This note begins an introduction to the main FBI files in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. FBI records make up about 46 percent of the ARC. The next largest contributor to the Collection, the CIA, makes up only about 27 percent. FBI records are thus by far the largest component of the ARC, and well worth a careful look.
Core and related files
The FBI files most relevant to the JFK assassination are the “core and related files”. Here is a list:
The files on the top left are the main investigation files for the assassination. The letters in front stand for the unit where the files were kept. HQ is of course Washington D.C., DL is Dallas, NO is New Orleans, where Lee Oswald spent a couple of months in 1963, and BA is Baltimore, where the Kennedy autopsy took place.
“Warren Commission” files are administrative (“liaison”) files relating to requests and correspondence from and to the WC.
Then there are a number of files on Oswald, the largest being the HQ file, then files from Dallas, Mexico, New Orleans, New York, and Little Rock. The files on Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald, are from HQ, Dallas, and New Orleans.
These are the “core” files.
The “related” files on the right side are on people related to Oswald in one way or another. They include files on Oswald’s wife Marina, his mother Marguerite, his Dallas acquaintance George DeMohrenschildt, two figures from Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, and Ruth and Michael Paine, two more of Oswald’s Dallas acquaintances.
Several of these files are very long. 62-109060 may be as long as 100,000 pages all by itself. For those trying to keep track of such things, all the core and related files are released in full. There are no redactions left in this large chunk of records.
In addition to the “core and related” files, there are also “field office” files on the assassination and the various people who met or knew Oswald. These files come from FBI offices across the country. They are massively redundant for the most part, with many documents appearing in the core and related files as well, often multiple times, but occasionally they have information not otherwise available.
Other FBI files
The core and related files, plus the field office assassination files, are far from the only FBI records in the ARC. Relative percentages are very hard to estimate without diving into the sea of paper, but at a guess, core and related files make up maybe one third to one half of the FBI ARC records.
Another huge chunk of FBI files are the HSCA – FBI subject files, amounting to at least another 200,000 pages or so. Hard to say how many individual records these pages are stuffed into.
ARRB records include at least one attempt to summarize FBI files in the collection, a 98 page table. This is not the final list; the date on it is February 3, 1998, and there are notes indicating that not all records have made their way into the collection.
On-line releases
In summary, FBI files are in many ways the true core of the ARC. Unfortunately, most are not available online. Some were released to the public long before the ARC was established. All of these earlier releases have lengthy redactions. (Some sections of the files were not released period.) These redacted versions are available online (in partial versions) in several places, including the MFF website, which has the four biggest core files.
The unredacted ARC copies of the FBI files are for the most part NOT available on-line. In particular, the ARC releases of core and related files are nowhere to be found on-line. The huge release of FBI records that came in 2017-2018 included mostly material designated NAR (Not assassination related) by the FBI. The ARRB agreed with this designation, which is why they were allowed to sit in the vaults for 25 years before finally coming out.
Ironic that the truly relevant FBI files are much harder to come by than the totally irrelevant ones.