This note discusses a recent claim about the ARC, a claim based on a memo written by CIA Chief Historian J. Kenneth McDonald. I spent some time working on this memo last year (see here for a blog note), so I was naturally interested in this new claim.

The claim comes from attorney Mark Adamczyk. For details, see Adamcyzk’s open letter to Rep. Paulina Luna, Chair of the House Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets. The letter is available on “Kennedys and King”, the blog of JFK researcher James DiEugenio (here).

Adamczyk’s letter makes two distinct claims, one concerning McDonald’s memo and one concerning a set of forms which the ARRB planned to attach to records with Board approved “postponements”, i.e. redactions. The forms are discussed at length by Andrew Iler, a Canadian lawyer, on DiEugenio’s blog. I will discuss these in a second note. This note focuses on Adamczyk and McDonald’s memo.

Reviewing the HSCA-CIA Segregated Collection

The McDonald memo cited in Adamcyzk’s letter discusses CIA handling and review of the HSCA-CIA Segregated Collection.

For those new to the subject, the Segregated Collection was a set of 64 boxes of CIA records which the Agency gathered in response to HSCA requests during the Committee’s two year investigation into the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King.

The first 63 boxes in the set contained hard copies of Agency records, HSCA and CIA correspondence, and CIA internal papers. The last box in the set contained 72 reels of microfilmed records, equivalent in length to another 63 boxes of documents.

At the end of the HSCA investigation, the CIA and HSCA signed an agreement whereby these records would be placed in Agency storage for another 30 years in order to preserve the documentary basis of the HSCA investigation and reports.

The records were boxed and stored until the early 1980s, when an FOIA lawsuit was filed requesting their release. The judge in the case ordered the Agency to produce inventories of the records, forcing CIA to open and review the boxes. The collection, however, remained in storage as the lengthy litigation continued.

Background to the memo: Gates, McDonald, and HRG

In November 1991, Robert Gates was confirmed by the Senate as Director of the CIA. Gates came into the Agency advocating greater openness and transparency. As part of his effort to achieve this, he expanded the Historical Review Program (HRP), a declassification effort begun in the mid-1980s, established a Historical Review Group (HRG) to oversee the Program, and requested a review of CIA declassification guidelines. As Chief Historian, McDonald was one of the main figures in this effort. He gives a summary of his views and suggestions on the HRP and HRG in a 10 February 1992 memo, available as ARC 104-10428-10099.

Survey and memo: McDonald and the Segregated Collection

In January 1992, as Congress began discussing possible release of classified records on the JFK assassination, Gates also tasked McDonald and the History Staff to conduct a survey of the HSCA-CIA collection, and make recommendations for its disposition. McDonald’s survey and recommendations are summarized in a 10 February 1992 memo, available as ARC 104-10428-10104.

Note that McDonald wrote two memos dated 10 February 1992. The first one deals with HRP and HRG issues. I will call this “the HRP memo.” The second memo deals with the Segregated Collection survey. I will call this “the survey memo.” The survey memo is the doc Adamczyk discusses in his letter to Rep. Luna.

The McDonald Memo as a plot

Adamczyk wrote his open letter to Rep. Luna with a purpose of course. He believes that Luna’s task force needs to investigate “the conduct of and obstruction by the National Archives with respect to JFK assassination records.” His evidence for NARA’s role in “obstructing” the release of records in the JFK Collection comes in part from McDonald’s memo.

The reasoning in parts of Adamczyk’s letter is hard for me to follow, so I will cite his own words as much as space allows.

Adamczyk’s discussion comes in the section of his letter titled “Pre-ARRB Obstruction of the JFK Act”. This section points out that the JFK Act was signed into law on 26 October, 1992 (by President Bush, not by Congress, as Adamcyzk mistakenly says).

Adamcyzk believes that well before the passage of the JFK Act, “CIA knew that the ARRB would have unprecedented declassification authority and that the ARRB was mandated to review and make release decisions on each assassination record.”

Armed with this pre-knowledge, “the CIA was prepared with a plan to maintain maximum secrecy over its most sensitive assassination records. By February 1992 (eight months before the Act was passed), the CIA had already designed a written strategy to circumvent the JFK Act before the ARRB even took office.”

