On Trump orders, thousands of JFK assassination documents newly public

WASHINGTON: Thousands of pages of digital documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy are now available for historians, conspiracy theorists and the merely curious, following orders from US President Trump.

An initial tranche of electronic copies of papers flooded into the National Archives website on Tuesday evening after justice department lawyers spent hours scouring them. As of 10.30pm, the National Archives had published 2,182 PDFs totaling 63,400 pages. Trump had said a day earlier that the release would include around 80,000 pages. The archives did not immediately respond on Wednesday to a request for comment on whether more documents would soon be released. The archives' Kennedy assassination collection has more than six million pages of records, the vast majority of which had been made public before Trump's order.

The digital documents released on Tuesday offer a window into the climate of fear surrounding US relations with the Soviet Union shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Experts doubt the new release will change what is known about the killing of JFK, as Kennedy is known, in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963. The release is nonetheless likely to intrigue people.

Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard history professor whose books include "JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century 1917-56," said in an email the new papers may help fill in the picture, but added, "...I don't expect dramatic new revelations that alters in some fundamental way our grasp of the event."

One document with the heading "secret" was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men. Oswald was married to a Soviet woman at the time of the shooting.

Department of defence documents from 1963 covered the Cold War of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro's support of communists in other countries. The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the US or escalate to the point "that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime." One document released from Jan 1962 reveals details of a top secret project called "Operation Mongoose," or simply "the Cuban Project," which was a CIA-led campaign of covert operations and sabotage against Cuba, authorised by Kennedy in 1961, aimed at removing the Castro regime.

Kennedy's murder has been attributed to a sole gunman, Oswald. But polls show many Americans still believe his death was a result of a conspiracy.

Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a nephew of JFK, has said he believes the CIA was involved in his uncle's death, an allegation the agency has described as baseless. Kennedy Jr declined comment when contacted on Tuesday.