They either “have nothing to do with the assassination, or bear on it in only the most marginal, tangential way.” “They are not significant,” Professor Robert Reynolds, one of a handful of assassination researchers who study and follow the documents in detail, told me in a recent email. The 502 documents released on May 11 contain little information about JFK’s murder. In writing about new files last year, Michael Isikoff concluded, it “only underscores the point that what has been hidden from the public is largely about highly sensitive agency collection activities and exotic plans for operations that, while in some instances highly embarrassing and by today’s standards indefensible, bear little if any relevance to the crime itself.” I echoed the same sentiment in my article about the files the Archives released last month. It is clearer with every document release this year from the National Archives - 422 on April 13, 355 on April 27, and 502 on May 11 - that much of the information the CIA has fought to keep secret for so long revolves around names of assets and agents, locations of the agency’s stations abroad, and often minutiae about some of its off-shelf international operations. Why would the government keep files from the public unless they contained explosive revelations? People who have not studied the JFK assassination suspect that the most important documents about the murder of the president must be those still under lock and key at the National Archives.

Jfk redacted files