[revised and corrected 2025-06-16]
In this recent note I promised to discuss a number of HSCA depositions not yet released in full. This note provides the details.
To understand the full background, start with this note.
The short version: HSCA formally deposed many people. Transcripts of depositions are available in the ARC, but it turns out that for 24 depositions, TWO copies of transcripts are available in the ARC. This led to a great deal of confusion and inconsistency in redactions and releases.
Some of these duplicate transcripts were released in full long ago. Others were not released in full until 2026, and several duplicate records are still available online only in redacted versions.
This post looks at these duplicates to determine what is available online and what is not, and what has been released in full and what has not. Clearly there is room for an additional release of these duplicate transcripts in the ARC.
Note this does not involve release of hitherto unseen information.
In each case discussed below, there were two copies of transcripts. One of the two copies has been released in full. The other copy has one or two items covered by a redaction box, so it is released in part. That means in each case, there is at least one copy open in full for public inspection.
For why all this is worth a post, see the “two cents” discussion at the end of this note.
The duplicates
Following is a list of people with duplicate depositions:
| # | Name | Job title | Deposition date |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Bustos, Charlotte Z. | CIA Mexico Desk Chief | 1978-05-19 |
| #2 | Egerter, Ann Elizabeth | CIA Counterintelligence officer | 1978-05-17 |
| #3 | Goodpasture, Ann | CIA Mexico City Station officer | 1978-04-13, 1978-11-20 |
| #4 | Hidalgo, Balmes | CIA JMWAVE Station agent | 1978-08-10 |
| #5 | Hunt, E. H. | Former CIA officer | 1978-11-03 |
| #6 | Larson, William F. | CIA Information Management Staff | 1978-06-27 |
| #7 | Manell, Barbara | CIA Mexico City contract officer | 1978-04-28 |
| #8 | Manell, Herbert | CIA Mexico City Soviet Desk | 1978-04-28 |
| #9 | McCone, John | Director of Central Intelligence | 1978-08-17 |
| #10 | Murphy, David E. | CIA Chief, Soviet Russia Division | 1978-08-09 |
| #11 | Nosenko, Yuri | KGB defector | 1978-05-30, 1978-06-20 |
| #12 | O’Neal, Birch | CIA Counterintelligence Staff, Special Intelligence Group | 1978-06-20 |
| #13 | Phillips, David A. | CIA Mexico City Cuban Ops | 1976-11-27, 1978-04-25, 1978-05-11 |
| #14 | Rankin, J. Lee | Warren Commission Chief Counsel | 1978-08-17 |
| #15 | Ryan, Thomas | CIA Soviet Russia Division Counterintelligence Staff | 1978-07-27 |
| #16 | Shaw, Robert T. | CIA Mexico City Cuban Ops | 1978-05-16 |
| #17 | Solie, Bruce | CIA Office of Security | 1978-06-01 |
| #18 | Tarasoff, Boris and Anna | CIA Mexico City translators | 1976-11-28 |
| #19 | Tovar, B. Hugh | CIA Chief Counterintelligence Staff | 1978-06-29 |
| #20 | White, Alan B. | CIA Deputy Chief of Station, Mexico City | 1978-05-18 |
| #21 | Whitten, John | CIA Chief of WHD Branch III | 1978-05-16 |
Each deposition transcript for the people on this list is available in two copies, textually identical pairs with perhaps minor visual variations. In some pairs, a cover sheet may be present in one copy and not in another. In one case, HSCA staff notes were appended to one record but not another.
The copies are distinguished in the JFK database by having two different record numbers, one starting with “180-10110-” (call this the “a” copy), and one starting with “180-10131-” (call this the “b” copy).
Several things worth noting:
!) As pointed out in my previous post, there are 24 duplicate transcripts, so a total of 48 transcripts. I included the transcript of Ann Goodpasture’s second deposition in my discussion even though there is no duplicate copy, so I wound up with a note on 49 transcripts.
2) Three people in this list were deposed more than one time: David Phillips (3x), Yuri Nosenko (2x), and Goodpasture (2x). This means there are only 21 people in my list of deponents.
3) The name of one deponent was given as “Restricted” in NARA’s JFK database. According to the database, both copies of the deposition were released in full (RIF), but neither one is available online. After some research, I believe this was the deposition of CIA counter-intelligence officer Birch O’Neal. A partial copy of O’Neal’s deposition is available in the Malcolm Blunt’s online archive (see here).
4)The names used in the table are true names, though some of the deponents used pseudonyms, or their names were withheld in the database index at various points. To save space, I have not cited sources for where I found the true names.
