Prior to the 2025 releases, over six hundred pages in the ARC were completely redacted. These redacted pages have been a frequent subject on this blog, check out the blog category WPR records (whole page redactions).
The amount of information on these pages far surpassed every individual item redaction, paragraph redaction, and text block redaction in the rest of the collection. This was the last hidden storehouse of information in the ARC.
All of these pages are now released in full.
This note therefore begins a new series, where we look at what was in the records with the MOST WPRs. There is interesting stuff in there, no question, unless of course you are looking for new information on the JFK assassination. If that’s all you want, this series may not be for you. In fact, the 2025 releases may not be for you either!
Main points in this note:
- Origins of whole page redactions in the ARC
- Origins of project LIFEAT
- “Contacts with Cubans” LIFEAT file
- Discussion of newly released pages
- Jeff Morley’s take on “Contacts with Cubans” in 2023
- Historical value of the file
WPRs in the ARC
As often noted on this blog, whole page redactions were frequent in CIA records, beginning with the 2017 releases at NARA. Prior to that, they were very unusual, almost non-existent. Why did they suddenly show up? Because NARA insisted on opening up at least SOME pages in every “withheld in full” record in the ARC.
Why were there so many records withheld in full in 2017? These were NBR records (not believed relevant), designated so by the ARRB, the limited term Federal Board which reviewed ARC records for release. The ARRB ultimately decided that a number of records in the ARC didn’t fit even their extremely broad definition of assassination related, and dropped them back in the archive boxes to await future release.
Relevant schmelevant, NARA told CIA in 2017, you’ve got to get at least parts of all these things out. Whole page redactions were CIA’s response to this mandate, and NARA, Trump, and Biden have been squeezing pages out of CIA ever since.
The former champ
This new series of notes looks at records that had lots and lots of WPRs. Our retrospective begins with the top WPR record: ARC 104-10188-10001 This record has 119 pages. In 2023, 92 of these were WPR. In 2025, the record was released in full.
Let’s see what all the blanks were about.
The LIFEAT Project
It always helps to know what a record is about. Unfortunately, that can be difficult with ARC records. They each have a unique identifying number, but they don’t all have descriptions, or even titles. For ARC 104-10188-10001, the identification aid says simply: “CONTACTS WITH CUBAN OFFICIALS”.
It turns out that this record is a volume in a file on a long-standing CIA project: LIFEAT. We now know an impressive amount about this once top secret project. This article is not the place for a lengthy history, so I’ll just give the short version.
LIFEAT was a wide ranging tel-tap operation, i.e. CIA was listening in on people’s telephone conversations. The taps were in Mexico City. LI is a digraph code, indicating Mexico related. FEAT is a randomly chosen codeword.
There were two major CIA teltap operations in Mexico city in the early 1960s: LIFEAT and LIENVOY.
LIENVOY was a joint operation with the Mexican government, proposed and put into place by the then president of Mexico Mateos-Lopez. This was one of the great secrets that CIA concealed for as long as it could. LIENVOY tapped the lines of Cuban and Soviet Russian diplomatic facilities, and was highly regarded by both U.S. and Mexican governments for the type of information the operation provided.
It was the LIENVOY tap which recorded a phone call to the Russian embassy from someone who identified himself as Lee Oswald. As one might expect, this call and several others which the CIA later determined were related to Oswald, was an important part of the Warren Commission investigation into President Kennedy’s death, and perhaps an even MORE important part of the HSCA re-investigation of the JFK assassination.
LIFEAT, in conrast to the joint LIENVOY taps, was a CIA “unilateral” teltap. The Mexican government did not know CIA was doing this, and the CIA apparently gave them no LIFEAT info or leads at all. LIFEAT could NOT tap Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities without bumping into the LIENVOY team, an embarrassing flap to be carefully avoided.
Instead, LIFEAT did teltaps, outside the two embassies, on an impressive range of people in various places, including Eastern bloc and Cuban diplomats, and various Russian embassy personnel when they were not in the office. We know this from a partially redacted CIA history of their Mexico City station.
Oswald was not recorded in the LIFEAT taps, though some have speculated that the big redactions in “Contacts with Cuban Officials” were perhaps hiding Oswald contacts. I’ll have more to say about such speculation below, suffice to say here that Oswald doesn’t show up in this file.
So who WAS LIFEAT listening to? That question is answered in part by this volume of the project file.
A review of “Contacts with Cuban officials”
Looking at this volume of the project file with the redactions now gone, it is not that hard to understand.
The first three pages of the file are Mexico City cables from Jan-Feb 1967 about a Canadian, Don Lowry, who contacted the Soviet press attache Nickolay Leonov in Jan 1967, apparently looking for help in getting a press job in Cuba. Lowry also tried to contact the Cuban cultural attache, Ricardo Escartin.
The Mexico City station knows all this because LIFEAT was covering Leonov. The station checked with the local FBI officer in MC, who has info possibly identifying Lowry. The station notes that their photo surveillance op, LIONION, has a photo of a man who visited Cuban embassy on Jan 9. This man “shows some resemblance to very old LNERGO (FBI) photo of Donald Robert Lowry.”
