Stunning JFK Memo Resurfaces As Full Document Release Imminent
As the remaining files tied to John F. Kennedy’s assassination approach public release, a recently surfaced memo, allegedly authored by the former president just ten days before his tragic death, has reignited speculation about what he may have been investigating.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating the release of all remaining documents related to the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Signed on January 23, the directive instructs the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to formulate a plan to declassify the JFK files within 15 days, with additional time allocated for documents concerning the other two cases.
This decision marks the latest development in a decades-long debate over government transparency regarding Kennedy’s assassination. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 required all relevant records to be publicly accessible by October 26, 2017, barring ‘exceptional’ circumstances.
However, successive administrations continuously delayed full disclosure, citing national security concerns. Trump’s order in January seeks to eliminate these delays and release the remaining files to the public. As part of this initiative, the FBI recently announced the discovery of approximately 2,400 previously unreleased records connected to Kennedy’s assassination, amounting to roughly 14,000 pages.
Meanwhile, the so-called JFK UFO memo has fueled speculation for years. The document in question is said to show President Kennedy requesting the CIA to provide information about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) just days before his assassination on November 22, 1963.
Dated November 12, 1963, the memo is officially known as National Security Memorandum No. 271 and primarily focuses on U.S.-Soviet collaboration in space exploration.
Another document frequently associated with this memo is a letter reportedly sent by Kennedy to the CIA Director, requesting a review of UFO intelligence to prevent potential misidentifications during the Cold War. Some UFO researchers claim that this letter suggests Kennedy was seeking access to classified UFO intelligence, fueling speculation over whether this pursuit had any connection to his assassination.
At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, John McCone was the CIA director. McCone had long been suspected of being involved in concealing details about JFK’s assassination, and according to a 2015 Politico report, the CIA eventually acknowledged this.
“McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced Dulles out following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA,” the report stated.
“Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian — mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency — faced a steep learning curve,” it continued.
Following JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson kept McCone as head of the CIA. McCone played a key role as a witness before the Warren Commission, the investigative body formed by Johnson to examine Kennedy’s death. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership, McCone pledged full cooperation and testified that the CIA had found no evidence linking assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to any conspiracy, whether foreign or domestic.
In the end, the commission’s final report closely mirrored McCone’s description of Oswald—a former Marine and self-declared Marxist—as a lone, disturbed actor.
“But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions,” Politico’s report added.
“Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were ‘complicit’ in keeping ‘incendiary’ information from the Warren Commission,” it stated.
“The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia,” Politico noted further.
“Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.”