The government just posted another tranche of documents that the conspiracy theorists hope will tell us who really killed John F. Kennedy. Even though we are unlikely to learn anything important about that, we are learning a great deal about us.
There are 2,200 documents in this latest data dump, comprising about 63,400 pages of official memoranda and handwritten notes and blurry photographs, and they were released without anyone apparently having given much thought to organization.
It will take months or longer before historians sift through all of them.
So far, the most vivid details appear to be those about Yuri Nosenko—the KGB spy who defected to the United States in 1964, before his CIA overlords turned on him, believing that he was still spying for the Soviets. Eventually, his CIA overlords’ overlords turned on them, and Nosenko was returned to good standing. Officially.