So far, none of the thousands of PDF files have yielded any information that would challenge the official historical narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting on his own, shot and killed President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Instead, the smoking guns of history are emerging from granular details of now fully declassified CIA covert operations. The final revelations in the documents turn out to be the CIA’s most guarded of secrets: sources and methods, agent identities and global targets. The unredacted documents name names—of officials, operatives, assets, informants and collaborators. They identify places, collaborating countries, espionage techniques, expenditures, and previously unknown clandestine activities. Those operations include how the CIA manipulated elections in numerous nations, sabotaged economies, plotted to kill foreign leaders and overthrew undesirable governments abroad—while also busily conducting illegal operations at home.
Who knew, for example, that the CIA was secretly spying on Washington’s famous muckraking newsman Jack Anderson? And that in the early 1960s the CIA had almost as many agents working under diplomatic cover as the State Department had actual diplomats abroad? Or that CIA director John McCone conducted furtive “dealings” at the Vatican with Pope John XXII and Pope Paul VI which, according to one of McCone’s aides, “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.”
The JFK papers reveal that the Agency was running a massive telephone wiretap operation in Mexico—codenamed Project Lienvoy—out of the office of Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos—who was himself a CIA collaborator and approved the surveillance operations. They identify Mexico, along with 14 other nations whose intelligence services were “assisting us” in covert efforts against Cuba. According to one declassified memo, López Mateos told the CIA station chief that he was “delighted that a decision had now been made to get rid of Castro.” As part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA managed to contaminate an entire cargo shipment of Cuban sugar bound for the USSR “with a chemical used in the process of denaturing alcohol,” according to one Mongoose update. “When this cargo of sugar is refined in the Soviet Union the contaminated bags will completely contaminate the entire shipment,” the secret report continued, “making the sugar unfit for human or animal consumption in any form.” The documents also expose how the CIA financed and orchestrated the 1966 election of its chosen coup-plotting military man, Gen. René Barrientos in Bolivia. They record in greater detail than previously understood how agency operatives financed—at $10,000 a day—street protests in British Guiana that pushed the liberal government of Cheddi Jagan from power in late 1964.
