By Todd J. Gillman and Charles Scudder
The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Documents released Friday from the dwindling trove of sealed John F. Kennedy assassination files show the FBI keeping close watch on civil rights and anti-war movements and their leaders in the 1960s.
The National Archives released 676 records Friday, mostly from the CIA’s files. Many contain redactions.
Among the material related to the JFK investigation: transcripts of intercepted phone calls made by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City during his trip there a few weeks before the killing. The CIA had been watching Oswald, a sharpshooter and a rare U.S. defector to the Soviet Union, and some scholars expect the remaining files will show the CIA and FBI botched opportunities to prevent the tragedy.
Friday’s release came eight days after President Donald Trump agreed to last-minute requests from the CIA and other agencies to keep some material under seal, at least temporarily, citing national security concerns.
A 1992 law set Oct. 26 as the deadline to unseal all remaining files regarding the murder of Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, or collected during the many inquiries that followed, unless the president deemed such material damaging to law enforcement, diplomacy or intelligence gathering.
Trump had vowed a sweeping release before the deadline. So his decision to withhold thousands of long-sealed documents disappointed researchers. Trump’s own impatience seemed clear, too.
He responded to the public criticism by ordering immediate reviews of all files still kept classified, directing agencies to withhold as little as possible. He promised that all material eligible for release would be unsealed within six months, and as soon as possible.
The trove unsealed Friday includes 553 CIA documents, plus smaller sets from the Departments of Justice and Defense, and 56 from the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The National Archives called it “the first in a series of rolling releases pursuant to the President’s memorandum based on prior reviews done by agencies.”
Another 29,000 records remain under seal and subject to further review, out of about 5 million pages of records in the archives collection — most of which was released in the late 1990s after Congress created a review board to scour the files and set the final 2017 deadline.
The latest files include a 70-page city-by-city FBI assessment from May 1967 titled “Racial violence potential in the United States this summer.” Deadly riots did break out that summer — the worst in Detroit and Newark, N.J., but also in Minneapolis and Milwaukee.
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The risk in Dallas was deemed low, particularly after Dallas had just elected its “first Negro” school board member, Dr. Emmett J. Conrad.
The FBI was more worried about Houston after a recent police shooting, agitation by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and because boxer Muhammad Ali lived there. The previous month, Ali had refused induction into the Army in Houston.
“Clay,” the report says, referring to him by the name he’d given up three years earlier, “could become a rallying point for opposition to the draft and to the Vietnam war by racial groups.”
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One memo described in detail the CIA’s surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, an elaborate primer on spycraft.
The CIA recruited Mexican phone technicians to tap the embassy’s lines, postal workers to help intercept mail, and even a photo processing technician to develop surveillance film after an in-house CIA technician resigned.
In mid-1962, Mexican counterparts declared an intention to install their own taps, prompting a scramble to disconnect the CIA taps to avoid discovery.
The memo describes the challenge of working with Mexican authorities, calling the security service “brutal and corrupt.”
The Americans weren’t perfect. They used an apartment across the street from the Soviet compound as one of three sites to photograph personnel and visitors. But the film was only collected three times a week and “photographs were not made initially until a complete roll of film was used” — creating a delay in identifying Oswald when he was overheard on phone calls.
The cache released Friday includes much material deemed irrelevant to the JFK case by the Assassination Records Review Board — the five-member commission created by Congress in 1992 to scour the files and determine which records could be released without harming the national interest.
One 1969 document, for instance, chronicles the CIA’s recruitment of a Harvard Law graduate to work undercover in Africa and Europe.
There’s also a two-page memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to CIA Director Richard Helms in October 1967 regarding a possible trip by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to attend a gathering of Nobel Prize winners in Moscow.
And a 20-page FBI dossier on King dated March 12, 1968 — three weeks before his own assassination — that reflects Hoover’s intense suspicions of the civil rights leader, and the resources he devoted to discredit King.
There are plenty of rabbit trails to keep researchers busy.
For instance: a file marked by the National Archives as James Garrison’s CIA file. Garrison was the New Orleans district attorney portrayed by Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone film “JFK,” which inspired the 1992 law mandating release of the assassination files. It turns out to be a report on a World War II scheme involving Capt. Carrol Garretson and 86 swords stolen in Burma. And eight of the 10 pages are blank.
Many of the documents are redacted in part. Some include whole paragraphs or pages that have been blacked out. Others are illegible in part or in whole; age has taken its toll on pages filed away for as many as 54 years.
One CIA document includes a one-page glossary of such basic terms as “agent” and “source” — and 29 blank white pages. Many of the documents are duplicates of other files in the release.
One lengthy CIA document recounts how Cuban radio stations reported the King assassination.
A document from the National Security Agency dated four days after the Kennedy assassination says that thousands of messages were intercepted between the U.S. and Cuba — too many to evaluate individually, though early computers of that era would be used to find mentions of Oswald.
It also mentions a Cuban who was given a “go ahead order” to flee from Tampa, Fla., to Havana between Nov. 17 and Nov. 20, 1963. He was reported safe in Cuba on Dec. 8, after fleeing through Texas and Mexico.
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