A former Chicago mobster who claims to have killed President John F Kennedy says that President Donald Trump’s plan to release the files tied to the assassination will only yield more ‘lies’.
James Files, 83, claims he fired the bullet that killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963 from behind a fence on the grassy knoll overlooking Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
He says the other shot that struck Kennedy was fired by his boss, Charles ‘Chuckie’ Nicoletti, who was hiding out in the book depository – the same place Lee Harvey Oswald is believed to have been at the time of the shooting.
Files and his team of mafia hitmen, who he claims were recruited and trained by the CIA, packed up their weapons and fled the scene just seconds after the fatal shot was fired, he alleges.
The mobster first claimed to have killed JFK in the 1990s, while he was jailed for the attempted murder of two police officers. His account of Kennedy’s assassination has been widely dismissed over the years.
Now, after Trump signed an executive order authorizing the release of remaining classified JFK records, Files has once again doubled down on his claim that he ‘took the fatal shot’ that killed Kennedy.
He has also warned that despite Trump’s order, intelligence officials are unlikely to change their stance on the case and claims that ‘a hundred years from now they will still say that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy’.
‘The government tells a lie, they have to live the lie. I don’t think Trump will get any further than what’s already been disclosed,’ Files told The Times, alleging the ‘CIA has lied to the American public for 61 years’ and is not suddenly going to say ‘we’re sorry, we lied to you’.
Files was a Vietnam war veteran who was also part of a team that trained a militia for the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
After he was kicked out of the military, Files became the right hand man to Chicago mafia chief Nicoletti, who was a hitman for mob boss Sam Giancana.
Files has previously alleged there was a conspiracy between the mafia and the CIA to kill Kennedy.
He claimed the CIA turned against JFK after called for a stop of the secret Bay of Pigs operation and that the agency then called in mobsters to assassinate him in Dallas.
Files detailing his account of the fatal shooting, says he was stationed on the grassy knoll as Kennedy’s motorcade approached.
He ‘followed’ Kennedy through the ‘crosshairs’ of his gun and shot the president as his open-topped limousine turned onto Elm Street.
‘Before I lost my line of sight, I took the fatal shot. I hit Kennedy in the right temple, and blew the back side of his head out,’ he told the newspaper.
He and his team then cleared the area within seconds without anyone noticing, Files has claimed.
Files has also alleged that Oswald, who was charged, but then shot dead before he could be tried or convicted in the killing, never fired a single shot.
Oswald always denied killing Kennedy, but was shot dead by nightclub boss Jack Ruby before he could go on trial for murder.
The Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone, but conspiracy theories have run riot ever since.
Conspiracist who don’t believe Oswald was the killer, or that he was acting alone, have long claimed a second shooter was present on a grassy knoll that JFK and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy drove past as the shooting started.
While the most infamous conspiracy theory is that JFK’s assassination was an inside job by the CIA or FBI, others believe the Soviet Union may have played a role in the shooting.
A collection of over 5 million government records at the National Archives was required to be opened by 2017, unless there were any exemptions designated by the president.
But about 3,600 of those records still have redactions and haven’t yet been fully released.
Surveillance of Oswald, a file on a Cuban hitman, and the president’s plan to obliterate the CIA are among bombshell revelations that could be contained within secret JFK assassination files.
In late January, Trump ordered the declassification of the remaining files, saying: ‘All will be revealed.’
No date has yet been set for the release, but the White House was alerted on February 7 that the FBI discovered about 14,000 pages of documents as the agency set about reviewing the secret files in response to the order.
‘This is huge. It shows the FBI is taking this seriously,’ Jefferson Morley, an expert on the Kennedy murder told Axios.
‘The FBI is finally saying, ‘Let’s respond to the president’s order,’ instead of keeping the secrecy going.’
While experts claimed the discovery could let to a new era of transparency regarding the shooting – Trump insiders worried the development was a stall tactic.
One anonymous Trump aide was furious, calling the development ‘total Deep State bulls**t.’
Another said: ‘When POTUS hears about this stonewalling, he’s gonna hit the roof.’
The document bombshell was revealed to the Trump administration after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had filed its plan to disclose the records.
Millions of pages of JFK documents have already been released leaving only a few thousand kept in the archives.
The most recent releases included CIA cables and memos recording visits by Oswald to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City weeks before the assassination.
Experts doubt there are any major revelations lurking in the archives that would change the accepted version of events.
Trump promised during his reelection campaign that he would declassify remaining government records surrounding the assassination.
He made a similar promise in his first term but gave way to the CIA and FBI who argued that some documents should be kept from the public for fear they would reveal national security secrets.
Trump said he was persuaded by Mike Pompeo, his former CIA director, not to release them during his first term.
‘I was actually asked by Mike Pompeo, secretary of State, not to, and I felt he knew something that maybe, you know , when he asked you not to, you sort of say ‘why?’ and he felt that it was not a good time to release them,’ Trump said.
The Kennedy family has been wrought with division over trump’s order to release the final classified files.
Trump’s health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr said he approves of the decision to declassify the files relating to the infamous 1963 murder of his uncle.
RFK Jr has previously repeated conspiracy theories that the CIA was involved in his uncle’s assassination
‘I think it’s a great move because they need to have more transparency in our government and he’s keeping his promise to have the government tell the truth to the American people about everything,’ RFK Jr said after Trump signed the order.
His approval of the files’ release is starkly in contrast with comments made by JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, who issued a harsh rebuke to the order.
