This is another long-overdue note giving a brief overview of CIA files on Lee Oswald, the man who shot President Kennedy. It is the second in a series of notes on CIA records in the JFKARC. The first note, on CIA docs in HSCA records, is available here.
Note the plural in the title of this post; there were multiple CIA files devoted to Oswald over the years, as well as files where Oswald was mentioned, but was not the main subject.…
[Corrected and revised on 1/17/24; new refs added 1/23/24]
This long-overdue note gives a brief overview of CIA documents that were collected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a special Congressional committee that investigated the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
During its 1976-78 investigation, the Committee acquired a massive collection of CIA records, dating from World War 2 all the way up to the 1970s.…
Now that the dust has settled from the JFKARC review, more than one researcher has cast a jaundiced eye on the Transparency Plans (TPs) filed by the five agencies that still want to continue redactions in ARC records.
Why jaundiced? The TPs give both the redactions remaining in the ARC, and the schedule for their release, and that schedule is not nearly fast enough for researchers’ tastes.…
This note discusses how I was able to put together again virtually all of a lengthy CIA file using both the latest releases from the ARC and bits and scraps of an ancient file from 1993.
The file I am discussing in this note is the CIA Office of Security file for J Walton Moore, who for many years was the head of CIA’s field office in Dallas, including the period when Lee Oswald was a Dallas resident.…
I’ve been very busy with other projects recently, so there’s been a long silence on this blog. Having a few free hours this weekend, however, I’m putting up a note on some of the work I did this summer.
This note might interest people who are curious about which CIA records are available online, or who are looking for Garrison files in the ARC.…
This note looks at a critique of the current state of the ARC, written by Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF). The critique is online here. The MFF website which Bradford heads is the foremost source for JFK ARC documents. His note is therefore worth a careful reading.…
Today’s note continues to look at whole page redactions (WPRs) in CIA documents from the JFKARC. These were a feature of the 2017-2018 releases, but have been mostly released in 2022-2023. How many are left? Keep reading to find out!
For those who missed the first installment of this series, including an explanation of WPRs, see here.…
[Revised 9-2-2023]
Today’s note continues to look at whole page redactions (WPRs) in CIA documents from the JFKARC. These were a feature of the 2017-2018 releases, but have been mostly released in 2022-2023. How many are left? Keep reading to find out!
For those who missed the first installment of this series, including an explanation of WPRs, see here.…
On 24 August 2023, an additional 21 records from the JFK Assassination Records Collection were posted at NARA. This is the sixth set of ARC records posted at NARA this year. This posting will probably interest few researchers, but it did release some new text. Which records and what text?…
Today’s note continues to look at whole page redactions (WPRs) in CIA documents from the JFKARC. These were numerous in the 2017-2018 releases, then mostly released in 2022-2023. How many are left? Keep reading to find out!
For those who missed the first installment of this series, including an explanation of WPRs, see here.…