Heads up! More FBI docs have been added to the Mary Ferrell Foundation collection. These docs were previously unavailable online. They date from early in the investigation and offer much interesting detail and atmosphere, well worth a look!
The Dallas Field Office file
The new additions to the MFF collection are from FBI casefile 89-43, compiled by the FBI’s Dallas field office. (For a note on the “core” FBI files on the JFK assassination, see here.)
There are 785 records in the new MFF posting, dating from the first five days of the investigation (November 22-26). There is, of course, considerable overlap between the Dallas field office file and the FBI HQ file (62-109060), but they are by no means identical. There is a very handy cross reference worksheet for 89-43, listing which items in 89-43 are incorporated in other files. The worksheet is available at MFF, here.
A brief look at this list shows that many of the items in this new posting are not available in other files. This means these newly posted docs are important reading for anyone interested in the FBI investigation of the assassination.
Even those docs which are available in the HQ file can be useful. The HQ assassination file is available online mostly in a release dating from the 1980s. There are still many redactions in this version. The newly posted field office docs, however, are apparently ALL released in full. Don’t know when or where MFF got these, but good job!
There are also many places where the HQ file and the field office file have different marginalia and markings or are cited in differing ways, all of which careful researchers will want to see in detail.
Examples of new material
Individual documents added to FBI casefiles are called “serials.” One does not have to look far to find a number of striking docs. The first serial in the field office file (89-43-1) is a memo for the record written by Gordon Shanklin, Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas office. Apparently written sometime in the afternoon of 11/22, it is a vivid depiction of the confusion and shock in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Shanklin is bombarded with phone calls from FBI HQ, which apparently was picking up all sort of misinformation. They have heard a Secret Service agent was killed, they have heard President Johnson had a heart-attack and is “near death”. Shanklin is also not getting 100% accurate information, believing that a Dallas PD office was shot with a rifle (it was a revolver), and so on.
The second serial is also from 11/22, and gives Special Agent Ray Hall’s description of the Book Depository room where Oswald fired his shots. The report is filled with many important details and has Hall’s additions in blue ink. Apparently Hall both saw the site himself and talked to the Dallas PD officer C. J. Day. He describes “some brown wrapping paper … in which the rifle had apparently been wrapped in.” He notes the details of the rifle itself, including the “empty brass clip” in the rifle with “SMI 952” written on the side. This description matches Day’s own description, apparently also written on 11/22, which is available in the Dallas PD records (here).
Two cents
It is hard to believe that such important records were not previously available online, but that seems to be the case. I have not yet found copies of Dallas field office records at any other websites. The MFF division of the postings into five days is especially worth noting. The file is by no means in strict chronological order, and the JFK database does not have dates for many of these records. This means the guys at MFF have actually gone through the file, looking for serials from these five specific days. Very valuable work. Big thumbs up for MFF!