This note looks at the ARC records posted at NARA on March 20. This was the third set of records posted, so they are batch 3. I have already covered batch 4, so this will probably be the last note in my overview of the 2025 releases, unless there is a batch 5. (There are still the “newly found” FBI records.) After this, I can finally get down to discussions of individual records.
The main points covered in this note:
- Batches 3 and 4 of the 2025 releases are cleanup posts
- Batch 3 releases “listed records” and “overlooked records”
- Listed records are mostly from SSC-FBI admin file, with lots of duplication
- Overlooked records are mostly from FBI organized crime files
- PFIAB records offer interesting intelligence details
- 15 records were never before posted online, mostly Pike Committee records
Batch 3 description
NARA posted 161 records in batch 3. My first post on the releases (here) had a quick overview of the departments and agencies (D/A) these records came from, and how many records each had. I’ll repeat the table here for convenience:
| D/A prefix | D/A name | count |
|---|---|---|
| 104 | Central Intelligence Agency | 1 |
| 124 | Federal Bureau of Investigation | 121 |
| 135 | House Select Committee on Intelligence | 14 |
| 144 | National Security Agency | 2 |
| 157 | Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities | 1 |
| 178 | Gerald R. Ford Library | 1 |
| 180 | House Select Committee on Assassinations | 2 |
| 198 | Office of the Secretary of the Army | 1 |
| 206 | President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board | 18 |
NARA’s batches 1 and 2 were the main release, with a total 2182 pdfs posted. Batches 3 and 4 are cleanup, posting pdfs for records missed in the main release (161 + 16 = 177 total). Putting everything together, NARA has posted a total of 2,359 pdfs on line this time. As we will see, however, this does not quite add up to 2,359 ARC records.
Two types of releases in batch 3
Batch 3 is interesting because we can divide the pdfs posted online into two types: “listed records” and “overlooked records”.
Beginning in 2017, NARA started posting pdfs of released records in the ARC. Including the March releases, there have been a total of sixteen postings (counting the batches in 2025 as one posting).
It is clear that there was a well-defined set of ARC redacted records. Continued postings either finished releasing specific records in full, after which we saw them no more, or released some parts while still holding back other parts, followed a few months or years later by the next posting.
This is why we knew what records might be posted in 2025; it was the same old shrinking set of redacted records from the redacted list.
The only uncertainty we had was that in 2022-2023, NARA did not specifically tell us which records had finally been released in full. Records can be hundreds of pages long, and it’s tough to go through looking for blank redaction boxes.
Of course, if you wanted to sift through thousands of documents to see for yourself, you could. I did. Call it a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder.
So the records that have been posted and reposted at NARA since 2017 are what I mean by “listed records”. When these records appeared one final time in 2025, it was not a surprise.
It was a surprise to see records that had not previously been released in 2017-2023. Apparently NARA has continued to rummage through its boxes and came up with this very limited set of records that they overlooked when compiling the list of redacted records. Now that they’ve found them, they are posting pdfs of these records in full, sans redactions!
This rest of this note will go through each of these record sets separately, and put the big picture together at the close.
Redactions in listed records
Out of 161 records in batch 3, 60 had previously been posted at NARA. As you can imagine, there were not many redactions left to release in these docs. Lots of personal info, all duly published at NARA. It still boggles the mind.
Almost all of the listed records were from the FBI, 42 from the giant FBI-SSC administrative file. At least one extravagant claim has been made for the data released from these irrelevant files. I’ll eventually post about it, but don’t expect to read anything nice.
There were also files from the FBI-HSCA administrative file, again not much JFK relevant. I should point out that the massive duplicate FBI files I previously wrote about are almost all from these two files.
In case you don’t remember, I cited one case from the SSC-FBI files where NARA posted ten 100% duplicate files totaling 2450 pages, all in order to release two pages of redactions. Caveat lector.
Redactions in overlooked records
To explain again, there were many pdfs posted in batch 3 which were NOT posted at NARA once, from 2017 to 2023. How many? I count 98, so the majority of records in batch 3 belong to this group. As we will see below, 15 of these records were apparently posted online for the first time!
Why did this happen? My theory is that these redacted records were simply not caught when NARA started releasing stuff in 2017. No idea when they found out these things were still redacted, but they took this opportunity to post all of these records in full. I have looked at all of these records, and there are NO redactions in the 2025 releases. Done!
The records in this group that were previously posted online can all be found at the MFF website, so it is possible to say how much material was released in these records. In some cases it was surprisingly extensive. One interesting example was 124-10226-10305. The old MFF version of this record is here.
