Assuming some government agency actually did kill Kennedy, how long would they have to wait until admitting what happened would carry no consequences? I feel that it really wouldn't be that long. 100 years? Less?
Why on earth would they literally ever do that? There are always numerous procedural backdoors on how to avoid that if you play by the book (can't release from archives if it ain't archived for reason XYZ for example), and endless options if you don't.
If you as chief just take a single copy of some strong evidence and burn it, that's about it, who is gonna stop you. People on top of these power pyramids have usually more massive ego than their body can actually take so its easy to feel righteous about such acts.
Out of all the possible reasons, killing one's own president is confidently on top of the list of reasons to never ever disclose.
Not that I subscribe to any particular theory since we don't know and probably never will, but there are way too many weird coincidences and events to make the lone shooter theory anything but a fringe, unprobable one.
But given how massively CIA et al fucked up long term almost everything they took upon, this would have to be their best-executed mission by far. That doesn't mean somebody else wasn't more competent/lucky.
A story from my former soviet-enslaved country in east europe - after iron curtain fell, secret services were intensively burning all the heaps of incriminating paperwork gathered in prior decades on themselves and their collaborators, and bribes were done to get ones that evaded this. Very few remained. That's how you easily erase past, no other digital copies on distributed tapes. Now most apparatchiks are in politics or organized crime, often both.
Unfortunately some of it won't be released, particularly the note Oswald passed to Special Agent Hosty a few days before the assassination. Allegedly it was a threat to stop hassling his family but we'll never know. Hosty was ordered by his superiors to destroy it, and promptly flushed it down the toilet.
Or the letter in Oswald's handwriting (no name on it) to James Jesus Angleton (head of CIA wetworks), released in the past couple of years, asking him for clarification on what he was expected to do while in Dallas.
Never, as long as the CIA still exists. The institutional reputation of the agency is very low right now among large swaths of the population. Imagine what would happen if it was revealed that they had a hand in killing a sitting US president? No matter how long ago it was, their reputation and credibility (and the reputation and credibility of all the institutions and people who continue to uphold them as patriotic defenders of democracy) would be forever tainted (even beyond what it is today).
I'm not so sure. All the current employees of the CIA are absolved, simply because they were not even alive at that time. All the principles have been long dead. I think they could credibly claim "mistakes were made" and move on. It's a perfect opportunity to sort of wipe the slate clean.
Something to keep in mind is that any intelligence service gets blamed for their failures, but gets no bump in reputation for their successes. This means that the more activities any service does, the worse their reputation will be. Because no one has a 100% track record.
I mean the Cia peddled cocaine in America for extra spending money. I really don't think their reputational issues are because they have too many visible failures.
