Latest batch of JFK assassination documents show Kennedy’s distrust of the CIA

The newly released tranche of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy includes a memo that for decades helped fuel speculation that the CIA was somehow involved in the killing of the president.

Known as the Schlesinger Memo, the 15-page document, dated June 10, 1961, was written by JFK’s aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It warned Kennedy that the CIA was encroaching on his ability to direct foreign policy.

The memo’s existence was not a secret, and it was made public earlier, but with large chunks of text blacked out for security reasons.

The entire unredacted memo was one of the thousands of now-declassified documents that the National Archives and Records Administration released Tuesday on orders from President Donald Trump. As of Wednesday afternoon, about 69,000 of the 80,000 documents that Trump promised to release have been posted online.

And if anybody was expecting to find proof in the memo that the CIA conspired with JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to kill Kennedy, they will not find it.

The information the government had blacked out had to do with CIA staffing, including the specific number of CIA operatives stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and how they “sought to monopolize contact with certain French political personalities,” as well as the number of CIA sources in countries like Austria and Chile.

Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who runs the “JFK Facts” blog and has been pressing the government for decades to release the records, was undeterred.

“There’s a sensational story here that people need to know,” Morley said in an MSNBC interview. “This is not a nothing-burger, as people will tell you. There is an amazingly interesting and pregnant story in these JFK files.”

The memo and other documents are more evidence that Kennedy deeply mistrusted the CIA, which had Oswald under surveillance long before Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, Morley said.

“We got a memo yesterday about Kennedy’s plans to reorganize the CIA, and a lot of that memo had been redacted before,” Morley said. “We now understand why Kennedy mistrusted the CIA and a mistrust, to be sure, that was returned by CIA officers who did not like his liberal policies.”

Under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, all the documents related to the assassination were supposed to have been released by 2017, when Trump was president the first time.

Trump released some documents then, but he also gave the intelligence agencies more time to assess the remaining files.

It was not until December 2022 that President Joe Biden released more than 13,000 records after the Mary Ferrell Foundation, the country’s largest nonprofit repository of JFK assassination records, sued the administration to make all of them public.

Morley, who is affiliated with the foundation, said that in all the documents “we see a new window into the CIA’s pre-assassination surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The late James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding members of the CIA, had put Oswald under surveillance starting in November 1959 and was “monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts,” Morley said.

Angleton had a 180-page file “on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas” in November 1963, Morley said, citing government documents that had been released earlier.

“So what this story raises is the question: Was the CIA incredibly, atrociously, incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?” Morley said. “We don’t have the answer to that question because there’s still some relevant records to come out. For example, one file of another CIA officer who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald is still kept secret. This is a great first start.”