This record is from the FBI file on Norman Rothman, a well-known LCN member closely affiliated with Santo Trafficante. There were several partial releases of this file earlier, but the 2025 pdf is released in full.
The most interesting material in here was the discussion of DEA’s use of Luis Posada as an informant against Rothman. Posada is now deceased, and lucky for him. All of the whole page redactions in the early version of the file were about Posada. These new pages add to our knowledge of Posada’s career. In addition, Posada had a lengthy CIA 201 file which originally had extensive whole page redactions. These are also now released in full. I will write on this in another note.
As you might have guessed, most of these overlooked records are from the FBI-HSCA files on organized crime. HSCA looked deeply into the theory that JFK’s assassination was the result of a Mafia conspiracy, and the HSCA investigators acquired a massive cache of FBI LCN records. That is what these lately released records are mostly about.
Organized crime figures with large numbers of record releases include Sam and Gabriel Mannarino (10 records), Johnny Rosselli (22 records), and Santo Trafficante (13 records).
The main thing being released in these records is, of course, informant names. The FBI fought long and hard to keep these under wraps, and I think it is safe to assume that all of these informants are safely dead by now. There is some colorful info in the releases, including a photo of Gus Alex on vacation, apparently in Switzerland.
I don’t see how any of this stuff is JFK relevant, but this is a very specialized field, so I’ll say no more here.
Another really interesting set of overlooked releases are docs from the Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This was a group of non-governmental civilians who were there to offer helpful advice on how to improve U.S. intelligence abroad.
As one might expect, some highly classified material was released in these records, which first came out back in 1998, when they were roundly ignored. Even then, the records still had numerous paragraph length redactions throughout the set of 18 docs, the nature of which was impossible to guess. These records are ALL released in full. What were the redactions covering?
Well quite a bit was satellite intelligence, classified under the codeword BYEMAN. Most interesting to me, but I am not an expert in this field. I’ll see if I can get any commentary from experts and post if I do.
There is certainly some JFK relevant material in these records, though the new releases are much less relevant than the material released earlier.
This shows once again that the ARRB accurately described their releasing practice. As Board chair Joh Tunheim said in an interview, they withheld virtually nothing directly relevant to the assassination, but did allow departments and agencies to hold back classified info that was not directly relevant to the assassination.
The PFIAB records are proof of this claim.
Previously unseen records
There were 15 records posted this time which were previously not available online: 13 records from the Pike Committee, the House version of the Senate Church Committee, and two records from NSA.
As I noted earlier, there are over 200 NSA records in the ARC which still have redactions, but have not been reposted at this time. These two NSA records were not released during the last eight years, but the material in them is trivial in the extreme. Don’t know what was released, it was probably names of NSA people. These are far more carefully protected than CIA personnel are.
I am still looking at the Pike committee stuff, this is as far as I’ve gotten. Some are quite interesting, others short and not very informative. No JFK stuff so far, but as you can guess, records have to name JFK assassination names before I talk about their relevance.
Loose ends
The careful reader might note that I am only up to 158 records in batch 3, which was supposed to have 161. The remaining three have duplicate numbers and are all messy junk. As I mentioned in a previous post, the FBI sometimes posted fragments of records, rather than the whole thing. I suspect this was part of their review process, but don’t really know. One of the remaining three records was like this, the same record number but only seven pages instead of 370. One was a total mistake, posting record X instead of records Y. The last was a hard to describe mess. 161 records it is.
Is anything left?
Yes! As I have said earlier, there are over 200 redacted NSA records that were not re-posted this time. There are five CIA records with substantial redactions that were not re-posted. There are also 70 plus FBI records that I found redactions in, but did not get posted this time either. Most of the FBI records are from the non-relevant FBI-SSC admin file, don’t expect much from there.
Most urgent, however, is the microfilm version of the Oswald 201 file, all 31000 pages of it. Yes, the file has been released in thousands and thousands of tiny pieces, but not all of it is available on line. Release the microfilm 201! Give us the whole thing in one fell swoop!
My two cents
There is interesting material in batch 3, but like the main releases in batches 1 and 2, the JFK relevant material is extremely limited. Nonetheless, it is also important to show commitment to the end goal of the JFK Act: total release.
The most disappointing aspect of the release is of course the feckless release of personal information for hundreds of people, a poisonous imperfection in the 2025 releases. This flaw is just as prominent in batch 3 as it is in batches 1 and 2. Then of course, there is the mindless duplication of records in the FBI releases from batch 3, which makes research such a dull misery.