5) NARA’s JFK database indicates whether a record was released in full or not, but the database record status is current only up to 2018. For records that were released after that, I have checked myself whether they are RIF or RIP.
6) The job title I give after each name is based on what they were asked during the deposition. For example, Robert Shaw was in the CIA Inspector General’s office when he was deposed in 1978, but he was questioned primarily about his time at the CIA Mexico City Station. E. Howard Hunt was questioned primarily about his time working for the White House, not about his CIA career.
7) The copies of Hugh Tovar’s deposition are not 100 percent duplicates. ARC 180-10110-10014, which was finally released in full in January 2026, includes 12 pages of HSCA staff notes. The duplicate, ARC 180-10131-10325, consists of only the deposition itself. The deposition portions are identical. Oddly, the notes in the first copy are not on Tovar’s deposition. Instead, they are probably from William Larson’s deposition. Don’t know why the confusion.
Finding duplicate transcripts released in full
How does one determine whether a record in the ARC has been released in full? The JFK Database should be the answer.
The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) was established by a 1992 law: the JFK Act. The Act required the collection to have an electronic index: the JFK Database.
The Database was compiled from the identification aids compiled by the government agencies which supplied the records to the National Archives. The JFK Act required Agencies to produce these aids, also referred to as Reader Information Forms (RIFs).
The RIFs provided basic metadata about each record: which department/agency supplied it, who wrote it, how many pages, what date, etc.1For a longer introduction to the Database, see here. They also indicated record status: redacted or released in full. Determining record status should therefore be as simple as searching the Database constructed from the RIFs.
Unfortunately, determining the status of records in the ARC is not that simple. Why? The Database was not updated as record status changed. The most current version of the Database was released in May 2021, and accurately shows which records were released in full at that time. For records which were released in full after that, it is out of date.
How does one determine the status of these later releases?
In theory, following release of the updated Database in 2021, records it marks as redacted should have all been posted on NARA’s JFK website in newer versions, released in full.
Were they all posted? You have to check for yourself. Were all redactions removed? You have to check . for yourself. That is a lot of work. I have done that work, and I can say that, based on the 2021 Database update and pdfs posted at NARA, a complete versions of at least one copy of each transcript has been posted at NARA.
However, I believe there are at least five duplicate transcripts, marked as redacted on the 2021 database update, that have not been posted online by NARA. How did this happen? That is a complicated story which will doubtless put most people to sleep. Insomniacs read on, this is the cure you have been looking for!
Finding duplicate transcripts still redacted
Following is a list of the duplicate transcripts not yet released in full online
| # | Name | record no. | copy (a/b) | Deposition date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # | Bustos, Charlotte Z. | 180-10110-10026 | a | 1978-05-19 |
| # | Murphy, David E. | 180-10110-10011 | a | 1978-08-09 |
| # | Nosenko, Yuri | 180-10110-10008 | a | 1978-06-20 |
| # | Tarasoff, Boris & Anna | 180-10110-10030 | a | 1976-11-28 |
| # | While, Alan B. | 180-10110-10019 | a | 1978-05-18 |
The problem here arose from the mechanics of NARA’s record releasing.
In each NARA release through 2023, NARA did two things: first, they posted pdfs of JFK records which removed some or all of the redaction boxes. Second, they posted an excel sheet which gave all the JFK database metadata for the records they were posting.
This second was was useful, but not 100% necessary, since NARA made record metadata available elsewhere. The excel sheet, however, WAS essential for one thing: it told you the ARC record number of each pdf that NARA posted.
Strictly speaking, this too should have been unnecessary: NARA could have just used the record number as the filename for the pdf. For example, if you post a pdf of ARC record number 180-10110-10026, just give it the filename 180-10110-10026.pdf
NARA did this for some of the pdfs they posted, but not all. Instead, For many records they used other filenames, incorporating other numberings. As a result, the excel sheet columns “filename” and “record number” are essential to keep track of which pdf represents which record.
Unfortunately, this permitted another sort of error to pop up. Given this arrangement, it became possible to have an incorrect match between the pdf filename and the record number (and other metadata) attributed to that pdf in the excel sheet.
This is what happened with a number of pdfs that NARA released, including four duplicate transcripts.
Take the two copies of the Charlotte Bustos deposition, 180-10110-10026 and 180-10131-10338. According to the NARA spreadsheet for April 2018, copies of both files were posted at NARA’s website.
If we look at the filename listed for these two records, however, we see that it is the same: 2018/180-10131-10338.pdf. This means NARA did NOT post two pdfs for these two transcripts, they posted only one.
