(WASHINGTON) — Intelligence dispatches, memoranda, and cables between U.S. government agencies in the years leading up to and after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination nearly 60 years ago have been released by the National Archives.
Fifty-eight years ago in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, but since Oswald himself was killed shortly after the assassination, questions lingered about whether anyone else was involved, feeding conspiracy theories.
President Joe Biden ordered the release of the documents in October but it’s being done in stages, with thousands remaining secret amid intelligence agency concerns about what they could reveal.
While there appeared to be no explosive revelations, among the documents released on Wednesday were CIA memos discussing Lee Harvey Oswald’s previously disclosed trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City months before President Kennedy was killed.
One of those CIA memos — written the day after the assassination — says Oswald communicated with a KGB officer while at the Soviet embassy that September.
“According to an intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Lee Oswald was in the Soviet Embassy there on 23 September and spoke with Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich,” the document said.
“Oswald called the Soviet Embassy in 1 October, identifying himself by name and speaking broken Russian, stating the above and asking the guard who answered the phone whether there was ‘anything concerning the telegram to Washington,'” read the memo from a high-ranking CIA official.
Oswald — who was married to a Russian woman — was trying to get visas to move to the Soviet Union, according to the documents.
Another newly released document shows a tip from a U.S. official in Australia two days after the assassination — an anonymous call to the embassy from a man claiming to be a chauffeur for Soviet diplomats who said the Soviets had “probably” financed the assassination.
That, U.S. officials asserted, was a crank call.
Biden has ordered the review of the remaining 14,000 documents and the National Archives is required to release those by December 2022 — unless intelligence agencies raise issues.
The National Archives says the vast majority of documents related to the assassination have been made publicly available.
ABC News’ Jack Date, Quinn Owen and Lucien Bruggeman contributed to this report.
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