The October cables

Lee Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, traveled to Mexico City at the end of September, 1963. During his stay there, he visited both the Cuban and Soviet Union embassies. Prior to one of these visits, he called the Soviet Embassy, identifying himself as Lee Oswald. This call was monitored by a teltap center, jointly operated by the Mexican and United States governments, and became the subject of several cables between CIA headquarters and its Mexico City station in October 1963, a month before the assassination of President Kennedy.…

Oswald docs in the December 2021 releases

This post reviews newly released redactions from documents related to Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO), as posted at the National Archives website last December. Oswald is a key figure in Kennedy assassination documents, and the release of redactions in Oswald-related docs is always worth a close look.

The review this time is limited to LHO docs from the CIA, since these are more readily identified than LHO docs from other agencies, as will be seen below.…

Summary of December 2021 releases (updated)

I have not yet posted any notes on the December 15 releases. I may have an article on these elsewhere in the next few weeks, so I will hold off on extended discussion for now. Following is just a quick summary of the records posted on NARA’s website.

Agency totals

Totals of records released per agency (the number in parentheses is the agency prefix):

# agency record count percent
1 CIA (104) 958 64%
2 FBI (124) 355 24%
3 HSCA (180) 106 7%
4 SSCIA (157) 24 2%
5 Ford Lib (178) 15 1%
6 ACSI/IRR (194) 11 < 1%
7 OSA (198) 5 < 1%
8 JFK Lib (176) 5 < 1%
9 JCS (202) 3 < 1%
10 DOS (119) 3 < 1%
11 LBJ Lib (177) 2 < 1%
12 NARA/WC (179) 2 < 1%
13 NSC (145) 1 < 1%
14 NARA (181) 1 < 1%

Newly released records

One surprise in the December releases was to see 70 78 records which were not previously released in 2017-2018.…