This note discusses the FBI-Church Committee liaison file, FBI file number 62-116395. The liaison file uses “SSC” as its abbreviation for the Church Committee, since their official title was the “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities.” In the discussion below, I will therefore use SSC to refer to the Committee.
The SSC conducted a major inquiry into the United States intelligence community from 1975-1976. As part of the inquiry, an SSC subcommittee, chaired by Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart, examined issues in President Kennedy’s assassination. Their conclusions were summarized in Book V of the Committee’s report, available at the MFF website here.
It is no surprise that the section of the FBI-SSC liaison file relating to the Schweiker-Hart investigation is in the ARC. What is surprising is that the ARC holds almost the ENTIRE FBI-SSC liaison file, a huge collection that is otherwise totally irrelevant to the JFK assassination.
My latest page count for the FBI-SSC records in the ARC is approximately 53,000. Of these pages, about 5,200 were released between 1994-1998. This was the portion of the file that was assassination related.
The remainder of the FBI-SSC file was released (with some redactions) between 2017-2023. Virtually all of this material is marked NAR, “not assassination related.” When these NAR releases began, it was not clear how much material was included, because the FBI did not supply page counts for any of these records. It was only in 2017-18, when the actual pdfs were released, that it became clear there were over 47,000 pages of NAR material in this part of the collection.
To find such a huge amount of material was surprising for a couple of reasons. Forget about the files irrelevance to the assassination, there are not that many FBI-SSC records listed in the JFK database! How could there be so much material?! It turns out, however, that most of these records have hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages.
Page counts were particularly difficult for these records because the FBI-SSC pdf files posted at NARA’s JFK website often included docs from multiple records. My page counts for these records are based on the actual pdfs released by NARA. To avoid duplicate counts, I have made sure that each of the pdfs for the FBI-SSC liaison file was only counted once. I am therefore reasonably confident that the count of 47,000+ pages is correct.
A file list
A excel list of records from the FBI-SSC liaison file, with links to the pdfs on the MFF website, is available here.
Remember that for many of these FBI pdfs, NARA combined multiple records into one pdf. The list gives a link to the MFF copy of each pdf, then one record number for ONE of the records included in the pdf, and the FBI case file number for THAT record (as found in the 2021 update of the JFK database at NARA). The final column gives the number of pages in each of these pdfs at MFF. Adding up all of these pages gives 47,412 pages.
If you track down ALL of the records from the FBI-SSC liaison file and try to look them up in the JFK database, you will discover that the number of pages field is BLANK for all of them! The FBI told the ARRB it would not provide number of pages for the NAR records until the records were released. The FBI has still not done this.
Matching the correct number of pages from these pdfs to each individual record in the JFKARC is a non-trivial task. I have not attempted to do this. However, I am confident that all of the pages in all of these pdfs are indeed from the FBI-SSC liaison file, so regardless of which pages go where, I am reasonably sure they belong to file #62-116395.
These pdfs therefore represent all the NAR records the FBI has released since 2017 from the SSC liaison file. (I hope!) And as I said above, I am confident that there are no duplicate pdfs in my list.
None of these records were released by the ARRB in the first wave of releases from 1994-1999. As noted above, there were some records from the SSC file released in the first wave, which WERE assassination related. Apparently NONE of these records are on-line at present.
My two cents
The sheer volume of the FBI-SSC liaison file is mind-boggling. How this mass of non-JFK material wound up in the ARC is worth a close look. I will have at least one more note on this. For those who are interested in the complex story of the SSC inquiry, the liaison file is a gold-mine of information that has been neglected by most ARC researchers, with the notable exception of David Garrow. I will eventually have another note on Garrow’s rigorous study of the FBI’s MLK files which seem to derive mostly from the FBI-SSC liaison file.