ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AND RESEARCH CENTER

AARC in The New York Times

TNYT-300x146 AARC in The New York Times

March 19, 2025, 11:23 a.m. EST

It’s no secret that the C.I.A. has long placed agents undercover as State Department officials. Daniel Alcorn, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, the largest private collection of material related to the Kennedy assassination, speculated that the newly released portion of Schlesinger’s memo to Kennedy about the practice had long been redacted because it confirmed the C.I.A.’s cover arrangements. “I guess they consider that a matter of secrecy,” he said. “They really just didn’t want the embarrassment or the negative attention.”

A newly unredacted portion of a 1961 memo to President Kennedy describes how the C.I.A. had placed about 1,500 agents overseas as State Department employees. The aide who authored the memo, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that the practice, which was originally meant to be temporary and limited, was threatening the State Department’s control of foreign policy.

“In the Paris Embassy today, there are 128 CIA people,” Schlesinger wrote to Kennedy. “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passers-by noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.”

RELATED: Jefferson Morley on the latest JFK Documents

JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Documents Release

544-5445812_logo-national-archives-and-records-administration-logo-hd-937816622-300x292 JFK Assassination Records - 2025 Documents ReleaseMarch 18, 2025 Release

In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.

The National Archives has partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176.

As of March 18, 2025, the records are available to access either online at this page or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page.

  • March 18, 2025 – 7 PM EST Release: 32,000 pages (1,123 PDF files)
  • March 18, 2025 – 10:30 PM EST Release: 31,400 pages (1,059 PDF files)
  • March 20, 2025 – 9:30 PM EST Release: 13,700 pages (161 PDF files)
  • March 26, 2025 – 3:30 PM EST Release: 53 pages (16 PDF files)
  • April 03, 2025 – 7:00 PM EST Release: 704 pages (207 PDF files)

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Trump’s promise to release JFK files sets off all-night scramble by DOJ’s National Security Division

Trump announced the files’ release while visiting the Kennedy Center Monday

March 18, 2025, 9:45 AM

The Justice Department’s National Security Division has been in a scramble trying to meet President Donald Trump’s promise on Monday to release declassified information from the JFK assassination investigation today.

Trump, during a visit Monday to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, announced the government would be releasing all the files on Kennedy’s assassination on Tuesday afternoon.

Less than half an hour after that announcement, the Justice Department’s office that handles foreign surveillance requests and other intelligence-related operations began to shift resources to focus on the task, sources said.

In an email just before 5 p.m. ET Monday, a senior official within DOJ’s Office of Intelligence said that even though the FBI had already conducted “an initial declassification review” of the documents, “all” of the attorneys in the operations section now had to provide “a second set of eyes” to help with this “urgent NSD-wide project.”

Eventually, however, it was other National Security Division attorneys who ended up having to help, sources said.

Attorneys from across the division were up throughout the night, into the early morning hours, each reading through as many as hundreds of pages of documents, sources said. Only prosecutors with an impending arrest or other imminent work did not have to help, sources said.

john-f-kennedy-gty-jef-250318_1742304664799_hpMain Trump's promise to release JFK files sets off all-night scramble by DOJ's National Security Division
President John F. Kennedy, shown during his news conference at the State Department.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

In promising the release of JFK files today, Trump said Monday that there is “a tremendous amount of paper.”

“You’ve got a lot of reading,” he said. “I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything. I said, ‘Just don’t redact. You can’t redact.'”

Trump in January signed an executive order directing the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” in order to end the decades-long wait for the release of the government’s secret files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.

 

By Mike Levine, Katherine Faulders, and Alexander Mallin

ABC News’ Hannah Demissie and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.