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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
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As the remaining files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination near public release, a newly surfaced memo, purportedly written by the former president just ten days before his death, has sparked new speculation about what he may have been trying to uncover.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the release of all remaining records related to the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The order, issued on January 23, directs the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to develop a plan for declassifying the JFK records within 15 days, with additional time granted for the release of documents concerning the other two cases.
The decision represents the latest chapter in a decades-long debate over government transparency concerning the Kennedy assassination. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 mandated that all related documents be made publicly available by October 26, 2017, save for ‘exceptional’ circumstances.
But successive administrations repeatedly postponed full disclosure, citing national security concerns. Trump’s January order aims to put an end to these delays and release the remaining files to the public. As part of this effort, the FBI recently revealed the discovery of approximately 2,400 previously undisclosed records related to the Kennedy assassination, totaling around 14,000 pages.
Meanwhile, the so-called JFK UFO memo has fueled speculation for years. The document in question is said to show President Kennedy requesting the CIA to provide information about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) just days before his assassination on November 22, 1963.
The memo, dated November 12, 1963, is officially titled National Security Memorandum No. 271 and primarily addresses U.S.-Soviet cooperation on space exploration.
Another document, often associated with this memo, is a letter allegedly sent by Kennedy to the CIA Director, requesting a review of UFO intelligence to avoid potential misidentification during the Cold War. Some UFO researchers argue that this letter indicates Kennedy was seeking access to classified UFO intelligence, fueling speculation about whether this pursuit played any role in his assassination.
At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, John McCone was serving as CIA director. McCone was long suspected of aiding in the cover-up of JFK’s assassination, and, according to a 2015 report by Politico, the CIA eventually admitted as much.
“McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced Dulles out following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA,” the report said.
“Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian — mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency — faced a steep learning curve,” it added.
Following JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson retained McCone as head of the CIA. McCone became a significant witness before the Warren Commission, the investigative panel Johnson created to examine Kennedy’s death. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership, McCone pledged full cooperation and testified that the CIA had found no evidence linking assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to any conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
Ultimately, the commission’s final report aligned closely with McCone’s portrayal of Oswald—a former Marine and self-declared Marxist—as a disturbed lone actor.
“But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions,” Politico’s report continued.
“Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were ‘complicit’ in keeping ‘incendiary’ information from the Warren Commission,” it said.
“The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia,” Politico noted further.
“Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.”