The JFKARC.INFO series on records with whole page redactions (WPRs) continues. This note looks at the personnel files for David Phillips. Phillips had multiple volumes in his personnel file, with lengthy whole page redactions all the way up until 2025.
All of Phillip’s personnel files are now released in full. What did the final releases show us? Read on to find out!
David Phillips’ personnel files
David Phillips was a senior CIA officer who served over twenty five years in the Agency. No need to ask why Phillips’ files are in the ARC. He has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories on the assassination of JFK, beginnning with the HSCA investigation of 1977-78.
It is impossible to summarize all of these theories here. See the online e-book The Bishop Hoax by JFK researcher Tracy Parnell for an in-depth look at the case conspiracy writers have made against Phillips. This is an excellent, illuminating work, well worth reading.
Phillips’ personnel records are long and complex, and a superficial glance through them might suggest that there should be some assassination relevant information in them. In fact, there is none.
What files do we have? In addition to a three hundred plus page Office of Personnel file, Phillips also worked under non-official cover for his first ten years with the CIA. This part of his career is recorded in Phillips’ two volume 201 file. A third “volume,” documenting some of the early projects Phillips worked on, was also pulled together for the HSCA investigation. Here are links to these four files in the 2023 and 2025 versions:
| record # | 2023 link | 2025 link | record info |
|---|---|---|---|
| 104-10177-10121 | 2023 link | 2025 link | 201 file vol 2 |
| *104-10177-10134 | 2023 link | 2025 link | 201 file vol 1 |
| *104-10177-10135 | 2023 link | 2025 link | 201 file misc docs |
| 104-10194-10026 | 2023 link | 2025 link | OP file |
The 201 files had a total of 30 whole page redactions in 2023, most of them in the two records marked with asterisks. There were no whole page redactions in the OP file as of 2023, though there were about 30 pages with shorter redactions.
Releasing the Phillips files
The release of these files was also complex. The ARRB designated Phillips’ regular personnel file “NBR”, not believed relevant, and it was not available until the 2017-2025 releases. The ARRB did, however, release six “fitness reports” from the file in the 1990s, and these give a summary of the later part of Phillips career.
The 201 files were released in truncated form in 1993-1994, and are available as “old CIA files” at the MFF website (volume 1 is here, volume 2 is here).
As a result of the numerous NBR sections in these files, the 2017 releases produced hundreds of previously unavailable pages on Phillips. For reasons which even now are not entirely clear, the CIA continued to request substantial redactions in the files, particularly the 201 files.
When these records were first released in 2017, there were over a hundred whole page redactions, producing angry reactions from JFK researchers and former HSCA investigators such as Dan Hardway.
What was in the whole page redactions?
Phillips’ 201 file provides supplemental material on his career under non-official cover, which lasted until the Bay of Pigs invasion. Phillips’ service in Guatemala during the PBSUCCESS overthrow of the Arevalo government, in Lebanon in the mid-1950s, and during the Bay of Pigs, when Phillips set up the Swan Island radio station, is not covered in the file at all.
The 201 docs released in the 1990s centered on Phillips’ work in Cuba in the late 1950s, since this was, for a while, the main interest of conspiracist researchers.
The newly released documents, however, are all from the earliest part of Phillips’ career in Chile. Phillips’ own autobiography, Night Watch, gives only a sketchy account of his work at this time, so recent releases do fill in some of the blanks.
Of the sixteen whole page redactions in volume 1 of the 201 file, for example, we have two copies of a November 1950 operational dispatch, which describes how Phillips, under the cryptonym FULMINATER-1, acquired a safe house for the polygraphing of FULMINATER-2.
This dispatch releases the name of the nominal leasee, and a woman, Maria Janda, who may have been Phillips’ case officer, as described in Night Watch. The dispatch is signed by Santiago Chief of Station, “Jerome C. Dunbar,” who Parnell suggests may be former FBI agent William B. Caldwell.
New releases also include a 1951 “operational review” of Phillips’ role in carrying out the “BRGHYTHM-LCACTING” projects, which seem to have been psychological/propaganda efforts, carried out under “ZACACTUS”, which seems to be the cryptonym for the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the covert activities branch of the early CIA.
Another new release is two copies of a PRQ-2 (Personal Record Questionnaire form 2) for Phillips, which is an evaluation of agent strengths and weaknesses. This strong, positive evaluation of Phillips shows that he was quickly identified as an excellent field agent.
There were only three whole page redactions in volume 2 of Phillips’ 201 file, but we now see that this is a single three page dispatch which is quite interesting. The Nov 1951 dispatch is unstinting in its praise of Phillips and gives more details of his work at this time.
The third set of documents “cross-referenced to the 201 file” had 11 whole page redactions that are now released in full. These documents are from a couple of years later, about 1953-54, and deal with a larger project called PBGROVEL, which involved setting up and financing a Chilean anti-Communist group. The three page project outline, once completely redacted, is now released in full.
An earlier description of PBGROVEL at Mary Ferrell mistakenly links this project to Guatemala, and claims that it was somehow connected to CI Chief James Angleton. The newly released material seems to contradict all this speculation.
Two cents
The 201 files for Phillips certainly contain new information on his career, as well as CIA covert activities in Chile from 1950 to 1954. The time frame for all this was over a decade before President Kennedy was killed, and could not possibly be relevant to the assassination. Nor is it relevant to Cuban activities, since this was all five to seven years prior to the rise of the Castro brothers and their friend Ernesto Guevara.
The ARRB designated all this material “not believed relevant” and this still looks like a good call to me. Why was so much material redacted for so long? Well, much of the material was duplicate copies of various documents, effectively doubling the length of the redactions, so it wasn’t as much material as it looked liked. Whole page redactions covered no more than seven or eight documents.
These documents reveal the identities of a number of other people besides Phillips. None of these people had any relevance to the JFK assassination at all, except for their contacts with Phillips over a decade before the assassination.
This is one legitimate basis for continuing to redact the material. It also seems possible that CIA was reluctant to expose projects like PBGROVEL, but the JFK Act makes no general exemptions for these types of activities. The lengthy redactions, lasting long after the 2017 deadline, were certainly overkill, if that was the only justification for them.
Regardless of what Phillips was doing in 1950-51, however, there was never any rational basis to connect it with Kennedy’s death over a decade later.
[A tip of the hat to Tracy Parnell for his comments and a correction to the first draft of this note!]