What the Just Released JFK Files Reveal About Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA

A trove of thousands of previously unreleased documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy offers new insights into the extent of the CIA surveillance over his eventual assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the months leading up to his murder in Dallas.

In records released by the National Archives Thursday afternoon, the American public was able to see not only how the intelligence community tracked Oswald, but also how a country navigated the throes of the Cold War.

Newly released documents range from presidential communiques with foreign leaders to payroll information for Cuban revolutionaries backed by the CIA and correspondence ordering the payment of bribes.

But to researchers' disappointment, the documents reveal little more than was previously known about Oswald's time in Mexico City prior to the assassination, where he made contact with officials from the Cuban and Soviet embassies.

"I think this is sort of half a loaf," Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Association and a leading expert on the Kennedy assassination, told reporters several hours after the release.

"The amount of documents released may look impressive but, spot-checking again, and this is very preliminary, there's a lot of documents that are basically released with similar redactions to what they were before. Sometimes, just slightly less," Bradford said.

In a summary sheet following Kennedy's assassination in 1963, a CIA official describes weeks of phone calls they and the Mexican government—then a close ally of the Soviet Union—intercepted that Oswald made during his time in Mexico City to both the Cuban and Soviet embassies seeking visas in an apparent effort to leave the country.

One call Oswald made to the Soviet Embassy aroused suspicion when he asked if there was "anything new" with the individual on the other end of the line—information that was forwarded to officials in Washington, D.C.

However, it did not appear the government took action on it, which agency officials noted in a report published nearly one month after Kennedy's death.

"At this writing (December 13, 1963) we do not know what action the FBI and other agencies have taken based on our report," the memo read.

When it was revealed Oswald was the prime suspect, the response within the CIA was explosive.

"When word of the shooting of President Kennedy reached the offices of our operating divisions and staffs on the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1963, transistor radios were turned everywhere to follow the tragedy. When the name of Lee OSWALD was heard, the effect was electric," the memo read.

"A phone message from the FBI came at about the same time, naming OSWALD as the possible assassin and asking for traces," the memo added.

The documents also reveal longstanding surveillance by CIA officials into Oswald's previous travels abroad to countries like Finland, detailing the agency's knowledge of Oswald to well before his assassination of the president—details that illustrate the intimate advanced knowledge the agency had in the lead-up to Kennedy's death in Dallas.

However, the initial result of the more than 13,000 pages of documents, researchers said, was "not encouraging," noting that many of the documents they had requested either contained many of the redactions they did previously, or were not included in the Thursday release.

The CIA document dump notably included just one document on George Joannides—the CIA's liaison to a 1970s-era commission investigating the assassination who was later revealed to have directed and financed a group of Cuban revolutionaries whose officers had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months prior to Kennedy's assassination.

Some believed those documents could have established a key link to whether Oswald had been employed by the CIA prior to the assassination, a claim the CIA denies to this day.

The CIA "never engaged Oswald," CIA officials told Newsy's Sasha Ingber Thursday.

Meanwhile, the available narrative released Thursday—that Oswald was a known entity—was already a well-known one, and contradicted the official narrative shared by CIA officials in the crafting of the Warren Report.

Other facets of the release left researchers wanting.

The document release also included a redacted—and previously released—version of a 1961 memo in which White House special assistant Arthur Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy about "reorganizing" the CIA after its failures at Bay of Pigs.

Their unwillingness to remove redactions in key documents, researchers say, only goes to prove the agency was not actually committed to transparency.

Hours before the release, President Joe Biden announced he would once again be delaying the release of numerous documents related to the case at the request of both the FBI and CIA, a sign that—five years after Congress passed legislation demanding their release—the intelligence community was not yet willing to reveal the full truth.

"Bear in mind that this does not have any information about secret agents in it, and it was written two years before the assassination," the Mary Ferrell Foundation's Jefferson Morley, a leading expert of the Kennedy assassination, told reporters in a Thursday press conference.

"We had hoped that this material would be released," he added. "We see this document today and it has a little bit of material unredacted, but it still remains largely redacted. And that's not a very good sign. If the CIA can't bring itself to release a document written two years before the assassination, a memo that is obviously critical of the CIA, you have to question their good faith in whether they're complying with the law."

Meanwhile, Morley and the Mary Ferrell Foundation's attorney, Larry Schnapf, said they plan to lobby Congress for the release of new documents and a potential oversight committee to look into whether federal intelligence agencies were complying with the law.

The deadline for the next release is June 30.