‘The truth is a lot sadder than the myth – a tragedy that didn’t need to happen,’ Schlossberg previously said. ‘Not part of an inevitable grand scheme. Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back. There’s nothing heroic about it.’
In the past, other members of the Kennedy family have supported the release of the files, including former Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy.
‘I think for the good of the country, everything has to be put out there so there’s greater understanding of our history,’ Patrick Kennedy said in 2021, as reported by Politico.
In the early 1990s, the federal government mandated that all assassination-related documents be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration.
Millions of pages of JFK documents have already been released leaving only a few thousand kept in the archives.
The most recent releases included CIA cables and memos recording visits by Oswald to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City weeks before the assassination.
Other revelations that could be included in documents still to be release include:
The Cuban assassin
One of the biggest redacted gaps in the National Archives records is in an FBI file assembled on Herminio Diaz, a Cuban assassin who is believed to have killed up 20 people and targeted political figures.
The file on Diaz starts in 1957 when he was involved in a plot to assassinate the president of Costa Rica.
It runs to 30 pages but more than a dozen pages remain redacted.
Diaz was killed in 1966 while attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro.
He had entered the United States in the summer of 1963, shortly before the JFK assassination, and it is known the CIA had contact with him.
He was given political asylum and lived in Florida.
Also already known is that Tony Cuesta, another man involved in the 1966 Castro plot with Diaz, survived after attempting to commit suicide with a hand grenade.
Cuesta was then befriended by a fellow inmate in prison, Reinaldo Martinez Gomez.
Decades later, Gomez went public, saying that Cuesta told him Diaz confessed to being involved in the JFK assassination.
Gomez said he wanted to ‘get (it) off his chest’ before he himself died.
Diaz’s known political hits also involved murdering a senior security official inside the Cuban consulate in Mexico in 1948.
The question remains – what is in over a dozen pages of redactions in his FBI file?
The secret memo on the CIA
Five months before the JFK assassination Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s speechwriter and adviser, wrote a secret five-page memo addressed: MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDIENT.
The memo was titled: ‘CIA Reorganization’.
It was written shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and around the time Kennedy declared is intention to ‘splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.’
While some of the five-page memo has been released, one-and-a-half pages remain redacted.
‘The page is about why JFK was alienated from the CIA, that’s very important,’ Jefferson Morley, a renowned JFK assassination expert who has written three books on the CIA, told DailyMail.com.
The blanked-out section comes just before a discussion of the CIA and ‘paramilitary warfare.’
In the unredacted parts of the memo Schlesinger suggests to President Kennedy that he break up the CIA.
The memo was written shortly after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Schlesinger wrote: ‘An agency dedicated to clandestine activity can afford damn few visible errors.’
The CIA had ‘about used up its quota’ and ‘its margin for future error is practically non-existent.’
Schlesinger wrote: ‘One more CIA debacle will shake faith considerably in U.S. policy, at home as well as abroad.’
The CIA had too much autonomy and was ‘corrupting the principles and practices of our society,’ the memo went on.
He said its operations should have to receive a green light from the State Department. effectively removing the CIA’s independence.
The memo makes clear that the CIA was on the chopping block under President Kennedy and provides fuel for those who claim the agency was involved in the assassination.
In addition to preserving its own existence and power, elements of the CIA were said to object to what they saw as Kennedy’s weakness against communism.
When the redacted part is released it could add to the theory that the CIA was either involved, or turned a blind eye to, a plot to kill the president.
What was Oswald doing in Mexico before the assassination?
It is known JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Mexico just weeks before the shooting to get visas for t he Soviet Union and Cuba.
However. of all the JFK files at the National Archives, the document with the most remaining redactions concerns that trip.
The CIA had Oswald under surveillance during the six-day visit.
It was bugging the Soviet and Cuban embassies and recorded his interactions with officials there.
Win Scott, the CIA’s Mexico City station chief later wrote that ‘every piece of information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald was reported immediately after it was received’ to the CIA headquarters.
It included ‘the entire conversation Oswald had from the Cuban Consulate with the Soviet Embassy.’
A document of more than 70 pages detailing CIA operations in Mexico is included in the JFK files released so far.
But swathes of it are redacted with numerous ‘Secret’ markings.
Those seeking the full truth of what Oswald did in Mexico, and who he may have met there, are eagerly awaiting release of the full document.
Other conspiracy theories about JFK’s killing
A web of alternative theories that still continue to swirl 60 years after the killing.
Some theorists believe Cuban President Fidel Castro may have been involved in the assassination, citing how the US failed to overthrow him during the Bay of Pigs operation.
President Johnson, as cited in a 1976 New York Times report, suggested that Cuba may have been responsible for the shooting but Castro dismissed the theory as ‘absolute insanity’, according to NBC News.
Some theorists believe that the Mafia may have organized the shooting after JFK tasked his brother then-US Attorney Robert F. Kennedy with tackling organized crime.
New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello, who was deported to Guatemala during the Kennedy era, was suggested as a potential mafia figure involved in the shooting. He also reportedly made threats against JFK.
This theory was heightened by the fact that Oswald had travelled to New Orleans prior to JFK’s assassination.
Others have tried to link the Ku Klux Klan to the shooting, noting how Kennedy supported the civil rights movement, but that support for this theory has declined over the years.
According to a 2023 Gallup survey, only 1 per cent of Americans believed the KKK was involved in the assassination.