CIA Covert Ops: Kennedy Assassination Records Lift Veil of Secrecy

Washington D.C., March 19, 2025 - On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”—intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources, White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in a Top Secret memorandum on “CIA Reorganization.” In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 123 “diplomats” were actually CIA undercover agents; in Chile, 11 of the 13 Embassy “political officers” were CIA undercover operatives. “CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as [the] State [Department]—3900 to 3700,” Schlesinger reported to President Kennedy. “About 1500 of those are under State Department cover (the other 2200 are presumably under military or other non-State official cover).” (Document 1)

The memorandum, declassified in full for the first time yesterday, is part of a final release of records on the Kennedy assassination under the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Pursuant to a directive from President Trump on January 23, the National Archives released 2,182 records (63,400 pages) in two tranches on the evening of March 18 and noted that more would be released as they were digitalized.

The new release includes hundreds of CIA records as well as White House and NSC documents relating to covert operations abroad, particularly in Latin American nations such as Cuba and Mexico which are fixtures in the history of the Kennedy assassination. Most of them were released before but with key redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods and covert operations abroad from being revealed. For the first time, these records on CIA covert operations are being released uncensored.

Among the revelations are completely unredacted copies of:

• A key document from the CIA’s famed “Family Jewels” series describing “examples of activities exceeding the CIA’s charter,” including a CIA counterespionage operation against the French embassy in Washington, D.C., that included “breaking and entering and the removal of documents from the French consulate” and DCI John McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, which “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.” (Document 4)
• The CIA Inspector General’s report on the 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot. (Document 6)
• A series of summaries of briefings by DCI John McCone to members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) that provide more details about known CIA political action programs and previously unknown details about “the Agency’s covert financial support to political parties in the fight against communism” around the world. (Document 2)
• A CIA inspector general report on the workings of the CIA station in Mexico City providing one of the most detailed views of how the CIA organizes its operations on the ground. (Document 3)
• A history of CIA operations in the Western Hemisphere covering 1946-1965, including expenditures by CIA stations in Latin America, and details on CIA payments and influence operations in Bolivia to orchestrate the election of their chosen candidate General René Barrientos. (Document 5)

“There is no doubt that the JFK Records Act has advanced public knowledge of CIA covert operations – who they targeted, how they were conducted and who conducted them – more than any other declassification in the history of access to information,” said National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, who has studied CIA operations for decades. “Without this law and its implementation over the last 27 years, these operational CIA files would likely have stayed Top Secret for eternity.”

The JFK Records Act

Congress passed the 1992 JFK Act in the wake of a public uproar over Oliver Stone’s popular conspiratorial movie, JFK. The film, starring Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison, who mounted a failed, conspiracy-driven prosecution of a local businessman for killing Kennedy, finished with a statement that over five million pages of records on the assassination remained secret. “The suspicions created by government secrecy eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and damaged their credibility,” noted the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in its final report. “Finally, frustrated by the lack of access and disturbed by the conclusions of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act), mandating the gathering and opening of all records concerned with the death of the President.”

After the JFK Act was passed, the National Security Archive played a role in advising the five-member oversight board and its staff to establish a broad definition of an “assassination-related” document. The ARRB mandated the full release of thousands of documents related not only to the immediate crime, but on covert action and espionage operations in Cuba, and Mexico, among other countries, and on FBI operations and the mafia. To date, the documents have produced countless revelations of the CIA and FBI’s operational histories.

“The Review Board has worked hard to obtain all records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and to release the records to the fullest extent possible to the American people,” the Assassination Records Review Board members wrote in a letter to President Clinton in September 1998, when they turned in their final report. “We have done so in the hope that release of these records will shed new evidentiary light on the assassination of President Kennedy, enrich the historical understanding of that tragic moment in American history, and help restore public confidence in the government's handling of the assassination and its aftermath.”

The National Security Archive is just starting to sort through this treasure trove of new revelations. Watch this space for future postings on CIA operations and much more.