Declassified JFK Files Bolster Conspiracy Theories, but Lack any Bombshell Revelations

The long-awaited release by the National Archives of the declassified JFK files appears to have not shed new light on the assassination of President Kennedy.The 1,123 documents released on Tuesday evening appear to lack any significant new information on the 1963 shooting in which gunman Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy during a visit to Dallas, Texas. Many of the files were previously released but partially redacted, according to BBC News.A majority of the documents appear to be related to the Warren Commission’s initial investigation in 1964, which concluded that Oswald had acted alone.However, the tranche of documents has shed light on more details surrounding the numerous conspiracy theories surrounding Mr. Kennedy’s death, including one on a “small clique” within the Central Intelligence Agency being involved and an investigation by the KGB to determine if Oswald was a Russian agent.A memorandum drafted on June 19, 1967, details how Garry Underhill, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, had fled Washington, DC, in a “very agitated” state the day after Kennedy was shot and had spoken to friends about a “small clique within the CIA” that had been behind the assassination.“The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook,” reads a portion of the memo. “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, and manipulating political intrigue to serve its own ends.”“Kennedy supposedly got wind that something was going on and was killed before he could ‘blow the whistle on it.'”Mr. Underhill, who worked as an intelligence officer during World War II and on “intimate terms” with high-ranking officials at the Pentagon and within the CIA, was found dead in his apartment six months later.In a U.S. Intelligence report from November 1991, officials say a KGB official named Nikonov was investigating if 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. “[he] doubted that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KBG [sic] watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”Oswald was a Marine Corps veteran who defected to Soviet Russia four years before Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas.Mr. Nikonov had also noted that his soviet wife “rode him incessantly,” leading to a “stormy relationship” between the pair.

Declassified JFK Files Bolster Conspiracy Theories, but Lack any Bombshell Revelations

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