This is my fourth post on John Caesar Grossi. Grossi, under the name Jack L. Bowen, was listed as a reference on Lee Harvey Oswald’s Dallas Public Library card, a card which helped identify Oswald when he was arrested for the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippet. Hours after his arrest for Tippet’s murder, Oswald was also charged with the murder of President Kennedy.…
Author Archives: Robert Reynolds
FBI files on MLK at MFF
Just a brief note today on the MLK files recently posted at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website (MFF). I previously did a post on NARA’s release of these files in July 2025 (available here).
MFF’s versions of these files are thoroughly re-arranged and re-indexed, and should be consulted in most cases where anyone is interested in MLK-FBI issues.…
Untangling FBI multi-record pdfs, part I
This is the first of a series of notes that try to straighten out some of the confusion around FBI multi-record pdfs.
Multi-record pdfs are an FBI release format which combines multiple ARC records in a single pdf. For a general description of multi-record pdfs released by the FBI through NARA, see here.…
A note on CIA record management
This note takes a brief look at the system CIA is now using for JFK records declassification. I am posting this note since declassification is one of my interests; I also hope this note will help clarify some ARC release issues.
The MORI system
This section is based mostly on a document from the National Archives titled “Records Management in the Central Intelligence Agency”, available from the Federal of American Scientists website here.…
A phantom FBI record
This is a brief note on an issue related to FBI multi-record pdfs (see here for an introduction to this troublesome topic). A much longer, more substantial note on these pdfs is coming up.
The short version
The point of this post is that there is a bad link in the 2017 ARC pdfs posted at NARA.…
FBI multi-record pdfs and the MFF collection
I’m posting this note for my own reference. Feel free to ignore this if you are not trying to understand the ins and outs of the FBI multi-record releases.
What is a multi-record pdf?
A multi-record pdf is a pdf which includes more than one ARC record. There is nothing special about this, you can make your own, like I do, if you have the right software.…
ARRB record notices: 28 Sep 1998
[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.…
Corrections to “Formal and final in the JFK Act”
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.…
“Formal” and “final” in the JFK Act
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.…
A note on ARRB “final determination forms”
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.…