The most recent of these cables tells us that the FBI passed this info to the SMABOVES, the Canadian intelligence service, on 13 Feb 67.
So this is LIFEAT providing the Station with info on people who have contact with Cuban officials. These first three pages were already partly released, and were there to read if you wanted to.
Dispatches from Haiti
The next part of the file is three dispatches from the CIA station in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. We were able to see the headers of these dispatches in the last redacted version of the file, but most of the details were withheld. The dispatches date from June 1966 to Jan 1967, and cover the next four pages.
They are followed by a 12 page attachment which was completely held back previously. This is a collection of teltap transcripts from LIFEAT coverage of Gerard Pierre Charles and his wife Suzy. Charles was a Haitian Communist studying in Mexico City. There are a couple of references to Gerard and Suzy in other CIA files from the mid 1960s. Some of these teltaps may have been on the Haitian embassy in MC.
We’re “fuzzy” on these conversations and the reasons Mexico City and Port-au-Prince were interested in Gerard and Suzy. One thing is for sure: they have not a scrap of relevance for the JFK assassination.
Dispatch to Santo Domingo
Another dispatch, to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, was also partially released in the 2023 release of the file. This dispatch, dated May 1966, also made clear it was forwarding LIFEAT transcripts from some place in Mexico City, but we had no idea of where, what, or who.
This dispatch was followed by 65 pages of blankness.
We now know what this blankness was all about. The transcripts were for teltaps on the Dominican Embassy in Mexico City. The transcripts are all in Spanish, read them if you’re interested. All I will say is that the names of Kennedy, Oswald, and Ruby do not occur anywhere.
Judy and AZ
The next dispatch in the file was released in full in 2023, so no surprises here. It was dated December 1965 and told us it included a transcript of a LIFEAT teltap, a conversation between Judith Feretto and Adelias Zendejas. The 2023 version then gave us 9 pages of blankness. Their conversation is now released. To my surprise, Judy and AZ did not once mention Oswald, Kennedy, or Ruby.
A previously opened section
Pages 96 to 113 in the file were almost completely released in 2023. I won’t summarize these, except to say that the docs jump from April 1965 to one page from February 1963, then again to January 1961, then to September-November, 1960.
The final gap in the file occurs from pages 114 to 117, four more pages of blankness. This was a series of Jan 1960 dispatches which dealt with LIEXIT, a project which managed to acquire hard copy of official Russian diplomatic communications from Mexico City to Moscow. No, they did not discuss Kennedy, Oswald, or Ruby in these dispatches. Nor did they mention Cuban matters at all. Odd.
The final pages in the file were two field reports from 1956, far in the distant past of project LIFEAT.
A failed evaluation of the file
“Contacts with Cuban officials” has not been completely ignored by JFK researchers. Jefferson Morley’s JFK Facts substack had a longish note on it back in July 2023.
In this article, Morley attempts to make a case for the relevance of this file to Oswald. He does this first by claiming that LIFEAT “was not used to obtain specific information about the Cuban and Soviet government. It was used to mount U.S. counterespionage operations against Cuban and Soviet spy services, involving persons of specific U.S. counterintelligence interest—such as Oswald.”
Morley even goes on to claim that “it was a LIFEAT wiretap that picked up Oswald’s conversations with Cuban officials six weeks before JFK was killed.” This amazing, unsourced claim is apparently connected to an unpublished manuscript by Win Scott, retired chief of CIA’s Mexico City station.
This is typical Morley, playing very fast and very loose with his texts. Morley does note that Scott concealed the LIFEAT project name when writing his manuscript. So how does Morley know it was LIFEAT and not LIENVOY, the long-acknowledged source of CIA information on Oswald, that Scott meant?
This is all pretty outrageous stuff, and the article is close to Morley at his worst. It is worth a more detailed dissection, if only for its errors and exaggerations, but not today.
Going back to actual “Contact with Cuban officials” file, it has always been clear that there was never anything related to Oswald in this file. How do we know this? The dispatches told us that the stuff being redacted was attachments. We know the dates of the dispatches, so we know the approximate dates of the attachments.
Most of the material in the WPRs is from 1965 to 1966. Unless there’s some conversation where someone starts talking about an assassination related topic, there can’t be anything about the 1963 death of Kennedy. When we get to the end, there is one report from February 1963, but there are no WPRs before or after this, so its clear there was just one doc from 1963 in the whole file.
The WPRs about LIEXIT were clearly from 1960, the context made this obvious, so none of the dates fit into the assassinaton chronological window.
Typically, Morley ignores the dispatches and cables which give us the context of the redacted pages. He mentions Haiti and the Dominican Republic nowhere, missing the point of releasing the dispatches completely.
Historical relevance of the file
Is this file worthless to historians? No! Of course not! If you are writing a history of U.S. intelligence efforts in Mexico, it is gold, the kind of stuff it has previously been impossible to get hold of.
It is, however, of almost no value whatsoever for anyone who wants to write anything about the JFK assassination. The first few pages have a little interest, illustrating the counterintelligence use of teltaps. Yes, this is reminiscent of what happened with Oswald. But Lowry was not Oswald, who was dead in 1967. All this shows us is that CIA was using LIFEAT just as it used LIENVOY. Where’s the surprise in that?