New name emerges in JFK assassination investigation

New questions about what government knew and when in President Kennedy assassination

ByDerricke Dennis ABCNews logo
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
New name emerges in JFK assassination investigation
A judge upheld an order by President Joe Biden, keeping thousands of documents from the John F. Kennedy investigation under wraps.

WASHINGTON -- The search continues for answers to lingering questions stemming from the John F. Kennedy assassination.

A judge upheld an order by President Joe Biden, keeping thousands of documents from the investigation under wraps.

But after six decades, a new name has emerged, ABC News reported.

And there are new questions about what the government knew and when.

Late last month, Biden issued a final order certifying documents from the JFK investigation to be released.

But the New York Times reports 4,684 of the files remain either partially, or fully, withheld from the public's eye.

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"On June 30, President Biden washed his hands on the JFK matter and said that this would be his last order about JFK," said Jefferson Morley, editor of the "JFK Facts" Substack.

Morley is editor of the blog "JFK Facts." He said some of the files being withheld could shed light on the CIA's investigation before JFK's death.

"What remains is about 4,400 documents from a variety of federal agencies, primarily the CIA, that still contain some redactions ranging from a word to a paragraph to a page to the whole document," Morley said.

Morley said there's one name that's been a mystery all these years, and was made public in the files: Reuben Efron, who worked for the CIA and was intercepting Lee Harvey Oswald's mail in the months before the assassination.

"Ruben Efron died 30 years ago. So they're not protecting the name of a living person. They're protecting the operational activity that he was engaged in, which was reading Lee Harvey Oswald mail," Morley said. "What it shows is that the CIA was running some kind of intelligence operation. We don't know exactly what, around Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, while President Kennedy was still alive."

It will now be up to individual government agencies to determine if and when more documents from the investigation are released in the future.