[updated 18 September 2025]
After looking at ARRB’s “Final determination forms” (here), I am back poking around in the ARRB’s record notices for information I might have overlooked. This note describes what I found.
Caveat lector! This note is pure bean counting, and will be deathly boring for most readers.…
This note corrects a major error in my recent comment “Formal and final in the JFK Act”. In that note, I incorrectly stated that there were less than one hundred instances of the ARRB’s “Final determination form” (FDF) in the ARC. In fact there are over seven hundred. After looking at all these instances, I have also changed my views on the use of these forms in the ARC.…
This note continues my recent look at Andrew Iler’s articles on ARRB’s “Final Determination Form” (FDF). If there were indeed over 26,000 of these forms printed and all of them are now AWOL, what does this mean for the integrity of the ARC? Iler suggests it opens the door for major doubts.…
The ARRB created a special form, which it called a “final determination form” (FDF), to record its decisions to release or postpone text in ARC documents. This form has recently become the subject of discussion among several assassination researchers, some of whom attach much importance to it.
I’m still looking at the arguments for this, so I don’t have anything general to say.…
This note discusses a recent claim about the ARC, a claim based on a memo written by CIA Chief Historian J. Kenneth McDonald. I spent some time working on this memo last year (see here for a blog note), so I was naturally interested in this new claim.
The claim comes from attorney Mark Adamczyk.…
This note provides the documentation I promised in my last post (available here). Better read that first, or the following won’t make much sense.
As I mentioned in my last post, I checked RIF comments for records from box 16 (you have to read the last note to understand this!),…
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.…
My interest in the ARC is often “academic”, and as a result, many of my notes on this blog are not particularly interesting for people who don’t care about the ARC as an archive. This is another such note, so caveat lector.
When the HSCA shut down in 1979, they made sure that all the CIA records they reviewed during their investigation were boxed, sealed, and stored for at least 30 years.…
Jeff Morley’s Substack blog JFK Facts has posted an interesting coda to the story of Operation TILT. (I discussed TILT in a note available here). The post features an interview with Dick Billings, the LIFE editor who accompanied William Pawley and the Cuban team to their drop off near the coast of Cuba.…