Lee Harvey Oswald was a 'poor shot' KGB claimed: Bombshell revelations from CIA's newly released JFK files
Unredacted documents related to the 1963 assassination of former president John F Kennedy have been released following an order by US President Donald Trump shortly after he took office.
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Who killed JFK has been the subject of subject of debate and conspiracy theories ever since his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Mr Kennedy was shot while part of a motorcade, with Marine veteran Lee Harvey Oswald being arrested and held in Dallas Police Headquarters – where he was fatally shot two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
More than 1,100 files consisting of in excess of 31,000 pages were posted on the US National Archives and Records Administration's website in the evening.
The vast majority of the National Archives' collection of more than million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artefacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century, said he had a team that started going through the documents but it may be some time before their full significance becomes clear.
"We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that," he said.
Here are the key early findings in the documents::
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Oswald was not a KGB agent
Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to Texas.
The newly released files include a memo from the CIA's St Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that, earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a US professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB.
The memo said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB”.
The KGB thought Oswald was a poor shot
The memo said that, as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted “that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR”.
It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a “poor shot” when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.
Oswald had visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies
Oswald visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.
One CIA memo describes how Oswald phoned the Soviet Embassy while in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban Embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would permit him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa.
On October 3, more than a month before the assassination, he drove back into the United States through a crossing point at the Texas border.
Another memo, dated the day after Kennedy's assassination, says that according to an intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Oswald communicated with a KGB officer while at the Soviet Embassy that September. The releases have also contributed to the understanding of that time period during the Cold War, researchers said.
Who was John Garrett Underhill Jnr?
A memo released by a left-wing magazine spotlights John Garrett Underhill Jr., a former Army Captain and CIA agent.
The passage, released by Ramparts in July 1967, reads: “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. 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. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
Were the CIA warned?
The documents includes a 1978 letter sent by a man named Sergyj Czornonoh to the British Embassy.
In it, he says that he was detained in London in July 1963 and interviewed by authorities, where he claims to have told them of a plot by Oswald to kill the US president.
He claims that American Vice Consul Tom Blackshear was alerted to Oswald’s plans, who was trying to defect to the Soviet Union.
Most of the documents are not new
Many people on social media have commented that many documents have already been released.
In 2023, former President Joe Biden ordered the release of thousands of files on the assassination.