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Kennedy files show paranoid underworld

Released records contain FBI memos, CIA field reports.

Cuban assassination plots involving exploding seashells and poisoned swimsuits. Bounties on the heads of high-profile communists. A secretive investigation that tracked John F. Kennedy’s assassin into Mexico.

As scholars, journalists and the merely curious pored through a tranche of nearly 3,000 newly released secret documents related to the 35th president’s assassination, there were few if any major plot twists about what happened that day in Dallas in 1963.

Instead, the files — which include secret FBI memos, handwritten notes from top White House officials and CIA field reports — tell the story of America’s paranoid underworld in the 1960s.

One FBI file shows how agents tracked Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, on a bus trip to Mexico City in October 1963. It included information that Oswald was wearing a “short sleeve light colored sportshirt and no coat,” seemingly innocuous information that had been classified to protect the FBI’s “operations in foreign country.”

Another top-secret White House document detailed a proposal to create “Operation Bounty” to assassinate prominent Cuban communists — suggesting up to $20,000 to kill communist informers, up to $100,000 for Cuban government officials, and a morbidly cheeky 2 cents for the death of Fidel Castro.

For all that the new documents reveal, the reality is that the government’s most sensitive documents have yet to be released.

President Trump on Thursday ordered some records to remain secret for the next 180 days until they can be reviewed and redacted, after intelligence and law enforcement officials protested that some information in the records could compromise sources or America’s relations with other nations.