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Shielded Kennedy Files Hid Spies, Not Conspiracies
Newly unredacted documents reveal details about Cold War spycraft, not a second gunman on grassy knolls. The revelations have “nothing to do with who killed Kennedy,” one expert said.
Shielded Kennedy Files Hid Spies, Not Conspiracies
Newly unredacted documents reveal details about Cold War spycraft, not a second gunman on grassy knolls. The revelations have “nothing to do with who killed Kennedy,” one expert said.
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For years, as the government has declassified and published documents related — some very tenuously — to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assumption expressed by conspiracy theorists and some historians was that anything still being withheld could be big.
That assumption led some of President Trump’s allies, including Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the nation’s top health official, to push him to release the final tranche of files from the Kennedy archives, believing they might reveal damning evidence: namely, that Kennedy was not assassinated by a lone gunman in Dallas.
But with the release of nearly 64,000 pages by the National Archives over the past 24 hours, including some that previously included redactions, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of U.S. intelligence operations.
… In another striking example, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a top White House aide, reported to Kennedy on the day of his inauguration in 1961 that “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were” intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover — spies, in other words. …”