Here are the most interesting takeaways from the landing of secret documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy

National Archives and Records Administration release 1,500 secret documents have a relationship with John F. Kennedywas assassinated on Wednesday. The 1963 murder shocked the nation and continues to ignite fascination among historians and conspiracy theorists alike.

The National Archives’ archive was expected to arrive a year ago, but President Joe Biden delayed it, blaming the coronavirus pandemic. Another launch date was dropped a month ago. Some of the files, which were originally promised to be released with those announced Wednesday, will be withheld until December 2022. Congress requires all Warren Commission documents to be made public. filed in 2017 in 1992. According to the National Archives, more than 90% of records related to the assassination have been made public.

While these documents may not reconfigure assassination in the American imagination, here are some of the most intriguing pieces of information from cables that have ever been hidden.

Lee Harvey Oswald met the KGB before the assassination

JFK’s hitman, former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, met a KGB agent in Mexico City just months before he killed the president, according to a CIA memo.

“According to a intercepted phone call in Mexico City, Lee Oswald was at the Soviet Embassy there on September 23 and spoke with Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich,” the memo read.

Oswald would call the same Soviet embassy a week later, identifying himself in broken Russian, CIA officials wrote.

“Hello, this one [is] Lee Oswald is speaking,” he told the Soviet diplomat, who answered the phone. “I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a consul, and they said they would send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you had anything new. But I don’t remember the name of that consul.”

According to the transcript of the call, Valery Kostikov, a KGB officer, told Oswald, “They say they haven’t received anything yet.”

“What have they done?” Oswald asked.

Kostikov said: “Yes, they say that a request has been sent, but nothing has been received yet. Then he hung up.

Oswald drove back to the United States across the Texas-Mexico border in October 1963.

An anonymous caller said the Soviet Union would fund Kennedy’s killing a year before it happened

One phoned the US embassy in Australia a year before Kennedy was assassinated, warning that the Soviet Union would pay $100,000 for it. The CIA never received advice, the New York Post report.

A 1964 State Department memo read, “Informed Canberra with full details of the November 23 phone call and the October 15, 1962 call. It should be noted that the CIA had no prior knowledge of the 1962 call. .”

Two days after the assassination, another person called about possible Soviet financing of the Kennedy attack, this time to a US Navy attaché, according to CIA cables. The man identified himself as Polish and was the driver for the Soviet embassy in Canberra, and CIA agents believed he was the same person who had called a year earlier.

However, the CIA officers wrote: “From the Australian authorities’ point of view, the caller was a cameraman, and Australian intelligence was unable to locate a Polish employee of the Russian embassy there.

Fidel Castro lurks in the CIA investigation

U.S. intelligence officers pursue an investigative line regarding Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City to conspire with the Cubans. A Mexican employee of the Cuban embassy in Mexico City detained by Mexican authorities said Oswald “claims to be a Communist and an admirer of Castro”.

That theory was later disproved when a Nicaraguan man confessed that he fabricated it when he met Oswald at the embassy to “involve the United States in a way that could lead to the overthrow of Castro”, according to a telegram to the Secretary of State.

The CIA also theorized that an Associated Press interview may have influenced Oswald. While the assassin was living in New Orleans, a local newspaper ran an interview with Fidel Castro in which the Communist leader warned the US against invasion of Cuba and assassination of its officials. , promises to be punished.

Another CIA document, this one marked “Secret Eyes Only”, outlines the agency’s own assassination plots against Fidel Castro, “involving the use of the criminal underworld with contacts inside Cuba ,” AP’s report.