TOP SECRET CIA Disclosures Among Recent Kennedy Assassination Documents

On May 7, 2025, MidPoint explored the history of the CIA’s covert operations, an extraordinary record of what our intelligence services were up to in our name at home and abroad in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, with our MidPoint guest, national security expert, Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, Associate Professor of Instruction in International Relations and Political Science in the University of  South Florida. This history of the CIA’s most secret secrets: the release of their sources and methods, agents’ identities, and their worldwide targets and interventions in foreign governments’ elections, were finally fully revealed in the thousands of pages of unclassified documents related to the John F. Kennedy Assassination that have recently been opened by the Trump Administration. These unredacted documents name names–of officials, operatives, assets, informants, and collaborators. They identify places, collaborating countries’ espionage techniques, expenditures, and some previously unknown murky clandestine activities. The operations include how the CIA manipulated elections in numerous nations, sabotaged economies, plotted to kill foreign leaders,  and even overthrew undesirable governments abroad, while also conducting illegal operations here at home.

We learned from Prof. Jimenez-Bacardi that there was not much new information released in these documents about the assassination itself. Certainly, nothing that would change the prevailing historical narrative–that Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, from the window of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. But, what is left is a veritable treasure trove of material for national security researchers like Prof. Jimenenz-Bacardi.

Prof. Jimenez-Bacardi was not surprised that there were no shocking revelations about the assassination itself in these documents. He attributes the fascination of the public with the assassination to human nature. He said, “I think sometimes when you have such an important and consequential event in history, like the assassination of the president of the most powerful country, it’s very difficult for people to accept that it could just be some disgruntled individual acting on his own like there’s this yearning, for there has to be some larger conspiracy here. Whether it’s the Soviets, whether it’s Cubans, whether it’s anti-castro Cubans that are upset at Kennedy because of the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Whether it’s disgruntled CIA officers who don’t like some of the President’s policies. Something larger has to be out there, and there’s an additional problem, of course, is that when you’re dealing with agencies like the CIA is that their standard operating procedures are of extreme secrecy and that in itself also creates quite a bit of distrust.” His take on the assassination is that it was the result of incompetence, a traditional intelligence failure that the CIA was ashamed to admit. Much more interesting to Prof. Jimenez-Bacardi were the revelations about the intelligence relationships between the US security services and the security services of other countries, both those that succeeded and, perhaps more interestingly, those that failed.

Prof. Jimenez-Bacardi is optimistic that we will continue to learn more from these documents as researchers delve deeper into them to discover further context for what has been revealed, and as the researchers begin to make more requests under the Freedom of Information Act for additional information that may now be declassified. And, he believes, of course, leaks of secrets from inside the government will always continue. “I don’t think leaks are going to go away anytime soon. What they’re really trying to do is they’re trying to control the messaging and control which leaks they’d like to get to the press.”

Tune into this entire fascinating discussion about what has been done in our name by our security services around the world and in the U.S. You can listen to the show from our archives here, in the WMNF app, or as a WMNF MidPoint podcast on Spotify or Apple Music.