JFK files released latest: Documents reveal KGB saw Lee Harvey Oswald as a ‘poor shot’ before assassination

A 1991 CIA memo cites a former KGB agent named Nikonov, who was tasked to determine whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the Soviet Union’s secret police.

After trawling through five thick files on the assassin, Nikonov cast doubt that Oswald was a KGB recruit.

Nikonov said he “doubted that anyone could control Oswald” but noted that the KGB “watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.”

Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and lived in Minsk before returning to the U.S. with a wife and baby in 1962.

One of the files included a memo from the CIA’s St Petersburg station dated November 20, 1991, which said the KGB, the former security agency for the Soviet Union, watched JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald closely.

The report cites a KGB official named Nikonov who had reviewed five thick files about Oswald to determine was part of the now-defunct Soviet secret police. Nikonov determined he was not.

He did, however, comment on Oswald’s marksmanship and said he was a “poor shot when he tried target firing in the USSR.”

About 2,200 files – consisting of approximately 63,000 pages – were posted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration on Tuesday evening.

It came after President Donald Trump teased the release on Monday while visiting the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and asserted that the government would not redact “anything.”

Though Trump previously stated about 80,000 pages would be made public.

Researchers, both professional and amateur, will need time to pore over the recently released JFK assassination documents, but as it stands, it’s doubtful that anything truly revelatory will be found in Tuesday’s trove.

News outlets spoke to numerous authors and historians who all agreed they’d encountered little new information and noted that many of the documents had been released during previous disclosures.

On social media things weren’t much different; every time someone thought they’d found something interesting, someone else pointed out the information had been released years — sometimes decades — prior.

It’s not a surprising development; in 2023, the National Archives estimated that 99 percent of the government’s documents related to JFK’s assassination had been made public at that time.

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy,” told Technogias Research that he believed people looking for a smoking gun that solves the Kennedy assassination in Donald Trump’s document release are going to be let down.

“I’m just telling you that we will learn things,” Sabato told the broadcaster. “But it may not be about the Kennedy assassination and people who are expecting, you know, to crack the case after 61 years, are going to be bitterly disappointed.”

Many of the documents released on Tuesday had already been made public. In 2023, the National Archives estimated that 99 percent of the government’s documents related to JFK’s assassination had been made public at that point.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard heaped praise onto her boss, Donald Trump, following Tuesday’s JFK document dump.

She noted that Trump had kept his promise to release the documents — which he did — though it’s still unclear if there is anything significant in the documents that hadn’t already been revealed in previous records releases.

See Gabbard’s statement below:

Back in 2021, Donald Trump tossed around the idea of releasing the remaining JFK assassination files. During an interview with the New York Times at the time, Trump seemed fine accepting the general consensus that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The reason I did that was because I thought it was appropriate,” Trump told the paper at the time, referencing his desire to release the documents. “When you have something that’s so sacredly secret, it really makes it sound very bad. I think they maybe got it right, probably got it right. Let people examine it.”

Trump has not given any indication that the contents of the records released on Tuesday have shifted his perspective.

David J Garrow, a historian with an expertise in US intelligence agencies, told The New York Times that the trove of documents related to JFK that were released on Tuesday were “profoundly more impenetrable” than previous mass document releases.

This is, in part, because thousands of documents lack any kind of annotation; its unclear which agencies produced them and many lack identifying information like file numbers.