10 BIG takeaways from JFK files released by Donald Trump: Did Harvey Oswald act alone? Find out

President Donald Trump-led United States administration on Wednesday released tens of thousands of classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F Kennedy.

The 80,000 pages of previously classified records being published without redactions, according to a statement from the office of Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence(DNI).

The files can be downloaded from the US National Archives website.

Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. As his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown, shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.

Here are some of the top revelations in the files about the assassination of the former president of United States:

Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.

Oswald was a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.

Did Harvey Oswald act alone?

A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B Johnson established to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy.

The ballistic reports and witness testimonies in the newly-released 2025 files say that does not add up. These documents suggest a shot may have come from the grassy knoll — an elevated area ahead of Kennedy’s motorcade—contradicting the lone-gunman story.

The KGB role: Files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a US professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB. The memo, news agency AP reported, said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB”

The KGB was Soviet Union's main intelligence and security agency from 1954 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Anyone could control Oswald: The memo added that as Oswald was described in the files, the KGB official doubted “that anyone could control Oswald, but noted that the KGB watched him closely and constantly while he was in the USSR.” It also noted that the file reflected that Oswald was a poor shot when he tried target firing in the Soviet Union.

CIA involvement: A newly declassified memo from November 1963, referenced in Wikipedia’s CIA Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory page, reveals how a CIA officer expressed alarm over Oswald’s activities, including the fact that he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before killing Kennedy.

Some of the previously released documents have offered details on the way intelligence services operated at the time, including CIA cables and memos discussing visits by Oswald to the Soviet and Cuban embassies during a trip to Mexico City just weeks before the assassination.

Scans, pictures and audio: Most of the files are scanned copies of original documents, some too blurred to be read after so many decades since JF Kennedy's assassination. There are also some photographs and sounds recordings from the 1960s, among the files released now.

CIA’s Gary Underhill's confession: One of the key revelations in the files is about CIA operative Gary Underhill who had told his friend that the intelligence agency was responsible for the former president's death.

The JFK files revealed that Gary Underhill fled Washington in a hurry a day after Kennedy's death. “The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening, he showed up at the home of friends in New Jersey,” the unredacted document says, adding that he feared for his life.

“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.”

Less than six months after this, theCIAoperative was found dead in his Washington residence

Operation Mongoose: The fresh tranche of documents, according to a Times of India report, shed further light on "Operation Mongoose," a previously secret CIA-led sabotage operation against Fidel Castro's Cuban regime authorized by JFK himself. These insights underscore the extent to which covert Cold War conflicts were deeply entwined with JFK’s presidency.

Trump’s Promise: The JFK file release was one of the transparency promise Donald Trump made soon after taking office of the President..Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on X that "President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency" while sharing the news about the release of the documents.