Continuing with our review of CIA files with whole page redactions, we come to the category of OP (Office of Personnel) files. This note covers two OP files which each had 27 whole page redactions in 2023. Both files are now released in full.
The subjects of these files were two senior CIA officers: William Broe and Newton S. Miler. How were they relevant to the JFK assassination? Read on to find out.
HSCA review of CIA personnel records
The personnel records discussed in this series were all designated NBR (not believed relevant) by the ARRB. For a discussion of the OP records and what the NBR designation meant, see this note.
I am sure that all of these OP files were actually requested by HSCA and provided by CIA. However, HSCA did not review several of these files. There is a blank log sheet on top of Miler’s file, which indicates it was not reviewed. I have not found a log sheet for Broe’s file, which suggests it was not reviewed either.
This is one reason why ARRB designated these records as NBR. HSCA did not review about 20 percent of all the files it requested from CIA. This is not a unique feature of these specific files. I may write more about this later.
Why did HSCA request info on Broe and Miler?
HSCA reasons for requesting files on people varied. In the cases of Broe and Miler, I have not been able to pin down the exact reasons, but HSCA letters requesting files and information often shed light on their reasons.
The HSCA letter requesting information on Broe is available here. Most of the people mentioned in this letter worked in CIA’s Tokyo Station.
The HSCA interest in the Tokyo station was primarily because of the claims of James Wilcott, who was a financial clerk in the station. Wilcott claimed that he had been told Oswald was a station agent and that he actually handled funds intended for Oswald. HSCA took this claim very seriously and interviewed several people in the station, as well as looking very closely at the station’s personnel records.
Wilcott was indeed employed at Tokyo Station, and correctly stated that Broe was at one point Chief of Station, but Wilcott did not claim any conversations with Broe about Oswald. This is probably why HSCA quickly lost interest in Broe’s personnel file.
Wilcott did, however, name others as having told him that Oswald was an agent. These people were interviewed by HSCA and did not support Wilcott’s claims. One person he claimed had told him things was not even present in Tokyo when Wilcott was stationed there.
After discovering these contradictions in Wilcott’s claim, HSCA ultimately concluded that his allegation “was not worthy of belief.”
The HSCA letter requesting information on Miler is available here. The immediate context of the request is not much help here. Given Miler’s job and the date, however, this may have been related to HSCA interviews with Yuri Nosenko. There were at least three of these, the first one on May 30, 1978, the same month in which HSCA asked for info on Miler. This request was thus perhaps in preparation for the Nosenko interviews.
Nosenko was a KGB officer who defected in February 1964 and claimed to have information about Oswald. There was considerable controversy in the CIA over whether or not Nosenko was a “bona fide” defector, and he was actually detained for several years in CIA facilities while the argument raged. Miler was a senior officer in counterintelligence and strongly argued that Nosenko was not bona fide.
The 2025 releases
Both Broe and Miler were senior CIA officers, with decades of assignments behind them when they retired. Their files are both over three hundred pages long, which is a lot for CIA. More to the point, both of them were assigned overseas many times.
CIA assignments abroad happen in only two ways: under official cover, or under non-official cover. Broe and Miler did all their time under State Department cover as Foreign Service officers. This was one of the most sensitive subjects in CIA’s ARC records, and CIA fought long and hard to protect this key intelligence method, before finally losing the battle in 2025.
Because of the many years both men spent undercover overseas, there was much more cover detail in their files than is usually the case. This detail accounts for most of the redactions that remained in their files in 2023 (with a smattering of station and base locations as well).
Broe, for example, had redactions on 82 pages of his 314 page file, including 27 whole page redactions. Almost all of these are related to State Department cover. The remainder are things like personal details about his family. The whole page redactions were things like letters describing the employment terms and contractual obligations of official cover, and even copies of the applications they filled out for the FSO positions their jobs required them to take.
Miler’s file is even longer and had even more extensive redactions, with 153 redacted pages in his 384 page file. Miler’s counterintelligence work was, if anything, even more sensitive than Broe’s work, so there were many work details which were redacted, but the whole page redactions are again mostly to protect cover details, official thanks for Miler’s work in various countries, Ambassadors grousing about his “failure to participate in country team activities,” and so on.
Again we have whole page redactions to protect employment terms, copies of applications, etc. One striking thing for me is that Miler started out as a code clerk in Shanghai and apparently did some very interesting things at a very young age. Even in these documents, dating from the 1940s, we meet with redactions. The justification for these is surely much weaker than for later redactions.
My two cents
Neither of these personnel files have even the remotest relevance to the JFK assassination. Publishing the details of State Department cover arrangements in order to prove that these people were not relevant to the assassination in the 1940s and 50s still strikes me as an absurdity.
Get ready. There are more files like these ones coming up.