Well, which one? If we look at the file 2018/180-10131-10338.pdf, we see that the first page is a RIF sheet which identifies it as 180-10131-10338. This means that in 2018, ARC 180-10110-10026 was not posted at all.
This is not the only record where this happened. Following is a table of the duplicate transcripts which had this problem:
| # | name | record no. | copy (a/b) | deposition date | filename |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bustos, Charlotte Z. | 180-10110-10026 | a | 1978-05-19 | 2018/180-10131-10338.pdf |
| 1 | Bustos, Charlotte Z. | 180-10131-10338 | b | 1978-05-19 | 2018/180-10131-10338.pdf |
| 2 | Murphy, David E. | 180-10110-10011 | a | 1978-08-09 | 2018/180-10131-10322.pdf |
| 2 | Murphy, David E. | 180-10131-10322 | b | 1978-08-09 | 2018/180-10131-10322.pdf |
| 3 | Nosenko, Yuri | 180-10110-10008 | a | 1978-06-20 | 2018/180-10131-10324.pdf |
| 3 | Nosenko, Yuri | 180-10131-10324 | b | 1978-06-20 | 2018/180-10131-10324.pdf |
| 4 | Phillips, David A. | 180-10110-10016 | a | 1978-04-25 | 2018/180-10131-10327.pdf |
| 4 | Phillips, David A. | 180-10131-10327 | b | 1978-04-25 | 2018/180-10131-10327.pdf |
| 5 | Tovar, B. Hugh | 180-10110-10014 | a | 1978-06-29 | 2018/180-10131-10325.pdf |
| 5 | Tovar, B. Hugh | 180-10131-10325 | b | 1978-06-29 | 2018/180-10131-10325.pdf |
| 6 | While, Alan B. | 180-10110-10019 | a | 1978-05-18 | 2018/180-10131-10332.pdf |
| 6 | While, Alan B. | 180-10131-10332 | b | 1978-05-18 | 2018/180-10131-10332.pdf |
I know this is confusing! Here is what the table tells us: for 12 HSCA transcripts, six “a” copies and six “b” copies, NARA only posted six pdfs, all of them “b” copies. In the excel sheet NARA posted for the 2018 release, however, it listed 12 HSCA transcripts. The links it gave For the pdfs of the “a” copies were all “b” copies.
This can drive you crazy when trying to look things up. For example, if readers look up the “a” copies from 2018 on the Mary Ferrell website, they will find that that although MFF prints the “a” copy record number above the pdf, the first page of the pdf is a RIF sheet which shows the “b” copy record number!
In later releases, NARA eventually posted real “a” copies for the Phillips and Tovar depositions, but they never posted real “a” copies for the other four records.
There was another even more confusing release in the 2018. NARA posted two separate pdfs for the “a” and “b” copies of the John Whitten deposition, but the RIF sheet attached to each copy is for the “b” copy. The “b” copy of the transcript is released in full, but where’s the “a” copy?
It is likely that the “a” copy of Whitten’s deposition was never posted, just the “b” copy. Oh well, at least NARA put up two pdfs for two records. Count the “a” copy of the transcript as released in full if you want, but I suspect it is not.
The last record to account for is the “a” copy of the first HSCA interview of Boris and Anna Tarasoff. An old, redacted version of the “a” copy is available on the MFF website, but NARA never posted an unredacted pdf of “a”. They did finally post an unredacted pdf of the “b” copy (180-10131-10340) in 2023.
Two cents
There are a number of “a” or “b” copies that are not available on line at all. As I noted above, the O’Neal deposition is almost completely missing online in both copies.
O’Neal was an important witness to how the CIA handled the search for information on Oswald, so this is unfortunate.
There are also deposition copies which the JFK Database tells us were released in full, but the online copies we have are old, redacted versions. For instance, both copies of DCI McCone’s deposition are available online, but both copies have one or two redactions.
I don’t claim great signficance for the fact that we do not have both copies of each transcript released in full. Nonetheless, this is part of the accounting that the JFK Act promised, and NARA should provide pdfs of these five (or six) records which are free of all redactions.
But I have a much bigger bone to pick with NARA. What about the microfilm copy of the CIA’s Lee Harvey Oswald 201 file?
According to both NARA and CIA, the microfilm 201 is a duplicate of the hardcopy 201. Post it so we can verify. Post it so we can have access to the many, many records in the 201 that are still not online.
It is included in the ARC. It consists of over 138 records, and has a total of over 30,000 pages. Not ONE of these has yet been released.
Until the microfilm LHO 201 is released in full, the release process for the ARC is not complete.
Clarify the record. Complete the releases.