What declassified JFK assassination files reveal about the CIA’s top-secret surveillance methods
Topics: Conspiracy Theories, John F. Kennedy, US News, Politics
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Topics: Conspiracy Theories, John F. Kennedy, US News, Politics
America stood still on November 22, 1963 - the day 35th president John F. Kennedy was gunned down while waving to his adoring fans in the streets Dallas, Texas.
He has since become the subject of numerous conspiracy theories with many believing assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Cuban authorities, while others suggested he was an operative of the Soviet Union.
Part of President Donald Trump's election campaign involved promises to uncover classified files in the case of the assassinations of both JFK and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the 'Epstein files'.
Advert
This week he made good on his promise, though people have been largely disappointed with the release, arguing many of the details were already public knowledge.
But still, whether the documents are entirely new or not, they detail the CIA’s top-secret surveillance methods.
Part of the newly-disclosed files however, reveal how the agency attempted to recruit double agents from the KGB, the Soviet Union's main security agency - it was pretty much CIA's Eastern European counterpart.
Agents attempted to recruit from the Soviet embassies in Mexico City - the capital of Mexico.
In one of the memos, a CIA agency brags about how valuable a double agent can be for the US.
"I cannot help but feel that we are buying a great deal for our money in this project," they wrote.
It also revealed how the CIA was following an American man who they described as a Communist living in Mexico - this document in particular has been of interest to researchers due to Oswald's visits to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in the months prior to JFK's death.
The documents also explain how between December 1962 and January 1963, agents tapped telephones in the Mexican capital, in a bid to listen in to what both the Soviets and Cubans were discussing at the embassies.
They detail instructions outlined for operatives to be able to be able to tap into a phone line - with the agency even providing a certain chemical for them to mark telephones with so other spies could see under a UV light that they have been tapped.
The CIA have long wished for the documents to be withheld from the public so that foreign states could not learn its surveillance tactics.
Oswald was camped out in a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, waiting for the 43-year-old's motorcade to drive by - which it did so at around 12.30pm.
The Democrat was sat in the back of an armoured Lincoln convertible limousine, alongside his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie Connally.