven of ten JFK files held by the Archives and sought by JFK researchers are now in the public record. These long-secret records shed new light on JFK’s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald,” Morley posted. “The release does not include two thirds of the promised files nor any of 500-plus IRS record, nor any of the 2,400 recently discovered FBI files. Nonetheless, this is most positive news on the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s.”

Many of the documents have long been in the public domain, except for minor redactions, such as the blacking out of personally-identifiable information of CIA sources or employees that the CIA had fiercely fought to keep secret.

One such document from August 1966 recommends a “certificate of distinction” for a CIA official who led the spy agency’s technical division. Previous releases of the same document contained redactions striking sentences that described how this individual led a team that “conceived and developed” the use of “fluoroscopic scanning” and X-rays, which allowed the CIA to “detect hidden technical listening devices” for the first time. The official, James McCord, would go on to become head of security for Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972 — and gain infamy for his role as one of the Watergate burglars whose break-in precipitated the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

The release of the JFK materials comes a day after Trump announced to reporters that the administration would begin releasing the records on Tuesday, prompting a scramble inside the Justice Department to free up attorneys to assist with the declassification process.

Congress voted in 1992 to require the government to release and declassify all records related to the assassination and subsequent investigations by 2017, but that deadline was repeatedly pushed back by Trump and President Joe Biden due to national security concerns.

Tuesday’s release represents a small, outstanding tranche of the more than six million pages of Kennedy assassination records collected by the National Archives — the majority of which have already been declassified and are available online or in person for review, according to the agency.

Also released Tuesday were 14 documents related to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., totaling about 1,050 pages and 21 documents regarding Robert F. Kennedy, totaling about 2,500 pages.

Of the RFK documents released, only one directly mentioned his assassination in 1968. An intelligence document from 1968 — previously released in 2018 — discusses how RFK’s assassination stoked interest in his brother’s assassination and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the matter.

“The forthcoming trial of Sirhan, accused of the murder of Senator Kennedy, can be expected to cause a new wave of criticism and suspicion against the United States, claiming once more the existence of a sinister ‘political murder conspiracy,'” the dispatch said.

Some of the other documents detailed operations to potentially overthrow Castro in Cuba. According to a 1964 document, two intelligence assets discussed potentially assassinating Castro under the administration of Lyndon Johnson.

“CIA allegedly was formerly in favor of such a plan; however, inasmuch as Attorney General ROBERT KENNEDY Would have no part of it, it was shelved. Now the plan has allegedly been brought up again for consideration,” the document said.

Another previously released document detailed RFK being briefed on potential plans to kill Castro.

“RFK asks to be told before the CIA works with the Mafia again,” a footnote of the document read.

Some of the documents appear to have originated from the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, also known as the Rockefeller Commission. In a 1964 intelligence document, a station chief noted an interest in developing a source whose daughter is a secretary in RFK’s senate office. That document was released in 2018.

ABC News’ John Parkinson, Ely Brown and Peter Charalambous contributed to this report.

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Stephen Collopy

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