The survey memo is that written “strategy”. Given Adamczyk’s description, it is not just a strategy, it is a plot.

Which sections of the memo spell out this “strategy”? According to Adamcyzk, it is spelled out in Section 10, where McDonald writes: “I recommend that CIA transfer its entire HSCA collection (as defined and identified in this report) at its existing classification (emphasis added) to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), for continuing declassification review by Archives staff, in accordance with the relevant laws, regulations and CIA guidelines (emphasis added). This transfer should be earned out under the auspices of CIA’s Historical Review Program (emphasis added). To retire this HSCA collection to the National Archives offers some significant advantages…”

McDonald devotes four paragraphs to the advantages of transferring the HSCA collection to NARA. Adamcyzk condenses this to one sentence: “a transfer of these HSCA records (Sequestered Collection) to the National Archives, before the establishment of the ARRB, would “protect their existing classification.”

Note that the phrase “before the establishment of the ARRB”, does not appear in McDonald’s memo.

According to Adamczyk, “The memorandum concludes that “NARA must ensure the confidentiality of investigatory sources and the proper protection of personal privacy and national security information, including intelligence sources and methods. NARA would continue the court-ordered declassification review according to CIA guidelines (emphasis added). CIA can accelerate the declassification of this collection by funding review positions at NARA (emphasis added). … If Congress should eventually undertake to open this entire Collection without regard to classification, the National Archives will be in a stronger position to protect its national security and privacy information than the CIA, whose motives would appear self-serving, if not sinister.”

None of this looks like “a written strategy to circumvent the JFK Act.” Why then does Adamczyk make this claim? Because he believes “the CIA transferred sensitive HSCA records to the National Archives before enactment of the JFK Act, which subverted review by the ARRB.” How would transferring records to NARA before the JFK Act was signed subvert review by the ARRB? This is VERY unclear to me.

Immediately below the “subversion” claim, Adamczyk cites section 5(d)(3) of the JFK Act. This section states: “Assassination records which are in the possession of the National Archives on the date of enactment of this Act and which have been publicly available in their entirety with out redaction shall be made available in the Collection without any additional review by the Review Board or another authorized office under this Act and shall not be required to have such an identification aid unless required by the Archivist.”

The purpose of this section is clear. Congress did not require the ARRB to look at records that were already released in full by October 1992. This includes the vast majority of the Warren Commission (WC) records at NARA. And as the agency having custody of these records, NARA did not have to produce identification aids for them. This provision saved both NARA and the ARRB a significant amount of time and energy.

According to Adamczyk, however, transfer of records before the signing of the JFK Act “may have only been proper if the Sequestered Collection was transferred to NARA and ‘made publicly available in their entirety without redaction’ as provided in section 5(d)(3) of the JFK Act.” He then continues: “Otherwise, only the ARRB had the authority to make final declassification decisions under specific standards in the JFK Act, with only the President having the authority to overrule the ARRB on its final decisions and orders.”

This does nothing to relieve my confusion. Does Adamczyk believe that the Act forbids the transfer of assassination related records to NARA before October 1992, unless they were released in full? Perhaps he thinks that assassination related records could be turned over to NARA before the act was signed IF AND ONLY IF they had identification forms attached?

This was impossible, as the form for the identification aids, the Reader Identification Form, was not created by NARA until December 1992, months after the Act was signed into law.

Adamcyzk, who is a lawyer, has either misunderstood the Act, or has failed to express himself clearly. I see nothing that would contravene the law, or subvert the ARRB’s review of the records, even if they were turned over to NARA months before the signing of the Act without any identification aids at all. Yet this seems to be the gist of Adamczyk’s claim.

NARA’s part in the plot

With all this, one is still left to wonder why Adamczyk is writing about obstruction by NARA. As far as I can tell, Adamczyk has no documentary basis for claiming that NARA has done any such thing. He does, however, have suspicions:

“Was this sensitive Sequestered Collection of CIA assassination records provided to the ARRB with identification aids and RIF numbers for review by the ARRB under the JFK Act? Or was this Collection transferred separately to the National Archives under separate procedures, not authorized by the JFK Act, for review only by the Archivist and the CIA at a later point in time and under different standards that were favorable to the CIA? This CIA memorandum from February 1992 strongly suggests the latter.”

