Four unanswered questions the new JFK files could shed light on
The release of thousands of top secret government files today could be the moment that finally lays to rest many of the conspiracy theories that have swirled around President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
For five decades the shooting has spawned myriad myths and theories about what happened on that infamous day in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.
Some are clearly farfetched, such as the idea Mr Kennedy was murdered by a poisoned dart from a bystander seen holding an umbrella or the ‘Year Zero’ theory that posits the assassination was part of a centuries-old plot that had seen all US presidents elected in a zero year die in office.
Yet, there are legitimate questions surrounding the shooting that have never been fully answered.
The most prominent include what exactly the CIA and FBI knew about the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, what he was doing in New Mexico weeks before the shooting and what information was classified after the assassination.
The new documents
More than 3,000 classified files related to the US president’s murder are due to be released today, and will be pored over by historians for clues about his death.
The documents will be published after President Donald Trump announced at the weekend he would not block their release and they are expected to include testimony from the then heads of the CIA and FBI.
They are also said to contain statements from President Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, and the attorney of a mafia boss central to the mystery.
Official version of events
The official version of events is that as President Kennedy’s open-topped Lincoln Continental limousine reached Dealey Plaza a former US Marine and known Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, was waiting on the sixth floor of the overlooking Texas School Book Depository with a Carcano Model 91/38 infantry rifle.
Oswald, whose shooting skills had been graded as ‘sharpshooter’ while in the military, fired three shots at the motorcade at around 12.30pm. The first bullet deflected off an oak tree before ricocheting off the pavement on the other side of the square, slightly injuring bystander James Tague.
The second struck the President in the neck wounding him, but not fatally, before hitting Texas Governor John Connally in the back and lodging in his left thigh.
The third hit Mr Kennedy in the head causing catastrophic injuries. The President was rushed to the nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital but pronounced dead at 1pm.
Oswald was arrested shortly afterwards, but was never fully questioned over the shooting as he was gunned down by nightclub operator Jack Ruby in Dallas Police Headquarters the day after the assassination.
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In the intervening decades there have been a number of official inquiries into the assassination which have corroborated the official timeline of events and determined that both Oswald and Ruby acted alone.
Was there a second shooter?
This is one of the main bodies of conspiracy around the assassination and spawned the infamous “grassy knoll” hypothesis. Proponents argue that Oswald could not have inflicted the damage he did on the President from the angle he was shooting, so there must have been a second gunman who delivered fatal shot.
This set of theories really took off when the Zapruder footage emerged in 1976, which captured President Kennedy’s final moment from just feet away.
Conspiracists posit that as the footage shows the President’s head jerking backwards with the impact of the third shot, the fatal bullet must have come from in front of him - rather than the elevated position behind the motorcade from which Oswald was firing.
Ideas as to who this supposed second shooter could have been range from an sniper in a nearby storm drain, to members of the President’s secret service accidentally shooting him as they returned fire in the ensuing melee.
This strain of speculation was lent credence when a congressional select committee, set up in part due to the outcry caused by the footage, concluded there was “probably” a conspiracy involving a second gunman on the “grassy knoll” in the central square.
This theory has since been discredited by analysis of the audio from the assassination and modern visual recreations, but the conspiracies still persist.
The new evidence could finally debunk this genre of the JFK mythology if classified testimony from those in the motorcade at the time sheds light what happened in the frantic moments after the first shots rang out.
What did the CIA and FBI know about Oswald?
Lee Harvey Oswald was not an unknown quantity to the US authorities when he pulled the trigger on that sunny afternoon in Dallas.
The 24-year-old had served four years in the US Marines before being honourably discharged in 1959. It was later changed to a dishonorable discharge, outraging Oswald, who made threats late in 1963 when he learned the military had rejected his appeal of its decision.
The CIA also had cause to monitor Oswald due to his openly Marxist views (one of his nicknames in the Marines was Oswaldskovich due to his socialist sympathies) and his links with hostile Communist countries.
In the same year that he left the Marines, Oswald travelled to the Soviet Union and tried to renounce his US citizenship in a bid to settle in Russia. He ultimately failed to become a Soviet citizen and returned to the US in 1962 with his Russian wife Marina Prusakova and newborn daughter, June.
As such, Oswald was being monitored by the FBI and CIA in the lead-up to the assassination, including during a week he spent in Mexico City, where he had meetings at the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy.
The official explanation for these meetings is that Oswald was again attempting to obtain Soviet citizenship along with a visa to visit Cuba on a return journey to Russia.
However, the full extent of what the CIA and FBI knew about Oswald and what, if any, contact agents had with him has never been established.
Many of the conspiracy theories portray Oswald as a fall guy and patsy of various other sinister forces at play. The classified files should give a clearer picture of the US security agencies’ intelligence on and relationship with Oswald.
What was Oswald doing in Mexico City weeks before the assassination?
Oswald’s visit to Mexico City is another element of the JFK story that has been fertile for conspiracies, principally for those suggesting either the Soviets or Cubans had a hand in the assassination.
Intelligence documents released in 1999 show that after Oswald failed to obtain the visas, someone impersonated Oswald in phone calls made to the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate.
They also linked Oswald to a known KGB assassin called Valery Kostikov, whom the CIA and FBI had been following for over a year.
News of these developments was learned hours after the president’s death and dominated discussions at the highest levels of the US government in the aftermath of the assassination.
However it is still unclear exactly what happened in Oswald’s meetings in Mexico City and what US agencies knew. The testimonies of the heads of the FBI and CIA should unearth more detail about this crucial period in the run-up to the fatal shots being fired.
Was there a government cover-up?
The most common iteration of conspiracy around JFK is that it was somehow an inside job. Suspects range from rogue CIA operatives angry at President Kennedy’s handling of the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, to it being masterminded by his successor, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. The new files are very unlikely to do anything but challenge these theories.
Yet they should unearth more information about how the US government handled the aftermath of the assassination with a key area of interest to historians being the intelligence around Oswald’s links with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
America had been on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union the year before over the Cuban Missile Crisis and there were fears that any evidence linking the communist countries to President Kennedy’s death could provoke World War Three.
The new cache of classified document should clarify what was known about Oswald's links to foreign nations at the highest levels of government, and what was withheld from the public.
