The recent release of thousands of pages related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has given researchers a deeper look into the covert operations and mindset of the CIA during the Cold War. The National Archives released documents in several waves, beginning with roughly 32,000 pages on March 18th, followed by another 31,400 pages later that same evening. A third batch of 13,700 pages was released on March 20th, bringing the total to more than 76,000 pages now available for public review.
The release follows an executive order signed by President Donald Trump. While the documents do not provide a single comprehensive narrative of the assassination, they offer significant context about the era. Dr. Larry Sabato, founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has been analyzing the files and shared his findings in a recent interview.
Sabato noted that the documents reveal a world defined by spy-versus-spy tactics, not just between the United States and the Soviet Union, but also among Western allies. For example, the U.S. suspected that the Soviets had placed a spy inside French intelligence. Instead of working through French officials, the CIA inserted its own agent into the French intelligence agency to identify the Soviet mole. In a separate incident, the CIA broke into the French embassy.
One figure involved in that operation was James McCord, a CIA officer who was later among the first people convicted in the Watergate burglary. McCord had been honored within the CIA for developing technology designed to detect hidden microphones.
The documents also detail a plot to poison a shipment of Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The plan involved placing an agent on board a ship that had stopped in Puerto Rico. The agent was instructed to contaminate the sugar with a substance that was supposed to cause only a terrible aftertaste, making the Soviets less likely to purchase Cuban sugar. Sabato expressed skepticism about the safety of the substance, noting that it posed an incredible risk and could have given the Soviets a powerful propaganda tool if the plot had been exposed.
Sabato also discussed the CIA’s extensive mail tampering program, which was far larger than previously known. The agency opened and examined mail coming from the Soviet Union and China, and in some cases manufactured fake letters to incriminate individuals. This involved reproducing signatures, creating stationery that mimicked official documents, and even producing counterfeit postage stamps. The operation required hundreds of CIA employees and was designed to go undetected by the recipients.
Another revelation involved the CIA’s use of honey traps. The agency reportedly used a former FBI agent to procure women for foreign dignitaries, including heads of state and cabinet officers. The goal was to gather compromising material on allies as well as adversaries. Sabato noted that the operation sometimes misfired, such as when an Arab dignitary was matched with a Jewish starlet. In other cases, the relationships became long-term.
Regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, Sabato said he has found no direct evidence that Oswald had help, but he acknowledged indirect suspicion surrounding the CIA. He pointed to the agency’s decades-long resistance to sharing the full truth about its knowledge of Oswald, including its monitoring of his mail and its misleading of congressional investigators. Sabato noted that the CIA provided a liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations who was actually deeply involved in efforts to blame Oswald for the assassination from the very beginning.
Sabato also raised questions about the CIA’s failure to act on clues that Oswald was dangerous. Oswald had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker in the spring of 1963 using the same rifle later used to kill President Kennedy. Despite the existence of evidence and people in Dallas who suspected Oswald, he was never picked up. Sabato said this could have been negligence or something more deliberate.
The documents also provide more detail on the CIA’s involvement in assassinations of foreign leaders. In one case, the agency supplied weapons to dissidents in the Dominican Republic, which were used to kill Rafael Trujillo. Sabato described the CIA as running what amounted to an assassination operation during that period.
Sabato also expressed concern about what the documents reveal about the secrecy of government actions. He noted that many of the operations detailed in the files were done in the name of the American public and with taxpayer money, but remained hidden for decades. He suggested that similar activities may be taking place today, unknown to the public, and may not come to light for another 50 or 100 years.
Looking ahead, Sabato said he hopes future releases will provide more details about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in late September and early October 1963, where he visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Tapes of Oswald’s calls to those embassies have been lost, and Sabato noted that the FBI also misplaced Oswald’s fingerprints for a long period. He added that more than 10,000 pages were recently discovered by the FBI that had not been turned over to the assassination records review board in the 1990s.
The full analysis of the documents is still ongoing, but the release has already provided a clearer picture of the lengths to which U.S. intelligence agencies went during the Cold War.