[updated 2-18]
I have repeatedly said that there are now fewer than 3000 redacted records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. Having been challenged more than once on this, I decided to do a complete recount of redactions released in 2022 and 2023.
This note, dating from February 2025, will serve as my final attempt at such a count. It is just too boring, and time consuming, to do again. Besides, more releases are certain to come in 2025, and the results of those releases will serve to confirm (or debunk) the accuracy of my count.
This post will give a general introduction to current redactions. Follow up posts will discuss details of redactions in the five departments/agencies which still have redacted records in the Collection.
The main points of the series:
- Only 2500+ redacted records are left, 1000 less than usually claimed
- The majority are lightly redacted, only one to two items for more than half of them
- Lengthy redacted files are often of marginal or no relevance to the assassination
- Short records are mostly pieces from longer files and need to be read in context
The point of this series is not that it’s fine if the ARC is left in its current state, or that the requirements of the JFK need not be met.
The point is that the public should not be misled to expect major revelations from marginal material. And as a corollary, the professional and hardworking archivists of the National Archives should not suffer baseless aspersions that they failed to do their job.
Scope of discussion
The discussion in this note is strictly limited to records in the JFK ARC. There is now a tendency to mention all sorts of documents as missing, or withheld, or whatever, that were never part of the Collection. I don’t have anything to say about these.
There are 515 records in the Collection still withheld in full, as required by the JFK Act. For more about these, see the page on withholding here. I don’t have anything to say about these in this note.
Finally, there are some miscellaneous records which are indeed “missing” (according to NARA), tapes which are unplayable, and typewriter cartridges which are currently indecipherable. I don’t have anything to say about these either.
What is a redaction?
“Redacting” refers to removing information (usually text) from a document and replacing it with a “holder” that indicates something has been removed. The ARC uses a blank box as a holder. One blank box = one redaction.
Sources for current redactions in the ARC
The basic source for the status of records in the ARC is the JFK database. The most recent version available is from May 2021. I discussed this update in a long series of notes. Links to the notes are here.
Since then, there have been many new releases. In general, if the 2021 database says a record is open, it is open. If it says a record is withheld or redacted, one must look at other sources to find out the record’s current status. Other sources include spreadsheets NARA posted for later releases, which occurred in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
In 2021, there were 1491 records that had redacted material released. All of the redactions were removed from these records. The spreadsheet for these records is thus a list of records released in full which can update the 2021 version of the database.
The spreadsheets of records released in 2022 and 2023 do NOT update record status. They tell you which records in these two releases had at least one redaction removed, but not if the record is released in full or in part. This information is available, in part, in the postponement documents released in December 2022. The documents are available from this NARA webpage.
The postponement documents
The documents on the NARA webpage include five document indexes, compiled by five departments and agencies: the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and NARA. These are the five government units which asked President Biden to allow them to postpone release of information, in some of their ARC records, past 15 December 2022. The indexes list documents by their ARC record numbers and itemize the justifications for postponement. These justifications are explained in detail in accompanying letters.
Added together, these docs list the last records which have redactions in the ARC. Documents not listed here are open in full. (There may be a handful of redacted documents which have somehow slipped off the list, but put those aside.)
These lists represent which agencies want to postpone release of which redactions in which documents. There is duplication in the lists because more than one agency may want to postpone release of information in the same document.
In addition, although ARC record numbers have prefixes indicating which agency provided the record, in many cases agencies shared information, so that the CIA may now want to postpone releases of its information in FBI records, etc., etc.
Researchers need not really care who owns what information. We just need to know which docs still have redactions. To figure this out, just put everything together into one big list of unique record numbers. In theory this is simple. In practice, there are complications.
The CIA doc index actually lists all the records CIA posted online at NARA in 2022. Fortunately, it also indicates which ones were released in full and which ones were not.
Using the list, we can therefore check the documents posted at NARA in 2022 to see if the ones listed as released in full really are released in full. I have done this, and they are. The list is thus accurate.
After checking the records listed as released in part, I also verified that all of them still had at least one redaction (in 2022). Altogether, for 2022 the index listed 3648 records as still redacted.
In the four other lists, in a few cases, records listed as postponed were in fact already open in full. This tells us there was a lot of last minute review and release.
The 2023 releases
ARC releases did not stop in 2022. They continued on into 2023, when six more document tranches were posted at NARA. Almost all of these documents were from the CIA list. Documents from the DOD, DOS, FBI, and NARA lists, as posted in December 2022, were basically left untouched by the 2023 releases.
The first four document tranches posted at NARA were all released in full. There is no official document that states this. I simply matched them against the 2022 releases and found that all the redacted material was released. (Sometimes a very tedious process.)
The fifth tranche included many records released only in part, over 800 of the 1100 plus docs. However, many of these records originally included large sets of whole page redactions (WPRs) which were greatly reduced during this penultimate release. The sixth tranche was apparently an afterthought involving only 21 records with minor releases.
Summarizing, we have three sets of records with the following results:
- records on the CIA list NOT re-released in 2023: 971 which still have one or more redactions
- records on the CIA list which WERE re-released in 2023: 869 which still have one or more redactions
- records from the other four lists: 704 unique records which still have one or more redactions
Total: 2544
CIA records in the ARC have record numbers beginning with the prefix 104-. Note, however, that records on the 2022 CIA list do not all have 104- numbers. Instead, the list indicates for which records CIA requested postponement of release.
The same holds true for the other lists. Thus while the State Department requested postponements in 30 records, NONE of them have the standard 119- DOS prefix. Ditto for NARA records, which requested the postponement of personal information in the collection as a whole, specifically social security numbers and financial information. On the other hand, some FBI records have postponements in them requested by all FIVE agencies, so quite a mess if one wants to know who is making postponement requests.
As I noted, however, we need not care about this, since we just want to know how many records altogether still have redactions.
Two cents
Recent news stories have claimed 3600 plus ARC records with redactions. The more unreliable sources still write about “secret documents”. The figure of 3600 is off by about 1000, and none of these documents are “secret.” They are redacted. There’s a big difference by any rational measurement.
Other than saying “less than 3000”, I have not previously given a specific number on the blog. In my interview with Fred Litwin several months ago, I did show a slide where I estimated 2850. As we now see, that was high.
How to account for that? I missed about 200 non-CIA records in the big dump of June 26 which it turned out were released in full. In addition, there were about 100 “duplicate” records in the non-CIA document indexes submitted to President Biden in December 2022. As a result, I was off by almost exactly 300. 300 too many, that is.
I will soon put up an excel list of all of these, and compile some of the shorter records into pdfs as a sample. After that, I’m through hunting redacted records. With a handful of exceptions, I regard most of these records as random bits of files, with little intrinsic importance. Regardless, however, the redactions in them should be released. The JFK Act mandates this, and I take that mandate seriously.