Today’s post is about two mixed up docs in Sylvia Duran’s 201 file. This is definitely a NARA problem, hopefully one that will get straightened out when they repost these ARC records online.
The Sylvia Duran 201 file
A CIA 201 file is a collection of “biographical” material relating to someone the CIA is trying to keep track of. the HSCA-CIA segregated collection is full of 201 files, especially the microfilm portion of the collection.
Among the subjects of these 201 files, Sylvia Duran holds special interest for JFK researchers. Duran was the visa officer on duty in the Cuban consulate when Lee Oswald came in looking for a visa to Cuba at the end of September, 1963. Duran wound up getting arrested and interrogated by Mexican security services twice, and called as a witness by the HSCA over a decade later, as everyone tried to figure out what Oswald was doing in Mexico City a little less than two months before he assassinated President Kennedy.
With such a high interest in Duran, one would think that people were keeping a close eye on her 201 file, but in fact it has a couple of careless clerical errors in it that gave me hours of headaches.
File hash
As I’ve described earlier, the ARRB, the federal board that assembled and released the massive JFK Assassination Record Collection, broke down most files that the CIA provided them into individual documents and gave each one a supposedly unique number, AKA a RIF number.
This process unintentionally made it quite difficult to put the documents back together into a file sometimes. It also produced more than one case where what were actually separate documents got shoved together into one “record”. The docs we are looking at in the Duran 201 are nasty examples of this problem.
The first doc is ARC 104-10169-10202. It turns out there are two copies of this record at the Mary Ferrell website which illustrate the problem we are looking at very nicely. The first copy was released in 1998 and is available here. The second copy was released by NARA in 2017 and is available here.
The 1998 copy of the record is fine, except for a couple of redactions. It has two pages: “Routing and Record Sheet”, and the dispatch which the RRS references. The 2017 copy of the record, however, includes the RRS and an unrelated cable (DIR 84926).
This confusion is matched later in the Duran 201 by ARC 104-10262-10360. There are three copies of this record at Mary Ferrell: a 1998 release (here), a 2017 release (here) and a 2018 release (here).
It turns out the 1998 record is the cable DIR 84926, which was inserted by error in the dispatch record we first looked at. It is a one page document, with one redaction. The 2017 copy includes TWO pages: DIR 84926 and the dispatch in 104-10169-10202. This 2017 dispatch has two redactions still unreleased. The 2018 copy also includes TWO pages: the dispatch and the cable. This time, however, both documents are completely unredacted.
Summing up, the 1998 releases of ARC 104-10169-10202 and 104-10262-10360 are error free. The 2017 and 2018 releases of these records are scrambled, as described above: a two page record has become one page and a one page document has become two pages. These are the kinds of errors that making putting together a file from its component parts in the ARC such a difficult task.
My two cents
The ARRB essentially atomized hundreds, perhaps thousands of files, chopping them up into itsy bitsy pieces and giving them numbers which are by no means contiguous. Odd, but why bother trying to put the pieces back together again? Because the parts of the file often don’t mean anything until we know what the subject is supposed to be. When pieces of files are scrambled as described above, all that is left is an incoherent mess. Note to NARA: please fix!