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Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.
In June 1973, a C.I.A. employee wrote a memo at the request of William E. Colby, the agency’s director, listing various ways the C.I.A. had, to put it delicately, “exceeded” its charter over the years.
The seven pages matter-of-factly described break-ins at the French Consulate in Washington, planned paramilitary attacks on Chinese nuclear facilities and injections of a “contaminating agent” in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The memo ended with an offhand aside about John A. McCone, the agency’s former director.
“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing, McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters,” the author wrote.
It was just one paragraph in the roughly 77,000 pages the National Archives posted online this week as part of the latest — and supposedly final — release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure.
“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about it,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.
“Which of course,” he added, “we will now try to do.”
The document drop may have been a disappointment for those hoping for juicy revelations about the Kennedy assassination. But for scholars steeped in the history of intelligence agencies and the secret side of American foreign policy, there have been revelations aplenty.
They include information about C.I.A. involvement in various attempted coups, election interference in countries around the world and connections that ran to the top of some foreign governments. To see the documents all drop suddenly, without redactions, was remarkable to scholars.
“I didn’t think I’d live to see it,” Mr. Kornbluh said.
That the release included so much material with no obvious connection to the assassination reflected the broad intentions of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, a 1992 law passed after the Oliver Stone film “JFK” prompted a resurgence of conspiracy theorizing.
The law ordered that all government records related to the assassination and various investigations be gathered in one place and released within 25 years, with some exceptions for grand jury secrecy, tax privacy and concern for “identifiable harm” to national security.
And the law defined “assassination-related record” broadly, taking in a swath of documents related to the inner workings and covert operations of the C.I.A. and F.B.I., including many gathered by the Senate’s Church Committee, established in 1975 to investigate abuses by the intelligence agencies.
Before this week, 99 percent of the roughly six million pages in the collection had already been made public. Only several thousand documents remained redacted, and as few as 50 withheld in full, according to past statements from the archives.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said this week that only a few documents, which remained under a court seal because of grand jury rules, were still secret. The federal government is working to get those documents unsealed.
The release of the newly unredacted material had long been opposed by the C.I.A. because it would give up the names of its sources. But equally important to the agency was the desire to protect its mid-20th-century tradecraft: how well it had penetrated the Egyptian government’s communications, or the depth of its contacts in France.
Unredacted passages in the new documents revealed how the C.I.A. wiretapped phones in Mexico City in 1962. While that may be interesting in a Cold War spy movie kind of way, it has no bearing on whether American spy agencies can listen to a phone call made on an encrypted app on a modern cellphone.
But for historians, the agency’s closely guarded “sources and methods” are important to filling out the full historical picture. And some of the new material is startling, they said.
Fredrik Logevall, a Harvard historian who is working on a multivolume biography of Kennedy, said that it was remarkable to see a full version of an unredacted 1961 memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an aide to Kennedy, written shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, warning of the growing power of the C.I.A. and calling for it to be reorganized.
Newly visible passages revealed, among other things, that nearly half of the political officers in American embassies around the world were working for the C.I.A. “That’s astonishing,” Dr. Logevall said.
He also cited a now-unredacted 41-page memo of minutes from meetings between 1962 and 1963 of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which included many suggestive new details, including some related to surveillance of China’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.
There was also an unredacted 1967 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general on the 1961 assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo that now shows the names of all the C.I.A. agents involved in the plot.
“Without the 1992 law, all of this probably would have been under lock and key forever,” Dr. Logevall said.
The revelation of sources’ identities causes the C.I.A. deep angst, on principle and because it undermines efforts to recruit sources today.
“These relationships are secret for a reason,” said Nicholas Dujmovic, a retired C.I.A. historian. “If people don’t want others to know that they were cooperating with the C.I.A., for whatever reason, we have a moral obligation to keep these relationships secret, because that was the going in agreement.”
Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, a historian at the University of South Florida and researcher for the National Security Archive, said the documents also revealed efforts to interfere in elections in Finland, Peru and Somalia that had been rumored but undocumented, or entirely unknown. There was also new information, he said, about C.I.A. involvement in failed and successful coups in various countries, including Brazil, Haiti and what is now Guyana.
A 1964 C.I.A. inspector general report on the workings of the agency’s station in Mexico City was particularly significant, he said, because it contained one of the most detailed accounts available of how the agency organized its ground operations.
A heavily redacted version was released in 2022. But newly visible passages revealed that Adolfo López Mateos, the president of Mexico, had approved a joint surveillance operation against Soviets in Mexico.
The memo also described a “highly successful project” aimed at “rural and peasant targets,” led by a Catholic priest who had created an extensive network of youth groups, credit unions, agricultural co-ops and study centers — presumably, Dr. Jimenez-Bacardi said, to make sure people “don’t go on the Soviet path.”
The White House said on Thursday that all remaining classified documents in the collection are now open for research at the National Archives, with additional pages still set to be digitized and posted online “in the coming days.”
