NARA posted the “new” FBI releases related to the JFK assassination today (6/28/25). The announcement was posted on the 2025 releases page here, and the links for downloading are here. Twelve pages of links, get them while they’re hot!
Format issues
Happily, the releases are available as pdfs, just click on the link to the download page and look for the phrase “Files Available for Download — Other Files.” Like the other new NARA releases, there are a couple of downsides to these pdfs.
Number one, the images in the pdfs are TIFF images, which means the images and the pdfs are very large. Number two, each doc page was scanned on both sides. Only a handful of pages have text on the back, so this greatly inflates the number of pages to download and flip through. Number three, like all NARA pdfs, these were not run through an OCR program, so they are just images, not text.
Content issues
These records are VERY miscellaneous. They range from regular FBI files in all sizes and shapes to audio files and video files (such as the footage of Ruby shooting Oswald). Of course, the vast majority are text. There are 232 files altogether, but a couple of video files are not yet available, don’t know what’s up with that.
The text files are again highly miscellaneous. They are mostly labeled as sections or volumes in a couple of the big FBI casefiles for the JFK assassination. The most frequent files are 62-109060, the HQ file on the assassination itself, and 62-109090, the HQ file on Warren Commission liaison issues.
These labels are newly added, I believe. Wherever the FBI found these records, they incorporated them into existing files with new section, volume, and serial numbers. I’ll get back on this later in the week.
Some of the files are just record keeping, others are more substantial. I believe that some of them are one hundred percent duplicates of material that was already present in other records. I saw pages from Oswald’s “historic journal” for instance.
Others files cover new material, but much of it appears to be very peripheral stuff: some files are La Cosa Nostra stuff (LCN), others are files on the usual cast of characters such as Jerry Hemming and his brother.
There is also strangely irrelevant stuff such as a memo on the 1968 assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, John Mein. What earthly relevance this has to the JFK assassination is beyond me. Write if you can enlighten me.
Relevant or not, there are thousands and thousands of pages in this release, so a careful summary will take more than a day or two. I will have something up within a week or so, that’s the best I can do.