Other Department of Defense documents from 1963 reveal Cold War anxieties, particularly U.S. concerns about Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Fulfilling a campaign promise, President Donald Trump has released thousands of previously classified government files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The National Archives posted the documents online shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday. It includes approximately 1,124 documents previously withheld or redacted.
One of the most revealing documents, dated November 20, 1991, contains intelligence reporting on Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union.
According to this teletype, American professor E.B. Smith reported conversations in Moscow with a KGB official named “Slava” Nikonov who had reviewed Soviet intelligence files on Oswald.
“Nikonov is now confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB,” the document states.
The Soviet files portray Oswald as someone so unpredictable that Nikonov “doubted that anyone could control Oswald,” though the KGB “watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”
Nikonov also commented that Oswald was a “poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR” and also mentioned Oswald’s “stormy relationship with his Soviet wife, who rode him incessantly.”
Some documents reference conspiracy theories suggesting Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 specifically to assassinate Kennedy.
However, historians note that nothing in the released files has altered the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone.
Other Department of Defense documents from 1963 reveal Cold War anxieties, particularly U.S. concerns about Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The records assess that Castro would not risk provoking a war with the United States or take actions that would “seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime.”
Instead, analysts believed “it appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America.”
Despite the significant release, more than two-thirds of the promised files remain unreleased, including more than 500 IRS records related to the case.
Additionally, the FBI recently discovered approximately 2,400 new records linked to Kennedy’s assassination that weren’t included in Tuesday’s release.
