Newly-declassified files reveal that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. served as a “voluntary informant” to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before his 1968 assassination.
The CIA released an additional 1,450 pages of “historic material” related to the shooting of then-senator and presidential candidate RFK on Thursday, bringing the total number of declassified pages on the matter from the agency to nearly 5,000, according to a statement from Director John Ratcliffe.
Many of the new pages detailed a 1955 trip RFK took to the former Soviet Union along with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, revealing to the public for the first time that he volunteered his on-the-ground experiences while visiting the U.S. adversary to the CIA.
“Mr. Kennedy served the Agency as a voluntary informant,” receiving briefings prior to and following his trip to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia and other locations around the U.S.S.R., the files state.
According to Ratcliffe, that revelation shows the late senator’s “patriotic commitment to serving his country.”
RFK said in one of his briefings to the CIA, “On 29 Aug 55, while in Novosibirsk, USSR, a friend and I visited a State machine factory. The factory has 3,500 employees, of whom one third are women. The wage scale is between 840 and 2,500 rubles.”
“The Director of the plant whose name I do not recall was frosty, although the engineer was friendly,” the Democrat presidential hopeful told the agency, according to the documents.
The recent release also uncovered some details of the CIA’s investigation into Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian-Jordanian man currently serving a life sentence for RFK’s assassination.
While the agency looked into his international connections and possible connections to terrorist organizations, they did not find any proof that he was affiliated with any such groups, the documents state.
The declassification came in order to fulfill President Donald Trump’s executive order to release all records related to RFK’s assassination, with Ratcliffe saying he delivered on the president’s “commitment to maximum transparency, enabling the CIA to shine light on information that serves the public interest.”
“I am proud to share our work on this incredibly important topic with the American people,” the director added.
Trump’s executive order, signed just days after he re-entered office in January, also demanded the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Breitbart News reported.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard worked closely with Trump and the CIA to declassify the latest RFK documents.
“Today’s release is another important step in fulfilling President Trump’s commitment to maximum transparency. Thank you to those at the CIA, ODNI, and NARA who worked hard to locate, review, and digitize these documents, many of which have never been released publicly before,” she said in a statement. “We will continue coordinating with our partners across the Intelligence Community to fulfill President Trump’s promise of maximum transparency.”
Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praised the newest declassification, saying, “Lifting the veil on the RFK papers is a necessary step toward restoring trust in American government.”
“I commend President Trump for his courage and his commitment to transparency. I’m grateful also to Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe for their dogged efforts to root out and declassify these documents,” he added in a statement.
While the CIA has brushed off claims that they are connected to the Kennedy assassinations as conspiracy theories, RFK Jr. said in 2023 that there is “overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved” in the “murder” of his uncle, JFK.
“I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point,” the younger Kennedy said in an interview with New York radio station WABC 770.
The HHS secretary has also cast doubt on whether Sirhan was the lone gunman who took his father’s life, even supporting the convict’s parole from prison in 2022, which was denied by California Gov. Gavin Newsom at the request of other family members, Breitbart News reported.
The declassified RFK documents can be found here.
