The killer of John F. Kennedy was “too crazy” to work with, the KGB decided, before cutting ties with him a year before the assassination, newly -declassified documents show.
The National Archives and Records Administration made public some 13,173 documents related to the 1963 assassination on Thursday, which many longtime JFK-watchers hoped would shed more light on what the US government knew about Lee Harvey Oswald.
A 1990 document details testimony from an ex-KGB officer who said Oswald was briefly recruited by the intelligence network after defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959, but he was considered “a bit crazy and unpredictable”.
The officer claimed the KGB had no further contact with Oswald after he returned home in 1962 suffering from depression and homesickness, and the KGB “never tasked him to kill President Kennedy”.
Oswald lived in the USSR for a short time but returned to the US in 1962. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in his motorcade through Dallas, Texas, on Nov 22, 1963, at the age of 46.
An investigation led by the then-Chief Justice concluded that Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist, acted alone. Thousands of books, articles, TV shows and films have, however, explored the idea that Kennedy’s assassination was the result of an -elaborate conspiracy.
None produced conclusive proof that Oswald, shot dead by club owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters two days after killing Kennedy, worked with anyone else. Another document, from 1991, cites a different KGB source as saying that Oswald was “at no time an agent -controlled by the KGB” although they “watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR”.
Long-time JFK academics and theorists had hoped the latest release would reveal more information about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, where he met the KGB officer in -October 1963.
One document revealed the president of Mexico helped the US place a wiretap on the Soviet embassy without the knowledge of other officials in the Mexican government.
This nugget of information was hidden by redactions in a previously released version of the file.
There are also documents relating to a visit by Oswald to Finland in 1959 before his defection to Moscow.
“There’s not going to be anything that pushes the needle one way or the other,” Mark Zaid, a lawyer who works on securing access to the Kennedy archive, told The New York Times.
“For someone who has just an interest in the Kennedy assassination, I dare say they will not find anything that will make them gasp.”
Congress in 1992 ordered all remaining sealed files pertaining to the investigation should be fully opened to the public through the National Archives in 25 years, by October 2017, except for those the president authorised for further withholding. The Trump administration released thousands of pages but withheld others on the basis of national security.
In October 2021, President Joe Biden released about 1,500 documents but kept the others sealed.
The Archives said 97 per cent of the roughly five million pages in its collection related to the assassination have now been released. But some experts believe the government continues to redact or withhold important information.
The Daily Telegraph in London