Based on his suspicion, he proposes a theory:

“As the likely result of this CIA Memorandum of February 1992, a massive trove of CIA assassination records from its HSCA collection was shipped to the National Archives before the ARRB could start its work. Assuming that is true, these records were not assigned Record Identification Form (RIF) numbers and properly catalogued for mandatory ARRB review.”

Adamczyk thus envisages CIA and NARA working together to subvert the JFK Act: “This CIA strategy ended up giving the Archivist unauthorized and uncontrolled discretion over the CIA’s HSCA Sequestered Collection, controlled only by CIA guidelines, which is not permitted in any provision of the JFK Act. The Archivist and staff who controlled these records in the 1990s needs to be questioned about (a) exactly how the Archivist exercised his discretion pursuant to section 5(d)(3) of the JFK Records Act and (b) specifically about the extent of the HSCA/CIA records that did not receive a RIF number and were not disclosed to the ARRB for review and release final determinations.”

Flaws in Adamczyk’s claims

Are there flaws with this idea of a NARA conspiracy? There are indeed! Read on to find out more.

Flaw 1: Weak documentation, poor research

The HSCA-CIA Segregated Collection constitutes the bulk of CIA records in the ARC. There is thus a huge amount of information on the handling of these records in the ARC itself. Beyond ARC records, there were also multiple Congressional hearings and extensive testimony on the Act, and the status of the records at the agencies and at NARA both before and after the passage of the Act.

Yet the only ARC record, in fact the only document, that Adamczyk cites to support his theory is the survey memo.

Even here, he is confused about the basic bibliography of the memo, claiming that the memo was not available at NARA until 2021. Adamczyk cites ARC 104-10331-10001 as his exemplar of the memo, and give us a link to the 2021 version. In fact, this record was posted online in 2017, and was almost certainly available at NARA prior to that.

Nor is this the only copy of the memo. It also appears in ARC 104-10428-10104, which was processed and released in October 1998. So the memo was written in 1992, then released in full six years later. In no sense is this a long buried document.

Flaw 2: Illogical assumptions

Bibliographic confusion is a minor problem compared to the basic illogic of Adamczyk’s theory, which takes the standard complaint about access to CIA records and turns it on its head. The standard complaint is that CIA refuses to transfer its records outside their own storage vaults, keeping them out of the hands of researchers. When laws are passed or regulatory deadlines are set to make records more accessible, CIA delays for years, decades.

Adamczyk, however, believes the CIA transferred documents ahead of schedule, and placed them in the non-CIA vaults of the National Archives, a place where CIA had carefully avoided storing its classified records in the past. It does this in order to somehow HIDE them.

This makes NO sense. Once moved to NARA, the records are in NARA’s custody, not CIA’s. Hiding docs in someone else’s vaults is bound to be more difficult than hiding doc in CIA’s own archive in Warrenton. It requires the involvement of an indefinite number of people (hence NARA’s part in the conspiracy), for an indefinite period of time.

Moving them around, or even off the premises of NARA is also bound to attract much more attention than moving them to another CIA facility from Warrenton. Attention and access at NARA comes from both NARA employees, who are not CIA employees, and the ARRB, who have access to NARA vaults.

Then there is the problem of knowing WHICH DOCUMENTS to hide or remove, something that conspiracy theories involving concealment always neglect. As McDonald’s survey summary makes all too plain, the HRG staff had no idea of what stuff was where, giving vague, confusing, and often incorrect descriptions of the docs that they did look at.

Remember, the records at this point were not computerized, and not scanned. They were (and are) old, faded, often decaying paper, with many pages flat out illegible. It would take years of searching, and READING, to discover what papers were important and where they were.

At the root of all this is the question of WHAT the CIA is supposed to be hiding. This is NOT a subject that we are completely free to speculate about.

