On Wednesday, the National Archives released nearly 1,500 documents related to the US government s investigation into the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy.
The disclosure of secret cables, internal memos and other documents satisfies a deadline set by Joe Biden in October and is in keeping with a federal law that requires the release of records in the government's possession. More information is expected to be made public next year.
There was no immediate indication that the records contained revelations that could radically reshape the public's understanding of the events surrounding the 22 November 1963 assassination of Kennedy in Dallas at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.
But the latest tranche of documents was eagerly anticipated by historians and others who, decades after the Kennedy killing, remain skeptical that a troubled young man with a mail-order rifle was solely responsible for an assassination that changed the course of American history.
The documents include CIA cables and memos about Oswald's previously disclosed but never fully explained visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, as well as discussion of the possibility of Cuban involvement in the killing of Kennedy.
One CIA cable tells how Oswald called the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to ask for a visa to visit the Soviet Union. He also visited the Cuban embassy, apparently interested in a travel visa that would allow him to visit Cuba and wait there for a Soviet visa. He drove into the US on October 3rd, more than a month before the assassination, through a crossing at the Texas border.
A memo dated the day after Kennedy's murder says Oswald was in Mexico City and communicated with a KGB officer while he was at the Soviet embassy that September.
After Kennedy was killed, Mexican authorities arrested a Mexican employee of the Cuban Embassy with whom Oswald had communicated, and she said Oswald had professed to be a communist and an admirer of Castro.
One CIA document, Secret Eyes Only, traces US government plots to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1960, and a 1960 plot that involved the use of the criminal underworld with contacts inside Cuba Another document weighs whether Oswald, who was living in New Orleans, was affected by the publication of an interview with a CIA reporter who warned of retribution if the US were to take out Cuban leaders.
The new files include several FBI reports on the bureau's efforts to investigate and surveil major mafia figures, like Santo Trafficante Jr and Sam Giancana, who are often mentioned in conspiracy theories about Kennedy's murder.
Besides the Kennedy investigation, some of the material will be of interest to scholars or anyone interested in the minutiae of 1960 s counter espionage, with pages and pages of arcane details on such things as the methods, equipment and personnel used to surveil the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City.
There were 2,800 other records released in 2017 because of concerns from the FBI and the CIA, which Donald Trump cited as irreversible harm Even so, about 2,800 other records were released at the time.
The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald had been the lone gunman, and another congressional investigation in 1979 found no evidence to support the theory that the CIA had been involved.