Surveillance of Lee Harvey 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.
This week, Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the release of the remaining classified records about the shooting.
Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963, as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository building.
Gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, shot from a sixth-floor sniper’s perch, and was himself gunned down two days later.
The Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone, but conspiracy theories have run riot ever since.
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.
As he ordered their declassification with the stroke of a pen in the Oval Office, Trump said: ‘All will be revealed.’
No date has yet been set for the release, but here is what we could learn:
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.
Will this be the end of the JFK assassination saga?
Trump’s order may not cover all the records associated with the JFK assassination.
There are numerous other records not held by the National Archives.
According to JFK author Jefferson Morley the CIA still has ‘hundreds’ of other records, and others are with the Kennedy family.
And there are records of an interview with Jackie Kennedy in a private collection, in which she details her view on the lone gunman theory.
‘These documents need to be part of the executive order,’ Morley told DailyMail.com
‘They should be public now, there’s no legitimate national security information in here.’
Other secret documents include CIA ‘situation reports’ on Cuban exiles in Florida.
Trump’s order gives the Director of National Intelligence and Attorney General 15 days to come up with a plan for releasing the remaining documents at the National Archives.
However, there is no deadline for actually releasing them, which Morley said meant the ‘can could be kicked down the road.’
Experts said it was ‘possible’ the documents would reveal valuable new information.
‘There’s always the possibility that something would slip through that would be the tiny tip of a much larger iceberg that would be revealing,” said Larry Sabato, author of ‘The Kennedy Half-Century’.
‘That’s what researchers look for. Now, odds are you won’t find that but it is possible that it’s there.’
He added: “It just seemed so fantastical that one very disturbed individual (Oswald) could end up pulling off the crime of the century.
‘But the more I studied it, the more I realized that is a very possible, maybe even probable in my view, hypothesis.’
Trump’s move has sparked a civil war in the Kennedy family.
JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes the CIA was involved in the assassination.
He said: ‘I think it’s a great move because they need to have more transparency in our government and he (Trump) is keeping his promise to have the government tell the truth to the American people about everything.’
But JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, said: ‘Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back. There’s nothing heroic about it.’