2017 JFK ARC releases: A comparison with the NF16 list

[First posted on November 30, 2017, at rgr-cyt.org.]

In a recent series of posts here, I have been looking at the records released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under the JFK Records Act. These are the JFK assassination records that were originally mandated to be released by October 26, 2017. Despite the newspaper coverage, there are still many records that have not yet been released to the public. This post looks at what we know about these as yet unseen records.

As noted in a previous post, the records that NARA has been releasing since July 2017 are of two kinds: records “previously withheld in full” (WIF records), and records “previously withheld in part” (WIP records). WIF records have never been released in any form by any governmental agency or investigation. WIP records have been released at some point in the past, but with redactions which range from a single two letter prefix (cryptonym prefix) on a single page, to multiple pages which have been completely blanked out.

The WIF records, however, have received the majority of the attention in the run up to October 26. These records are by no means terra incognita. In response to an FOIA request, NARA released a detailed list of these documents in January/February 2016. I have tracked down some of the details about this list from the following sources:

a 2/4/2016 post at WhoWhatWhy.org (here)
a post at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, apparently put up February 10, 2016 (here)
A file posted at the official FOIA online website (here)

The FOIA website shows that a request for this information was submitted to NARA by Michael Raznitsky on Nov. 30, 2015, and a “partial” response was provided January 21, 2016. “Partial” seems to mean that parts of the list were redacted (as the annotations on the list show).

The file posted was originally cited by both WWW and MFF as listing 3603 records. It does not. John Newman’s website 2017JFK.org (here) attributes the figure of 3603 WIF records remaining to an April 15, 2015 presentation by NARA’s Martha Murphy (available on youtube here). I can’t find where Murphy gives this specific number, but she does make the important point that NARA’s online database of finding aids for the JFK ARC has many inaccuracies concerning which records are WIF, and which are WIP.

In any case, as MFF later acknowledged (here), the list NARA provided to Raznitsky under the FOIA in 2016 (hereafter simplified to “NF16”), had data for 3598 records. The file posted online omitted one page, which NARA provided to MFF (available here). With this correction, all the data for these records is publicly available. Many of these records list 0 pages; this means that the number of pages has not yet been entered into the NARA catalog. As a result of this, we do not yet know the total number of pages remaining to be released. We do have all the RIF numbers, which are the record numbering system devised by NARA for the ARC, and we do know which agencies provided the records. MFF gives a breakdown of records per agency for NF16 (here), but it is slightly off. The corrected numbers are as follows:

RIF prefix Agency No. Records
202
173
198
111
177
157
178
181
176
119
180
137
179
104
124
JCS
ONI
Army
DIA
LBJ Library
Church Cmte
Rock Comm
NARA
NARA-C
DoS
HSCA
IRS
DoJ
CIA
FBI
2
2
6
14
19
26
31
39
45
94
164
178
549
1171
1258
Totals 3598

(Note that 176 records are not from the US Secret Service, but from several collections held by NARA, in this case the papers of C. Douglas Dillon, Sec. of the Treasury and head of the Secret Service at the time of the Kennedy assassination. 181 records, on the other hand, are records produced by NARA itself)

The RIF numbers also allow us to check which of these records have been released in 2017 (as of 29 Nov). As noted in my previous post, NARA has provided spreadsheets which list all the data for the records released so far, but there are some ambiguities in the spreadsheets. As a result, MFF lists 1211 WIF records released as of 17 Nov, but I count 1179 records, 32 fewer than MFF counts.

Comparing the RIFs of the released records to the RIFs listed in NF16, we can see that WIP vs WIF numbers are still a problem. First, there are 31 released records which are listed in NF16, but the NARA release spreadsheet gives their status as WIP. These records are:

104-10413-10305
124-90046-10009
157-10002-10151
157-10002-10179
177-10002-10109
181-10002-10005
181-10002-10017
181-10002-10022
181-10002-10033
181-10002-10036
181-10002-10056
181-10002-10094
181-10002-10113
181-10002-10115
181-10002-10125
181-10002-10126
181-10002-10131
181-10002-10132
181-10002-10135
181-10002-10137
181-10002-10141
181-10002-10142
181-10002-10211
181-10002-10212
181-10002-10213
181-10002-10219
181-10002-10221
181-10002-10224
181-10002-10225
181-10002-10245
181-10002-10248

Second, there are 19 released records where the NARA release spreadsheet gives their status as WIF, but they are NOT listed in NF16. These records are:

124-90100-10464
144-10001-10103
144-10001-10110
177-10001-10437
179-40007-10244
180-10097-10488
194-10001-10392
194-10010-10397
194-10010-10421
194-10012-10037
194-10012-10139
194-10013-10328
194-10013-10341
194-10013-10342
194-10013-10343
194-10013-10344
194-10013-10345
194-10013-10346
194-10013-10448

I believe that the discrepancies between NF16 and the data in the release spreadsheets is due to NARA reviewing previous records which were not correctly accounted for. The RIF sheets that accompany the majority of the new releases support this suggestion.

For example, of the 31 records which NF16 lists as WIF and the release spreadsheet lists as WIP, the RIF sheets for 27 of these are stamped “Released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 ($$ USC 2107 Note). Case#: NW 54545 Date: 10-12-2017”, with the Current Status marking on the sheet all originally reading ‘Withhold’, but in two cases crossed out and hand marked ‘Open.’

I take this to mean that these records were processed as a set on 10/12, at which point the incorrect status was noted and corrected. (Also, it is interesting that most of these records were from NARA itself, i.e. prefix 181.)

In the case of the records that were not listed in NF16, but are marked on the release spreadsheets WIF, this was in at least some cases the reverse process. For example, on record # 194-10013-10328 the Current Status marking was “Released with Deletions”. This would explain why it was not listed in NF16. As for its release now listed as WIF, I assume that this was also due to review, though there is no marking on the RIF sheet to support this.

The end result: 1191 records in NF16 have now been released, with 2407 to go. Here is table of these records by agency:

RIF prefix Agency No. Records
202
173
198
181
111
177
157
178
176
119
180
137
104
179
124
JCS
ONI
Army
NARA
DIA
LBJ Library
Church Cmte
Rock Comm
NARA-C
DOS
HSCA
IRS
CIA
DOJ
FBI
2
2
6
13
14
15
23
26
45
94
101
178
234
549
1103
Totals 2405