My interest in the ARC is often “academic”, and as a result, many of my notes on this blog are not particularly interesting for people who don’t care about the ARC as an archive. This is another such note, so caveat lector.
Reviewing the HSCA-CIA docs: the McDonald Survey
When the HSCA shut down in 1979, they made sure that all the CIA records they reviewed during their investigation were boxed, sealed, and stored for at least 30 years. This massive collection of boxes is what we now call the HSCA-CIA segregated collection.
There is plenty of documentation in the ARC about how this was done. In fact, it was only a couple of years after that the records were opened again as a result of Mark Allen’s FOIA lawsuit which brought a good chunk of the collection under the purview of the FOIA.
This epic battle is way too complicated to summarize here; it was ultimately resolved only with the passage of the JFK Act, and Allen wound up with a gratis set of the segregated collection which he promptly donated to the AARC, the Assassination Archives and Research Center.
Allen’s donation is the source of a good portion of the docs at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, the premier online source for ARC records.
During the decade over which the suit lasted, the CIA did survey the segregated collection, but only for the limited requirements of the suit itself. In particular, they had to distinguish between CIA’s records and the HSCA’s records, sometimes a very messy task.
By 1991-1992, however, the winds of declassification were blowing around the towers of Langley, and on 10 January 1992, Gates ordered a systematic survey of the Segregated Collection under the direction of J. Kenneth McDonald, the CIA’s Chief Historian. McDonald reported back to Gates in a long memo dated 20 February 1992.
For those interested, the memo, several attachments, and some later, relevant documents are available in ARC 104-10337-10006, available at the MFF website here.
While it was very nice to have this summary of the survey, there were lots of interesting details missing. These missing details made it hard to go from McDonald’s summary of the collection to what is now in the ARC.
One document that I particularly wanted to see is listed on the bottom of this page. It is the “History Staff Checklist of boxes 1-63, Oswald’s 201 File, and sampling of microfilm (the microfilm sample includes all reels not covered by Microfilm Index).”
The summary of the 63 boxes of HSCA documents that follows this page is NOT a checklist, so this checklist is missing. It appears nowhere in the ARC. You can always file an FOIA request for documents like this, but that’s getting pretty deep into the weeds of history, so I let this slide. Until —
New ARC related docs in the MLK releases
To my surprise, this missing checklist, or the main part of it, appeared out of the blue in the release of records on MLK that was posted at NARA on 21 July 2025. There are in fact about a dozen lengthy documents in this release which are lists of ARC records.
Why were these document included in the release? Probably because Dr. King’s name appeared somewhere in these lists. This might seem a rather inadequate reason for adding lengthy docs to the release, but there are many examples of this.
The checklist is available from NARA catalog here. It covers 63 boxes of HSCA documents, but does not include documents in the Oswald 201 file, or the 72 reels of microfilm records in the HSCA-CIA Segregated Collection.
Unfortunately, the checklist does not have a complete list of folder titles. There were over 1500 folders in the 63 boxes of HSCA docs. Only a small percentage of these folders are listed in the checklist. Still there are many other pieces of information in 105 pages of the checklist that tell us a lot about the records when the CIA took its first crack at a survey.
Partial summary info
What does the checklist tell us about how the survey was done? What does it tell us about the condition of the records at this early point?
Each box sheet in the list is initialed by one of three people: KCR, GKH, and MSM. The 63 box sheets are all dated from 1/22/92 to 1/29/92. This means it took these three researchers about one week to go through the entire 63 box set, a lamentably inadequate period of time to do a real survey.
Each box sheet gives a location where the box was stored. The first 34 boxes were all documents from the Directorate of Operations (DO). According to the box sheets, in January 1992, these were all located at IMS (Information Management Services). I think it is a safe bet that this is in the D.C. area, perhaps Langley, perhaps some other D. C. facility. The final box 63 was also located at IMS.
The remaining 28 boxes were all at the Warrenton Record Center. Warrenton is over an hour’s drive from D.C. according to Google Maps, so it is not surprising to see that these records were all done at the same time, from about 1/27 to 1/29.
There are a number of other items marked on the checklist, including Job number, box number, arrangement (of folders), provenance, dates, preservation needs, etc. It was thus a checklist compiled by professional archivists.
On the other hand, the fact that there are not folder lists for every box tells us that this was a rushed job, or alternatively that not enough people were available for the task. In fact, folder lists are present for only about the first 11 boxes. Perhaps the folder lists were an afterthought.
If so this is a pity, since it leaves me with a lot of questions.
Another issue worth noting is that the haste of the survey meant that there are some inaccuracies in the description of the documents themselves. I have discussed this elsewhere. There was never any question that these inaccuracies were, well, inaccurate. Some may still be reluctant to accept this because the errors fit their views of certain assassination issues. We can now see clear evidence of the haste of the survey, which is the obvious source of the inaccurate descriptions.
Two cents: questions remaining
The main question I still have is “How well do the box and folder descriptions in the checklist line up with the box and folder notations reflected in the JFK database?”
The Segregated Collection boxes were probably reboxed after this survey, and in fact some of the folders were reboxed even before the survey. A number of folders were missing from some boxes, and the archivists’ notes indicate that they thought some of these had probably been moved to the 100 percent HSCA doc boxes.
Remember that the Allen suit raised the question of which records belonged to CIA and which belonged to the HSCA. Congress is not subject to FOIA requests, so if significant portions of a folder were originated by the committee, they would of course have to be separated. That, I think, is the explanation for this more extensive rearrangement.
I am still working on my own folder lists, but it seems that some of the folders are not where the checklist says they are. More on this boring subject in the indefinite future.
Still, there were a number of small puzzles in the original survey summary that are now cleared up by this new doc. Hopefully more such serendipitous releases may come.