Dr. Jimenez-Bacardi said he was eager to see the Church Committee interviews and depositions of former directors of the C.I.A., but had not yet found them.
Parts were included in previous releases. “But there are still secrets in those depositions,” he said.
The US is planning to board and seize Iran-linked oil tankers and commercial ships in the coming days, according to a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal.
The report noted that these actions would take place in international waters, potentially outside of the Middle East.
The US “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran,” US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said. “This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil.”
“As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions, or insurance requirements,” Caine continued.
Caine was further quoted as saying that the new campaign, which would be operated in part by the US Indo-Pacific Command, would be part of a broader US President Donald Trump-led campaign against Iran, known as “Economic Fury.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the WSJ that Trump was “optimistic” that the new measures would lead to a peace deal.
The potential US military action comes as Iran tightens its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, including attacking several ships earlier on Saturday, the WSJ reported.
The report cited CENTCOM as saying that the US has already turned back 23 ships trying to leave Iranian ports since the start of its blockade on the Strait.
The expansion of naval action beyond the Middle East will provide the US with further leverage against Iran by allowing it to take control of a greater number of ships loaded with oil or weapons bound for Iran, the report noted.
“It’s a maximalist approach,” said associate professor of law at Emory University Law School Mark Nevitt. “If you want to put the screws down on Iran, you want to use every single legal authority you have to do that.”
Iran claimed earlier on Saturday that it had regained military control over the Strait, intending to hold it until the US guarantees full freedom of movement for ships traveling to and from Iran.
“As long as the United States does not ensure full freedom of navigation for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will remain tightly controlled,” the Iranian military stated.
In addition, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on Saturday in an apparent message on his Telegram channel that the Iranian navy is prepared to inflict “new bitter defeats” on its enemies.
new video loaded: The Origins of the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket
By Jodi Kantor, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, June Kim and Luke Piotrowski
April 18, 2026
A Pakistani Ranger walks past a billboard for the U.S.-Iran peace talks in Islamabad on April 12, 2026. The talks, led by Vice President JD Vance, produced no concrete movement toward a peace deal.
Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
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Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
Despite stalled talks with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump expressed optimism this week that a permanent deal is within reach — one that may include Iran relinquishing its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear agreement during the Obama administration say mutual mistrust, starkly different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.
Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week that appear to have produced little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was all wrong.
“You cannot do a negotiation with Iran in one day,” she told NPR’s Here & Now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To get agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”
The talks leading to that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous style of negotiation, says Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as a special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.
Summing up the two sides’ differing styles, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership [is] stubborn and tenacious.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear talks deal at the Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 14, 2015.
Pool/AFP via Getty Images
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Pool/AFP via Getty Images
In 2015, patience led to a deal
The talks in 2015, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to finish the deal, says Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer was involved in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in getting the deal to the finish line, he said.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations for the Obama-era nuclear deal, speaks on April 22, 2016 in New York.
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“He would endure lectures … ‘let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’… and just keep plowing ahead,” Finer said, adding that a tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be “to say no to everything and see what actually matters” to the U.S.
“They’re just maddeningly difficult,” he said. “You need to go back at the same issue 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make any progress.”
Even so, Finer called the Iranian negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the U.S., they often lacked expert advisers “just outside the room,” yet still mastered the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.
“They were also negotiating not in their first language,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English, and they were hundreds of pages long with detailed annexes.”
Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the patience for a negotiation to end the conflict that could be at least as complex and time-consuming. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and actually just wanted Iran to capitulate,” Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, told Here & Now. “No nation – even one as odious as the Iran regime – is going to capitulate.”
Distrust but verify
Iran was attacked twice in the past year. First in June of last year, as nuclear negotiations were ongoing, Israel and the U.S. struck the country’s nuclear facilities. Months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the level of trust is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.
“It’s hard for them to take at their word what they’re hearing from U.S. officials,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, have to be wondering how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something that’s tangible” – such as their enriched uranium – in exchange for anything that isn’t ironclad or subject to suddenly be discarded by Trump or some future president.
“Once they give up their stockpile … they can’t recapture it the next day,” Malley said.
Even during the 2013-2015 nuclear deal talks, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verify — it was distrust but verify,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”
Malley cautions about relying on the JCPOA as a guide to how peace talks to end the current war might go. The leadership in Tehran that agreed to the deal is now gone — killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also greatly diminished and “whatever lessons were learned in the past … have to be viewed with a lot of caution, because so much has changed,” he said.
Negotiations have a leveling effect
Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a peace and security think tank based in Spain that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the U.S.-Iran relationship. Going into talks, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have a leveling effect. “The weaker party gains just by virtue of entering into a negotiation process,” he said.
Each side is looking for leverage, he adds.
In Iran’s case, it has used its closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House has shown an eagerness to resolve the conflict quickly. “If one side perceives the other needs an agreement more … that shapes the entire negotiation,” he said.
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