DALLAS – The National Archives released a trove of records from the Kennedy assassination files on a Friday afternoon. It was another strange stream of loose strings, dead ends and tangents with little apparent connection to the assassination of the nation's 35th president.
Here and there, the odd curiosity did appear, offering insight into the effort to understand the circumstances of Kennedy's murder but providing nothing to cast the official conclusions into doubt.
The National Archives placed 10,744 records online Friday — documents kept under seal for decades and due for release three weeks ago.
All of the documents come from the FBI's files. The batch includes 144 that had never been released, and 2,408 that remain partly classified, with much of the material blacked out 54 years after President John Kennedy's murder in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
To the layman, these large document dumps — thousands of pages at a time — may appear to be impressive feats of government transparency. However, many of the documents are copies, or copies of copies, or previously redacted versions of copies. There are no Kennedy assassination bombshells to speak of.
Look at a series of documents in the latest batch:
One file in the National Archives spreadsheet, which organizes the PDF documents, is a translation of a 1972 police report about an American who allegedly tried to pay for a Swiss hotel room with a fraudulent check.
The next document is a memo from the Swiss Central Police to an American attache, saying they were sending this police report to the U.S. Embassy. The third document, in German, is the original police report from Bern.
None of those documents mentions Kennedy, Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby or any of the other major characters in the assassination story.
A memo from April 1977 documents a tip from an IRS informant who claimed that the morning of the assassination, Dallas nightclub owner Ruby called and asked if he would "like to watch the fireworks" with him as Kennedy's motorcade drove through downtown. Two days later, Ruby would kill Oswald.
Ruby's mob links, and the fact that he died in prison, have long fueled theories that he was part of a conspiracy.
The IRS tipster's information on local bookies had been, according to local IRS investigators, generally reliable. The FBI records released Friday leave a cliffhanger. The tipster, identified as Bob Vanderslice, didn't show up for an appointment and apparently ducked the FBI for several weeks.
There's a one-page memo from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dated Dec. 17, three weeks after the assassination, informing the FBI that at the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, news of Kennedy's death was met with "jubilation." The Mounties' tipster also passed along that Cuba's foreign minister instructed diplomats in Canada to keep such jubilation to themselves.
The material reflects leads the FBI pursued for decades, based on tips of varying levels of credibility and detail.
As with previous releases, it's unclear how some of the documents relate to the Kennedy assassination directly.
For example, some of the never-before-released files include letters from blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson to East German officials about film critique and potential scripts.
A memo released Friday from 1988 refers to a claim by jailed French mobster Christian David, who maintained that three Corsican assassins were involved in Kennedy's murder. The FBI's legal attache in Paris wrote that David's attorney, Henri Juramy, had provided a sealed envelope, to be opened only if David were set free. He was facing trial for the 1966 murder of a French policeman.
"The envelope contains the name of the third person involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy," the memo reads. "Legat [legal attache] Paris considers the merits of Juramy's proposal suspicious" and recommends bringing in an FBI agent "well backgrounded in the Kennedy assassination investigation to make a determination of the relevance of his sources."
David's claim has been known for years, but the memo adds some new details.
This is the fifth release of records this year. A 1992 law gave federal agencies 25 more years to release all remaining Kennedy files. The deadline was Oct. 26. President Donald Trump agreed to another six months of review.
Some of the material provides tantalizing clues that could stoke conspiracy theories, though it's unclear whether they were kept under seal for that reason or, perhaps, to play down the extent of cooperation between U.S. and foreign authorities.
A memo from Detective Sgt. M. Ashdowne of Scotland Yard dated Sept. 8, 1989, showed the London police tracking down a lead for the FBI.
A resident of Brighton had seen a BBC documentary on the assassination that jogged her memory from a stint as a legal secretary in New Orleans. She phoned Joseph Giarrusso, a councilman who had served as police chief there during the 1960s, after recalling a letter she'd come across. The letter indicated payments being sent to the mother of Oswald. By whom, she couldn't recall, Scotland Yard reported.