The records we have at NARA are, with a very small set of exceptions, open in full. Previously they were FULL of redactions, so we now have an ocean of old versions where we can see exactly what was held back. That researchers like Adamczyk are not interested in this never ceases to puzzle me. It is basically a refusal to build an empirical basis for their constant speculation about concealment.

Flaw 3: An ahistoric account of the JFK Act

Another major problem with Adamczyk’s idea is that the history of the collection as documented elsewhere does not support it. Remember that Adamcyzk believes that before the passage of the JFK Act, “CIA knew that the ARRB would have unprecedented declassification authority and that the ARRB was mandated to review and make release decisions on each assassination record.”

Was the survey memo really a written strategy to circumvent the Act? Before making this claim, there is an obligation to make sure the dates are right. Gates asked McDonald and the History Staff to survey the segregated collection on January 16, according to the memo. The survey was completed and the memo sent on February 10. How does this comport with the legislative history of the Act?

The ARRB Final Report gives a brief survey of the legislative history of the JFK Act. The first proposals in Congress for record releases came in January. They did not spell out either the records to be released or the mechanisms for releasing them. Support built for a broad and systematic release throughout February, and the Act was introduced as a joint House-Senate resolution by Representative Louis Stokes and Senator David Boren on March 26.

There was NO legislative proposal for an ARRB and for record by record review and release prior to this. Clearly Adamczyk did not bother to do any research at all on the history of the JFK Act. instead, he simply regards CIA and McDonald as clairvoyant. Clairvoyance is a common feature of conspiracy theories, with the conspirators KNOWING how events will take place long before they happen. This is an obvious flaw in Adamczyk’s claim.

Gates asked McDonald to conduct a survey on January 16. There was only one proposal for a JFK records release at that point. Two more followed after January 16. These were the proposals that McDonald could have read by February 10, had he wished to. None of these proposals envisioned a review process, much less an independent federal board. Instead, they seemed to envision just a plain records dump.

This was the real background of McDonald’s memo, completely inconsistent with Adamczyk’s account.

Flaw 4: An ahistoric account of the response to the survey memo

Adamczyk also ignores the response to the survey, and the documented decisions that the CIA made with regard to the Segregated Collection.

McDonald recommended that CIA transfer the Segregated Collection to NARA. He gives a number of reasons for this, which Adamczyk describes in HIGHLY selective and tendentious terms. Whatever the reason for it, this was still only a recommendation from McDonald. Did Gates accept the recommendation? Adamczyk says nothing about this. He theorizes that NARA reached some sort of agreement with CIA to accept the HSCA records in a manner inconsistent with the JFK Act, so it seems he believes Gates DID accept McDonald’s recommendation, which was intended to defeat the Act.

If one looks at the documentation available, however, it is clear Gates did NOT accept McDonald’s recommendation. Instead, in a public speech on February 21, Gates announced that he was “transferring custody of all documents CIA possesses relating to the assassination of President Kennedy to the Historical Review Program.” (See ARC 104-10427-10000).

Prior to the March 26 joint resolution on the JFK records, we can be sure that work commenced on declassification of the Oswald 201 file. How so? Because the Oswald “pre-assassination file” was released on May 11. This file was placed in the National Archive, as documented in the ARC. Later in this note I will have more to say about the file and how it was handled. Here I will just note that this early release did NOT subvert ARRB’s review of these docs. All the records in the file were reviewed and released by the ARRB early in its existence.

Following the publication of the March 26 joint resolution, the CIA began transferring other records to the HRG, as described in several memos and letters. Transfer of the Segregated Collection from storage to the HRG was authorized by the House of Representatives on April 21. The boxes involved in the transfer are listed and described. There is no sign that boxes were not present. There is no sign that anything was removed from the boxes prior to this.

There is more to say on the subject of how the records were handled after 3/26. In addition to documents from the ARC, the House and Senate held several hearings on the JFK joint resolution, at which Gates or the DDCI William Studeman both testified, as well as the Archivist and NARA representatives. These hearings include many documents relevant to the record transfer. There was also an oversight hearing in November 1993 which contains much information highly relevant to record transfers.

