CIA, FBI, and the Redacted Foreign Intelligence on John F. Kennedy
By Desmond Okafor ·
For decades, the intelligence traded between US agencies and foreign governments regarding the murder of John F. Kennedy stayed hidden, leaving only sanitized working copies for the public.
A president died in a Texas motorcade, and the machinery of the American security state immediately began a campaign of curated forgetting. For sixty years, the families of those betrayed by the official narrative have fought for a truth that is perpetually redacted, sliced into fragments, and guarded by agencies that view transparency as a security breach.
I am working from a catalogue description of the records, not the documents themselves, yet the boundaries of the silence are clearly mapped. The record at hand describes the "Foreign Intelligence Files," a collection acquired by the Assassination Records Review Board—the body established by the 1992 JFK Records Act to force the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to house every single government document related to the murder of the 35th president.
Working Copies and Master Files
Within this series, the record establishes that we are not looking at original dossiers, but rather "working copies of records." In the language of the intelligence community, a working copy is a tool of convenience, a version of a document used for drafting, briefing, or distribution. The desk's reading is that the existence of these copies confirms the existence of original, unredacted master files that remain in secure agency custody, far from the reach of the ARRB.
When the Central Intelligence Agency—the US government's primary arm for foreign intelligence and covert action—and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—the domestic security service and principal law enforcement agency—hand over "working copies" to an oversight board, they are not providing the source of truth. They are providing a translation. The pattern suggests that the master files contain the raw, unvarnished intelligence, while the copies provided to the archives were sanitized long before they reached the boxes in Maryland.
This is not a clerical detail; it is a strategy of containment. By releasing working copies, the agencies maintain a firewall between what the public is permitted to see and what the agency actually knows. If the ARRB was meant to obtain records "to the fullest extent," the provision of copies rather than originals is a calculated failure of that mandate.
The Foreign Exchange
According to the public record, John F. Kennedy was fatally shot on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, while riding through Dallas. The immediate aftermath was a scramble for control, with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson sworn in aboard Air Force One just hours later. While the public was fed a narrative of a lone gunman, the record shows a different, more complex reality occurring in the shadows: a frantic trade of information between the US and the rest of the world.
The record states these files contain "correspondence, telegrams, interviews, memoranda, reports, and other documents exchanged between United States Government agencies... and foreign government agencies regarding the assassination." The record establishes the existence of these foreign partners but does not name the specific nations, leaving those identities off the file.
This exchange is the pivot of the story. The CIA and FBI were not merely investigating a crime; they were managing a diplomatic crisis. The public record establishes that Kennedy's presidency was defined by the Cold War, specifically his fraught relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. The fact that the FBI and CIA were exchanging "foreign intelligence" about the assassination indicates that the search for the truth was inextricably linked to the geopolitical tensions of 1963. The lines are clear: the assassination was treated not as a domestic homicide, but as an intelligence event with international implications.
The Domestic Void
There is a gaping hole in this record, and the hole is shaped exactly like the internal operations of the American security state. The record specifies that these files consist of documents "exchanged" between US agencies and foreign governments.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that it purposefully excludes purely internal domestic operations conducted by the CIA and FBI that were never shared with foreign partners. The "exchanged" label is a filter. It ensures that any communication that stayed within the walls of the FBI’s domestic surveillance wings or the CIA’s internal registries remains invisible.
We see the reports that went out and the reports that came in, but we do not see the deliberations that happened in between. We see the evidence that the US government felt was necessary to share with its allies or adversaries, but we do not see the evidence the US government decided was too radioactive to leave the building. The result is a record that captures the reactive trail of the investigation—the reporting, the telegrams, the diplomatic damage control—rather than the proactive planning of whatever events led to Dallas.
Third Party Vetoes
Because these records involve "foreign government agencies," they are subject to a specific kind of censorship. In the world of declassification, "Third Party" rules allow a foreign government to veto the release of intelligence it provided to the US, even if the US government is willing to release it.
The pattern suggests that the remaining redactions in the Foreign Intelligence Files are not the work of the CIA or the FBI, but the result of foreign governments protecting their own assets. If a foreign agent had been tracked to Oswald, or if a foreign intelligence service had provided a tip that the FBI ignored, that information would be blacked out today under the guise of protecting international relations.
This creates a recursive loop of secrecy. The US government can claim it wants to be transparent while pointing to a foreign ally as the reason for the blackout. It is a convenient shield. The record shows that foreign intelligence was central to the investigation, but the "Third Party" rule ensures that the identity of those foreign actors—and the nature of their involvement—remains a state secret.
The Reactive Trail
When we look at the components of the Foreign Intelligence Files—the "correspondence, telegrams, interviews"—we are looking at the debris of a crisis. These are the formats of reporting and intelligence gathering, not the formats of operational planning.
The desk's reading is that this collection serves as a map of the cover-up, not a map of the crime. By focusing on the "exchanged" records, the ARRB was given the paperwork of the aftermath. The records show how the CIA and FBI coordinated their stories with foreign counterparts to ensure the "lone gunman" narrative held water globally. They were not hunting for a conspiracy; they were managing the perception of one.
If a full, unredacted release of the master files were to occur, it would not show us a series of accidental discoveries. It would show the specific points where foreign intelligence contradicted the Warren Commission's findings and the specific instructions given to the FBI to suppress those contradictions. The still-withheld pages are protecting the names of the foreign assets who knew the truth and the American officials who paid them to stay silent.
The pattern is consistent: the US government provides the evidence of its activity, but never the evidence of its intent. The Foreign Intelligence Files are a ledger of what was said, but the master files—the ones still locked in the vaults—contain what was actually done. The cost of this curation was a permanent fracture in the public's trust, a price paid by a nation that was told it had a lone lunatic in a book depository when it actually had a global intelligence network managing the silence.