Newly declassified documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination reveal that the CIA was monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks leading up to JFK’s death. The files confirm that the agency wiretapped Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities in Mexico City, where Oswald traveled multiple times before the assassination.
Journalist Steven Portnoy reported that the documents provide further details on CIA operations in Mexico City, exposing previously classified surveillance activities. “These docs reveal how the CIA tapped phones of the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities, information that had been classified until now,” he stated.
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Oswald, who had lived in the USSR from 1959 to 1962, allegedly visited the embassies in Mexico City to obtain a visa for returning to the Soviet Union.
Additionally, the documents reveal that a top JFK advisor, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., warned the president about the CIA’s growing influence over foreign policy. In a memo, Schlesinger wrote that “CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of state” affected Kennedy’s ability to govern independently. He described the agency as a “state within a state.”
A newly released memo also confirmed that CIA source Samuel Cummings owned the International Armament Corp, a weapons dealer that supplied the sporting goods store where Oswald allegedly purchased the rifle used in the assassination. Cummings was one of the world’s largest private arms dealers and had supplied weapons to Fidel Castro.
In response to the declassification, the CIA issued a statement denying involvement in Kennedy’s assassination, calling the allegations “absolutely false.”
The document release is part of an executive order signed by President Trump in January, mandating the full declassification of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. assassination files. Over 60,000 pages and more than 2,000 files were published Tuesday night, with Trump stating that “80,000 pages” in total will be made public.
