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National Archives Releases Thousands Of Documents Related To JFK’s Assassination
The National Archives released over 3,800 documents Monday related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The Archives stated in a press release that 441 of the documents had not been made public before while 3,369 had been released with portions of the documents redacted.
The documents originated with the FBI and CIA and were identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as related to the investigation into JFKs ***.
Among the materials are transcripts and 17 recordings with Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964, shortly after Kennedys assassination.
Nosenko claimed he was in charge of the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, who the Warren Commission concluded was the lone gunman who shot and killed the president.
Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collections Act of 1992, which required the National Archives to preserve all the documents related to the assassination, following the release of the movie JFK the previous year.
The Oliver Stone film directly contradicted the conclusions of the Warren Commission, presenting the case that Oswald could not have been the lone gunman and that Kennedys death was the result of a conspiracy.
Perhaps the most compelling scene in the movie was when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, showed the Zapruder film,.
contending the bullet that killed Kennedy was a frontal shot and therefore could not have been fired by Oswald.
Former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the brother of the president, apparently had his doubts about the conclusions of the Warren Commission.
RFKs son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said his father thought the commission report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”.
He added that his father suspected the president had been killed as a result of a conspiracy involving Cuba, the mafia or perhaps rogue agents in the CIA.
The JFK Records Act requires all documents related to the Kennedy assassination to be released by October 26 of this year (the 25th anniversary of the passage of the law), unless the president deems specific documents should not be released for national security reasons.
More batches are due to be made public this fall.
Since 1992, over five million pages of records related to the assassination have been released.