The long-awaited release of tens of thousands of files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has sparked a desperate search for new clues in the shocking crime more than 60 years later.
The trove of previously classified pages spanning decades was made available by President Trump on the National Archives website Tuesday, with most seemingly only confirming information long known.
However, some interesting snippets being pored over include documents shedding light on theories eyeing a “small clique” in the CIA being involved — as well as an apparent KGB investigation to find if assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was one of its agents.
A memo dated June 1967 details how a former US Army intelligence officer, Gary Underhill, fled Washington, DC, “very agitated” the day after Kennedy was shot — and spoke with a friend about how a “small clique within the CIA” was behind the assassination, six months before he was found dead in his apartment.
“The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening, he showed up at the home of a friend in New Jersey.
“He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country,” the memo reads.
“Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
Underhill, a former US Army captain who worked as an intelligent officer during World War II, was said to be on a “first-name basis with many of the top brass in the Pentagon” and on “intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CIA officials.”
“The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband,” the passage reads.
It noted that the CIA clique allegedly killed Kennedy because he caught “wind” of their business and was “killed before he could ‘blow the whistle.'”
Underhill’s suicide was also called into question since he had been found with a gunshot wound behind his left ear, but Asher Brynes, his writing partner who found his body, said, “Underhill was right-handed.”
In another document released Tuesday, a teletype US intelligence report dated Nov. 20, 1991, said a KGB official named Nikonov investigated whether Oswald “had been a KGB agent.”
“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” the document says.
Nikonov “doubted that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KBG [sic] watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”
The file also noted that “Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR.”
Nikonov also noted that Oswald had “a stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly.”
Oswald, a Marine Corps veteran, defected to the Soviet Union four years before shooting Kennedy. Prior to the assassination, Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico, where he made contact with the Soviet Embassy in pursuit of a travel visa.
Another one of the files in the new batch, which was also labeled “secret,” showed how the CIA tracked an Italian newspaper article that alleged the agency itself was behind the assassination of the 35th president.
Some of the documents also shed light on the intelligence community’s machinations in the 1960s, including details about secret CIA bases worldwide.
One document described how the CIA was tracking a Cuban national named AMFUANA-1, who was sent to Cuba in 1961 before establishing a network of at least 20 people who helped draw up over 50 reports.
Most of the documents released on Tuesday appeared to relate to the initial investigation of the assassination by the Warren Commission in 1964.
That commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy with a high-powered rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, overlooking Dealey Plaza, as the president’s motorcade passed below him.
The official conclusion has been subject to controversy, with polls consistently showing a clear majority of Americans feel Kennedy was murdered as the result of a conspiracy — with theories floated implicating the Mafia, the CIA, and disgruntled Cuban exiles, among others.
Under the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, Congress set a 2017 deadline for releasing the outstanding JFK files.
When the time came, Trump had released thousands of files, including 19,000 in 2018.
However, there were still JFK files under wraps amid pressure from national security buffs like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
By the end of 2022, President Joe Biden had taken a similar approach and released over 13,000 files.
Before Tuesday’s release, the National Archives and Records Administration estimated that roughly 98% of the files had been made public — a pledge Trump made to increase government transparency during his second term.
