Did the Central Intelligence Agency in 1978 only request to black out mentions of Israel when journalists and historians sought to read documents about investigations into President John F. Kennedy's assassination? No, that's not true: The CIA wanted other things to be redacted, too, as seen in other files from the JFK collection. According to the agency's website, it generally doesn't release information about "the sources and methods of intelligence collection".
The claim originated from a post (archived here) published on X on March 18, 2025. It opened:
The CIA requested that any mention of ISRAEL be redacted in the JFK files.
Israel is literally the ONLY thing they're requesting to be redacted.
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Mar 19 13:37:41 2025 UTC)
The X.com post by podcaster Stew Peters, described as a conspiracy theorist and anti-semite by the Anti-Defamation League, shared two files where some sentence fragments mentioning Israel were surrounded by manually drawn square brackets indicating agents wanted that information protected from public release.
Both pages displayed CIA's stamps that said the agency "has no objection to declassification" of the documents, which was followed by a handwritten addition: "EXCEPT BRACKETS" and the date of the note: "8-7-98".
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Mar 19 13:52:09 2025 UTC)
The documents from the post were authentic. They can be found on the National Archives website here (archived here) and here (archived here).
The X post, however, cherry-picked just two files from the vast collection of JFK files containing millions of pages (archived here).
Contrary to the assertion made on X, the CIA requested not only mentions of Israel to be redacted but many more things. The list includes names (archived here) and references to specific agency's projects (archived here), as seen in the 2025 batch of declassified JFK files.
The CIA website (archived here) describes the categories of what the agency generally does not release to the public:
The CIA charter provides that information concerning the sources and methods of intelligence collection must remain secret. Such information is not available for public disclosure and is redacted from documents, but significant amounts of analytical or publicly derived information are available.
Even in a newly re-released memo (archived here) prepared for Kennedy by his adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the section discussing undercover CIA personnel based overseas in such countries as Austria, Chile and France was previously redacted (archived here) when parts of the Kennedy file were released in the years before the 2025 release by the Trump Administration.
Lead Stories contacted the CIA and the National Archives for additional comments. If we receive a response, the story will be updated as appropriate.
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