The Trump administration’s unveiling Tuesday of more than 2,000 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set off a scramble for any scraps of revelatory information within the files.
As The Washington Post continues to review the more than 60,000 pages released, nothing so far upends the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in the 1963 killing. But the newly unredacted files reveal new details about CIA agents and operations that the agency kept secret for decades.
Those details previously had been kept secret by national security officials, said Larry Schnapf, an attorney who has been pushing the government to release the records since 2017. The fresh disclosures, he argued, suggest that the government habitually labels too many documents as classified.
“You can see how that term has been abused,” Schnapf said.
Here’s an early look at some of the intriguing details in the records.
Date: Aug. 4, 1966 | Agency: CIA
An award recommendation for James W. McCord Jr. — a longtime, high-level CIA employee who was later convicted in the Watergate burglary — says he was instrumental in developing “fluoroscopic scanning” that enabled the CIA to “detect hidden technical listening devices” for the first time. Intelligence agencies spent “large sums of money” to develop such a capability, the document states, adding that McCord — who died in 2017 — and others had “contributed significantly to the future clandestine use of this technique on a world-wide basis.”
Date: June 1960 | Agency: CIA
This one-page document divulges that Manuel Machado Llosas – treasurer of the Mexican revolutionary movement and a friend of Cuban president and dictator Fidel Castro – was a CIA agent. Machado Llosas was slated to be stationed in Mexico City, where the document says the CIA planned to “use him to report on the activities of Cuban revolutionaries” and leverage his friendship with Castro and other Cuban leaders so he could act as a “‘political action’ asset.”
Date: Aug. 29, 1962 | Agency: CIA
In a covert operation, the CIA contaminated 800 bags of raw sugar on a cargo ship traveling from Cuba to the Soviet Union, a newly unredacted portion of this document says. The contaminate was a “chemical used in the process of denaturing alcohol,” the CIA wrote, adding that it would make the entire sugar shipment – 80,000 bags – unfit for consumption when it was refined in the Soviet Union. According to the document, the contaminate was not dangerous but was “so strong to the taste that it ruins the taste of the consumer for any food or drink for a considerable time.”
Date: Feb. 20, 1975 | Agency: SSCIA (the Senate Church Committee, which investigated U.S. intelligence activities abroad post-Watergate)
This newly unredacted memo reveals that the CIA surveilled Washington Post reporter Michael Getler, who joined The Post in 1970 and died in 2018. When this document was previously released, it had already unredacted the names of other reporters under “Surveillance of Newsmen,” which it said the CIA did to “determine source of security leaks.” References to CIA surveillance of a Post reporter who appears to be Getler are included in at least two other newly unredacted documents.
Date: May 28, 1975 | Agency: Various, including the FBI
A newly unredacted page of this document references a CIA memo revealing that the agency had created a fake organization, called the “Union for the Revolution,” with post office box addresses in Boston and Philadelphia. The group’s goal was to develop “penetrations and/or sources in revolutionary Arab groups in the Middle East.” It used its addresses to “circulate propaganda from the post office boxes in anticipation of interesting Arab groups,” the document says.
Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post; Bridgeman Images via Reuters Con; iStock.
Jonathan Edwards, Aaron Schaffer, Kyle Rempfer, Alec Dent, Evan Hill, Azi Paybarah, Alexandra Tirado Oropeza, Anthony J. Rivera, Anumita Kaur, Beck Snyder, Ben Brasch, Ben Pauker, Chris Dehghanpoor, Daniel Wu, Danielle Newman, Elana Gordon, Hari Raj, HyoJung Kim, Ian Shapira, Jada Yuan, Jorge Ribas, Kelly Kasulis Cho, Kelsey Ables, Kim Bellware, Leo Sands, Meghan Hoyer, Kyle Melnick, Niha Masih, Razzan Nakhlawi, Sally Jenkins, Sarah Cahlan, Tobi Raji, Tom Jackman and Vivian Ho contributed to this report. Design and development by Aadit Tambe and Matthew Callahan.
