President Donald Trump-led United States administration on Wednesday released tens of thousands of classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F Kennedy.
The 80,000 pages of previously classified records being published without redactions, according to a statement from the office of Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence(DNI).
The files can be downloaded from the US National Archives website.
Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Here are some of the top revelations in the files about the assassination of the former president of United States:
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
Did Harvey Oswald act alone?
A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But conspiracy theories, including ones arguing involvement from the CIA, the mafia and the possibility of a second shooter, have lingered.
Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
However, ballistic reports and witness testimonies in the newly-released 2025 files say that does not add up. These documents suggest a shot may have come from the grassy knoll—an elevated area ahead of Kennedy’s motorcade—contradicting the lone-gunman story.
KGB watched him closely
Files in the new release included 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, news agency AP reported, 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”
One suppressed statement from a Dallas bystander was forced to remain silent by government agents.
The memo added 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.
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