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Fingers were pointed at Dallas police after John F Kennedy was assassinated in the city, the declassified documents reveal.

Those who believed the local force was behind the killing included Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev.

And one FBI informant even named patrolman JD Tippit, who was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald 45 minutes after JFK died, as the President’s actual killer.

According to a note sent to agents, the source was told by an H ­Theodore Lee that “the president was actually assassinated by Dallas police officer TIPPIT”.

© Provided by Trinity Mirror Plc Dallas patrolman JD Tippit was named to by an FBI informant as the real gunman. The informant said Lee got the information from several previously active members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

The note also said a week before the assassination Tippit, who was alleged to be the head of the right-wing John Birch Society in Dallas, and a third man – possibly Oswald – met in Jack Ruby’s nightclub.

Ruby shot Oswald two days after Kennedy’s assassination and died of lung cancer in 1967.

The two men had supposedly met in a Florida airport as part of a group heading to Cuba to “cut sugar cane” and were heard discussing “Big Bird” by an informant.

Lee would later tell the FBI that communist Oswald was somehow involved in the anti-Castro movements as well as the FPCC, which allowed him to see both “sides of the issues involved”.

© Provided by Trinity Mirror Plc Moments before the assassination.

Tippit was in his patrol car when he stopped Oswald as he walked down Patton Avenue in Dallas.

After talking to Oswald through the window, he got out and was shot three times with a .38 calibre revolver. An autopsy showed he then took a bullet to the right side of his temple as he lay on the pavement.

However, the suspicions about the Dallas police were not confined to the US. CIA notes of a May 1964 conversation with Khrushchev said the Soviet leader did not believe American security was so “inept” that the president could be killed without a conspiracy.

He believed the Dallas Police Department was an “accessory” to the assassination and the CIA source “got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American Right Wing being behind this conspiracy”.

© Provided by Trinity Mirror Plc Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev believed there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s death.

When the source said Oswald and Ruby were both “mad” and he “acted on his own… Khrushchev said flatly that he did not believe this”.

The Soviets also suspected then Vice President Lyndon B Johnson could have been behind the killing, according to one of the 2,891 newly released documents.

In a note from December 1, 1966, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover said he was aware a US mole in Moscow was saying the KGB was “in possession of data purporting to indicate Johnson was responsible for the assassination”.

It came as the Kremlin feared it would be blamed for the President’s death and face retaliation.

The details emerged in a message to the White House called Reaction of Soviet and Communist Party Officials to the Assassination of President John F Kennedy.

The declassified documents, containing more than 30,000 pages, have done little so far to silence conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald was a fall guy for a wider plot.

© Provided by Trinity Mirror Plc The Kremlin feared it would be blamed for the President’s death and face retaliation.

One document from 1975 contains a partial deposition by Richard Helms, a deputy CIA director under Kennedy.

The intelligence chief later became CIA chief to the Rockefeller Commission, studying unauthorised CIA activities in domestic affairs. Commission lawyers appeared to be seeking information on which foreign leaders might have been the subject of assassination attempts by or on behalf of the CIA.

A lawyer asked Helms: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of ­President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or agent?”

But the document ends short of his answer. The papers also show Helms, who later served under the administrations of Lyndon B Johnson and Richard Nixon , claim that Johnson used to say Kennedy’s killing was an act of foreign retribution.

Helms said in a deposition: “President Johnson used to go around saying the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem.”

South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem was arrested and killed just weeks before Kennedy during a US-backed coup.



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