The long-awaited release of tens of thousands of files on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has sparked a desperate search for new clues in the shocking crime more than 60 years later.
The trove of previously classified pages spanning decades was made available by President Trump on the National Archives website Tuesday, with most seemingly only confirming information long known.
However, some interesting snippets being pored over include documents shedding light on theories eyeing a “small clique” in the CIA being involved — as well as an apparent KGB investigation to find if assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was one of its agents.
A memo dated June 1967 details how a former US Army intelligence officer, Gary Underhill, fled Washington, DC, “very agitated” the day after Kennedy was shot — and spoke with a friend about how a “small clique within the CIA” was behind the assassination, six months before he was found dead in his apartment.
“The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening, he showed up at the home of a friend in New Jersey.
“He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country,” the memo reads.
“Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it a suicide.”
Underhill, a former US Army captain who worked as an intelligent officer during World War II, was said to be on a “first-name basis with many of the top brass in the Pentagon” and on “intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CIA officials.”
“The friends whom Underhill visited say he was sober but badly shook. They say he attributed the Kennedy murder to a CIA clique which was carrying on a lucrative racket in gun-running, narcotics, and other contraband,” the passage reads.
It noted that the CIA clique allegedly killed Kennedy because he caught “wind” of their business and was “killed before he could ‘blow the whistle.’”