The release of a 1961 plan to break up the CIA revives an old conspiracy theory about who killed JFK

A key adviser warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of “all clandestine activities” and breaking up the CIA.

The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that 47% of the political officers in U.S. embassies were controlled by the CIA.

Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Thursday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it.

Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercuts the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also say they understand why doubters gravitate toward the theory.

“You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book, “Case Closed,” details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman.

Critics of the Oswald-acted-alone conclusion had predicted that previously unreleased material would bolster their positions. One of them, Jefferson Morley, the editor of the JFK Facts blog, said Thursday that newly public material is important to “the JFK case.” Morley is vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination.

Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is still more unreleased material, including 2,400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family.

Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.

“It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn’t pay close attention,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century"

Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the “origin story” of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA.

Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later.

Schlesinger told Kennedy that all covert operations should be cleared with the U.S. State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled.

Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now are “non-CIA,” and in most places, ambassadors do not automatically defer to the CIA.

“CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors, because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information.

But he noted: “If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you’re going to have a different picture. You’re going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations.”

Schlesinger's memo ends with a previously redacted page that spells out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley sees it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating.

The plan never came to fruition.

Sabato said that Kennedy simply “needed the CIA” in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964.

“Let’s remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,” Sabato said.

Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK’s presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations “avidly.”

“I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community,” Naftali said. “You can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he’s directing it.”

Associated Press writer David Collins in Hartford Connecticut, contributed to this report.

FILE - Secret servicemen standing on running boards follow the presidential limousine carrying President John F. Kennedy, right, rear seat, and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, left, as well as Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie, in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963. (AP Photo/Jim Altgens, File)

FILE - In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, the limousine carrying mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy races toward the hospital seconds after he was shot in Dallas. (AP Photo/Justin Newman, File)

FILE - Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard University historian and President John F. Kennedy's former personal assistant, holds a brief lecture as his book "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" was presented to Italian public on Jan. 24, 1966 in Rome. Sitting at left is Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini Jr. who introduced Schlesinger to the audience. (AP Photo/Gianni Foggia, File)

FILE - This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows President John F. Kennedy riding in motorcade with first lady Jacqueline Kenndy in Dallas, Texas. (AP Photo, file)

LONDON (AP) — Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet KGB officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets to Britain, has died. He was 86.

Gordievsky died March 4 in England, where he had lived since defecting in 1985. Police said Saturday that they are not treating his death as suspicious.

Historians consider Gordievsky one of the era’s most important spies. In the 1980s, his intelligence helped avoid a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.

Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became KGB station chief.

He was one of several Soviet agents who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by Britain's MI6 in the early 1970s.

The 1990 book “KGB: The Inside Story,” co-authored by Gordievsky and British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, says Gordievsky came to believe that “the Communist one-party state leads inexorably to intolerance, inhumanity and the destruction of liberties.” He decided that the best way to fight for democracy “was to work for the West.”

He worked for British intelligence for more than a decade during the chilliest years of the Cold War.

In 1983, Gordievsky warned the U.K. and U.S. that the Soviet leadership was so worried about a nuclear attack by the West that it was considering a first strike. As tensions spiked during a NATO military exercise in Germany, Gordievsky helped reassure Moscow that it was not precursor to a nuclear attack.

Soon after, U.S. President Ronald Reagan began moves to ease nuclear tensions with the Soviet Union.

In 1984, Gordievsky briefed soon-to-be Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ahead of his first visit to the U.K. — and also briefed the British on how to approach the reformist Gorbachev. Gorbachev's meeting with Prime Minister Thatcher was a huge success.

Ben Macintyre, author of a book about the double agent, “The Spy and the Traitor,” told the BBC that Gordievsky managed “in a secret way to launch the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”

Gordievsky was called back to Moscow for consultations in 1985, and decided to go despite fearing — correctly — that his role as a double agent had been exposed. He was drugged and interrogated but not charged, and Britain arranged an undercover operation to spirit him out of the Soviet Union — smuggled across the border to Finland in the trunk of a car.

He was the most senior Soviet spy to defect during the Cold War. Documents declassified in 2014 showed that Britain considered Gordievsky so valuable that hatcher sought to cut a deal with Moscow: If Gordievsky’s wife and daughters were allowed to join him in London, Britain would not expel all the KGB agents he had exposed.

Moscow rejected the offer, and Thatcher ordered the expulsion of 25 Russians, despite objections from Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, who fared it could scuttle relations just as Gorbachev was easing the stalemate between Russia and the West.

Moscow responded by expelling 25 Britons, sparking a second round in which each side kicked out six more officials. But, despite Howe’s fears, diplomatic relations were never severed.

Gordievsky’s family was kept under 24-hour KGB surveillance for six years before being allowed to join him in England in 1991. He lived the rest of his life under U.K. protection in the quiet town of Godalming, 40 miles (64 kilometers) southwest of London.

In Russia, Gordievsky was sentenced to death for treason. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 2007 for “services to the security of the United Kingdom.” It is the same accolade held by the fictional British spy James Bond.

In 2008, Gordievsky claimed he had been poisoned and spent 34 hours in a coma after taking tainted sleeping pills given to him by a Russian business associate.

The risks he faced were underscored in 2018 when former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned and seriously sickened with a Soviet-made nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury, where he had been living quietly for years.

The Surrey Police force said officers were called to an address in Godalming on March 4, where “an 86-year-old man was found dead at the property.”

It said counterterrorism officers are leading the investigation, but “the death is not currently being treated as suspicious” and “there is nothing to suggest any increased risk to members of the public.”

Former Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky after receives the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and Saint George from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in London, Oct. 17, 2007. (Martin Keene/PA via AP, file)

FILE- Former Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky after receiving the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and Saint George from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in London, Oct. 17, 2007. (Fiona Hanson/PA via AP, file)

FILE - In this Oct. 26, 1999 file photo, Oleg Gordievsky, a former deputy head of the KGB in London, prepares to testify before a House Armed Services Subcommittee in Washington. He died March 4 in England at the age of 86. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook, File)