This note discusses the FBI-Church Committee liaison file, FBI file number 62-116395. The liaison file uses “SSC” as its abbreviation for the Church Committee, since their official title was the “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities.” In the discussion below, I will therefore use SSC to refer to the Committee.
The SSC conducted a major inquiry into the United States intelligence community from 1975-1976.…
The Mary Ferrell Foundation continues to dig out ARC records from its vaults. The latest find is a box of folders from the FBI-HSCA liaison file.
FBI file 62-117290 is a massive compilation of docs requested by the HSCA during the course of its inquiry, plus various and sundry administrative docs.…
This note begins an introduction to the main FBI files in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. FBI records make up about 46 percent of the ARC. The next largest contributor to the Collection, the CIA, makes up only about 27 percent. FBI records are thus by far the largest component of the ARC, and well worth a careful look.…
This note concludes my survey of CIA record categories in the JFKARC. It is the fourth and last note in the series. Links to the series are available here. The two categories summarized below include fewer than 540 records, but some of these are quite interesting.
From the early days of the CIA, the DCI (head of the CIA) held a meeting every morning with CIA executive officers, a practice that lasted up until the mid-1970s.…
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.…
Some interesting ARC docs have recently been posted online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website. These docs are records of executive session testimony before the SISS (Senate Internal Security Subcommittee), which conducted a “limited inquiry” into the JFK assassination in late 1963. The session records were acquired by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) all the way back in 1995, and are noted in the ARRB’s Final report (see here and here).…
[First posted on May 4, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
For those not in the know, most (but not all) records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA have finding aids called Reader Information Forms (RIFs) Each RIF has a unique 13 digit number that identifies the document. In this numbering system, the first three digits represent the agency that provided the record.…
The Assassination Collection Reference System (ACRS) is NARA’s online database of finding aids for the JFKARC. This post discusses three sets of FBI records in the ARC which are not listed in the ACRS. Using the Mary Farrell Foundation’s online collection, ARC documents posted online at NARA, and ARRB record notices published in the Federal Register, I have put together an excel file of the missing data which is available here.…