This note is a continuation of my comments on the January 1992 checklist for the HSCA-CIA segregated collection (see here). Be sure to read that note before you read this note.

I recently learned that longtime JFK researcher Joe Backes also did a post mentioning the checklist. His post appeared on his substack blog “Justice for Kennedy”, and is available here.

Joe did a lot of writing on the ARRB in 1995-1998; I read his articles on the ARRB during this period carefully. These were originally available only on the Archive.org Wayback Machine webpage archive, and long ago I did a page discussing his articles with links to all of them I could find. The page is still available here. Backes’ articles are now also also available in the Fair Play website archive on the MFF website (here).

Backes’ post is worth a read for those interested in this specialized topic. This note follows up on Backes’ comments and looks at the January 1992 checklist in more detail. Once again, a caveat for those who are not interested in archival details: read this note at the risk of extreme boredom!

Backes’ post

Backes’ post discusses three points:

• an introduction to the idea that the CIA was able to avoid ARRB review of some of its records by sending them to NARA before the JFK Act was passed into law. This idea is now current among several JFK researchers; I will post a note on it later this month.
• a description of the Jan 1992 checklist;
• an outline of ARC 104-10337-10006. This is a collection of documents on how CIA reviewed the HSCA-CIA Segregated Collection. (Below, I’ll just call this “the review docs”).

Backes believes the checklist should be in the JFK ARC. Considering it’s close relationship with several other docs in the ARC, I agree. Will NARA fill out an identification aid for it and insert it into the JFK database? I doubt it.

The JFK Act requires departments and agencies to create iden aids, not NARA. They might tell the CIA to create a new iden aid for it, and then add it to the JFK database, but more likely a copy of it will go into a folder somewhere, and perhaps a descriptive note for the folder will be added to the guides to the CIA record group.

Backes also believes that the checklist was not seen by the ARRB staff. I’m not so sure about that. Mary McAuliffe was one of the ARRB’s CIA researchers. Prior to this, she was a staffer in the CIA’s Historical Research Group (HRG). After she retired, she was quickly recruited by the ARRB. I think it’s very likely that McAuliffe saw this doc, either while still at HRG, or after she joined ARRB.

Reading between the lines, Backes also believes, or at least suspects, that there might be some important new information in the checklist, perhaps something that would support the idea that CIA was indeed “hiding” docs in its review of the Segregated Collection.

This is certainly not the case. To see why, you have to read the checklist.

What’s in the box?

Basically the checklist consists of 63 box inventory sheets, plus about forty pages of handwritten notes on various folders in each box. I skipped over much of this detail in my last post, so I’ll fill in the blanks here.

The inventory sheets were obviously typed up by someone in the CIA History Staff specifically for this job. Here is a relatively scribble free example:

So this box was examined by GKH, surely an HRG researcher. GKH looked at the box on 1/24/92. Job number is a number CIA generates when they put a set of record boxes into storage. This is box 9 (duh). It is located in the facilities of the Directorate of Operations’ Information Management Service, and there were 75 folders in it; apparently there was no folder 76.

What kind of stuff is in the box? “Primarily HSCA requests for name traces from CIA on individuals, organizations. HTLINGUAL, CHAOS, surveillance operations in Mexico City 1963. Cables from HMM and Winston Scott. List of Cuban desk crypts, Spanish translations.”

Document types include dispatches, letters, correspondence, reports, FBI lab, memo of conversation, computer print outs. Maximum security classification is “secret”. Documents include material covered by the Privacy Act and touch on CIA sources and methods. There is at least one FOIA request pending on one or more doc in the box.

The box already had a list of folder titles in it, which is no doubt how GKH learned that “folder 76” was missing. And finally, there are thermofax copies of docs in the box. Thermofax is loathed by all archivists. These docs first fade until they are only blank pieces of paper, then crumble up and blow away if you look at them too long.

What does this tell us?

The January 1992 checklist is not the only source for how many boxes and folders were in the HSCA-CIA collection. The original location of every CIA record in these 63 boxes is also marked in the “comments” field of each doc’s RIF sheet. “Location” here means which box and which folder. This RIF info gives us an independent check on the box and folder structure that the checklist notes, since we can check what the RIF sheet comments field says about which docs came from which folders.

Applying this to box 9, we discover that the RIF sheet comments tell us there are actually docs from folder 76, which was supposed to be missing, and there are NO docs from another 12 folders which the checklist says were there in 1/92 (or at least didn’t mention as missing). This doesn’t have to mean those folders were destroyed or hidden of course; they could have been moved to different boxes or merged into other folders, for instance.

According to the RIF sheet comment fields, there are 741 records from box 9 now in the collection; not the smallest box, but not the biggest one either. Box checker GKH also noted there was a box inventory in box 9; according to the RIF comments, this inventory is available here. This “box inventory” is actually a folder list. This is probably why GKH didn’t bother to create one.

Using the checklist, and the “box inventory”, we can look to see where some of the folders in box 9 that don’t show up in the RIF sheet comments fields have gone to. The checklist for box 9 is thus a sometimes useful supplement to what we can find by just checking the box and folder numbers in the RIF comments.

Is the checklist info really new?

The answer to this question is no. Some of it was already available elsewhere. Where? In ARC 104-10337-10006 (the review docs). So Backes is on the right track in looking at the checklist in conjunction with the review docs.

What information is in the review docs collection? The first item is a five page memo from Chief Historian J. Kenneth McDonald. McDonald was charged by acting DCI Robert Gates with surveying the HSCA-CIA collection and recommending its disposition. The checklist was the first fruit of McDonald’s efforts.

Following the memo is a three page summary of the results of the survey, then two annexes: A and B. Annex A surveys finding aids and indexes for the collection. Annex B is a twelve page box list of files reviewed by the history staff.

The Annex B box list is almost identical with the “subjects” section of the checklist box sheets, making it clear that the checklist is the source of most of Annex B. Compare the Annex B description of box 9 with the subject field of the sheet shown above: The Annex reads: “Primarily HSCA requests.for name traces on individuals and organizations; CIA surveillance operations in Mexico City; copies of cable traffic from Mexico City Station. (File folder 76 missing.)” This is essentially identical to what we read above in the box 9 checklist.

I have gone through all 63 of the box checklists, and the same holds true for all of them, though sometimes details are added, subtracted, or changed. No doubt then that Annex B, which we have had since the late 1990s, presents most of the content of the checklist, except for working information such as who did the research, when, and where. Interesting as metadata, but not essential.

The additional 40 pages of folder lists are NOT in Annex B, so this is really new stuff. Some of these lists duplicate box inventories from other places in the collection, however, so even here we get the kind of duplication typical of the entire JFKARC.