Then there are the ARRB records, which are full of information regarding record transfers written by NARA staff. There are tens of thousands of pages of these available on-line, none of it giving a hint of ARRB discovering any mechanism whereby NARA concealed or held back assassination-related records.

Adamczyk mentions none of this documentation, much of which controverts his theory and assumptions. He does discuss the “Final Determination Forms”, the second main topic of his letter. As I said, I’ll leave that subject for another post.

Flaw 5: No point

Logic and history aside, Adamczyk’s theory has another problem. He believes that “a massive trove of CIA assassination records from its HSCA collection was shipped to the National Archives before the ARRB could start its work. Assuming that is true, these records were not assigned Record Identification Form (RIF) numbers and properly catalogued for mandatory ARRB review.”

Assume that some records were not assigned RIF numbers. Assume that some records were not reviewed by the ARRB. What was the point? If this “strategy” has any purpose, it is to conceal information the CIA does not wish to release. Concealing the information means concealing the records. So how were the records concealed?

Were they simply released late? Are they hidden in a secret vault at NARA? Are they deliberately misfiled in some other place? Or were they burned?

As I said, except for a very small set, the records that we have are released in full, so even if Adamczyk’s theory is somehow “true”, if the records he hypothesizes existed, and were released late, or were not reviewed by the ARRB according to protocol, who cares? They are there now, open in full to public inspection.

Still at NARA but somehow concealed on the premises, unfound after 30 years? Sounds like a Henry James literary mystery, or a paradoxical Jorge Borges story. Perhaps there is a secret masonic-like tradition at NARA where they learn a riddle that tells the secret hiding place, but everyone has forgotten what it means? Shades of Conan Doyle!

Burned is the only answer among these choices that makes any sense. A little thought, however, will show that this makes no sense either, instead leading us into a recursive series of questions. If they were going to burn things, why not do it at Warrenton? If they were going to burn things, why show it to the HSCA? Ditto the Church Committee. Ditto the Rockefeller Commission. Ditto the great progenitor, the Warren Commission.

After each presentation of the documents, the documentary trail grows longer and longer, impossible to erase even with the wiles and gadgets of the CIA. There is no version of this story that makes any sense either.

Flaw 6: It didn’t happen

As we have seen, Adamczyk believes that transferring records to NARA BEFORE the JFK Act was signed into law subverted the ARRB’s ability to review them according to the standards imposed by the Act. I still do not understand why this would be so.

One possibility: perhaps the Board could be tricked into thinking that the records were already released in full, so that they did not need review or identification aids. Another possibility: CIA reached a corrupt, covert agreement with NARA to conceal the records from the ARRB, in some manner and with some end that Adamczyk doesn’t feel obligated to spell out.

We can be sure, however, that in at least one case which matches Adamczyk’s hypothesis, NONE of these things happened. This is the case of the Oswald 201 file. Work on declassifying this file began early in 1992. When Gates addressed Senate and House committees on the JFK Act in May 1992, he presented the “pre-assassination” version of the file as an earnest of his intentions to open CIA records. Work on the Oswald 201 file continued after the release of pre-assassination records, and by September 1992 the first half of the 201 file was transferred to NARA.

These records were NOT released in full, and they were released PRIOR to the signing of the JFK Act. Did this early transfer, lacking RIF sheets, interfere with the ARRB review of these records? It did not. The ARRB requested and received RIFfed versions of the records, reviewed them, and opened most of the redactions. ALL of these records are available today at NARA, all open in full.

In fact, when the ARRB finally came on line, they published much stricter guidelines for requesting redactions than most agencies had anticipated. As a result, the ARRB required virtually all of the records previously submitted to NARA to be resubmitted, The ARRB’s strict interpretation of release exemptions was a hallmark of their time in office.

My two cents

With four historians and archivists led by a federal judge, the ARRB were nobody’s fools. I find it impossible to believe that they would have been fooled by the sort of half-baked “strategy” Adamczyk attributes to the CIA and NARA. Where does he get this idea? Perhaps there is some explanation in the second part of his letter that I have missed here. More on that later.