The long-awaited release of tens of thousands of fileson the assassination of President John F. KennedyTuesday night sparked a desperate search for new clues in the shocking 62-year-old crime — but much of the trove turned out to confirm information long known.
Gerald Posner, the author of the best-selling 1993 book “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” told The Post in a phone interview on Wednesday he was “about 22,000 pages” into the newly released files — but had yet to see a bombshell piece of evidence.
“I haven’t seen anything yet that is real news, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something,” Posner said. “The biggest question I have as I go through is, ‘Why were these classified for so many years?’ It’s pretty preposterous.”
7
The documents do contain some tantalizing tidbits surrounding the tragic events of Nov. 22, 1963, with one file exploring a theory thata “small clique” in the CIA being involved— as well as an apparent KGB investigation todetermine whether assassinLee Harvey Oswald wasa secret Russian agent.
AJune 1967memodetails how a former US Army intelligence officer, Gary Underhill, fled Washington, DC, “very agitated” the day after Kennedy was shot — and claimed to a friend that a “small clique within the CIA” was behind the assassination.
“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,”reads the memo, quoting from a story in the comtemporary left-wing magazine Ramparts.
“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 document goes on.
“Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
Underhill,a Harvard graduate and former US Army captain who worked as a journalist and intelligence 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.”
7
“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,” theRampartspassage 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.”
Anti-climactically, the memo — created in response to a much-criticized 1967 probe of the assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison — described Underhill’s connection to that investigation as “tenuous” and did not address the claims reported by Ramparts at all.
In another document released Tuesday, a teletype US intelligence reportdated Nov. 20, 1991, said a KGB officialknown only asNikonov or “Slava”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,” where the Marine veteran had lived from 1959 to 1962.
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[Marina], who rode him incessantly.”
Months priorto the assassination, Oswaldhadvisited the Cuban Consulate in MexicoCity, where he made contact with the Soviet Embassy in pursuit of a travel visa.
Another one of thefiles 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.
7
Some of the documents also shed light on the intelligence community’s machinations in the 1960s, including details about secret CIA bases worldwide.
One documentdescribed 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.
“I don’t think it changes anybody’s mind,” Posner said of the trove of 80,000 documents made public. “People who don’t believe the official version, they’re just going to say the documents must’ve been destroyed or they’re somewhere else in the government.”
The initial investigation, led 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.
7
7
“[President Lyndon Johnson] went to his death thinking that [Cuban dictator Fidel] Castro was involved,” noted Posner, adding that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still unconvinced his father was murdered in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan — who confessed to the killing hours after his arrest.
The notion that JFK was killed by a broader conspiracy, according to Posner, was cemented by the killing of Oswald two days after the assassination by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who “looks like he’s out of central casting from the mafia.”
Ruby, for his part, maintained he killed Oswald on impulse and out of a twisted desire to avenge Kennedy — as well as spare former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy the trauma of returning to Dallas to testify at Oswald’s trial.
7
7
The conspiracy-minded have noted Ruby’s possible ties to mob figures through his clubs — with some suggesting he acted as a hitman to pay off a debt or silence Oswald about his own nefarious connections.
“I saw a poll in Gallup, where 27% [or] 29% thought it was a lone assassin,” said Posner,apparently referring to a 2023 survey by the venerable pollster. “I was actually surprised” it was that high.
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.
