Category Archives: Record issues

These notes discuss problems with individual records, as opposed to problems that affect all records from an agency, or problems that affect the entire Collection.

A non-list of assassins in the ARC

This note looks at a CIA record which is still redacted. Just because a record is redacted, however, doesn’t mean we can’t know what kind of things are redacted. In fact, with records such as this one, the things redacted are obvious. Taking this knowledge into account when we discuss the records is good.…

NARA releases six blacked out pages

The quality of ARC reproductions has become more and more of an issue as time goes by and the original documents deteriorate. Today’s note is, perhaps, a serious example of this. Nonetheless, a completely illegible image is still not the same as a withheld or redacted record, as we will see below.…

The FBI issues a blank page

Continuing with my short posts on oddball releases, the specimen for today is record number 124-10289-10167, released in 2022, and which is, as the title indicates, a blank page. This note attempts to explain why the FBI issued a content free record. It may seem exotic to you newbies, but I’ve seen at least one other instance of this before.…

Siamese twin records

This note is really for my own reference, but may be helpful for one or two other people, somewhere, somehow.

Ever see a peanut M&M with two peanuts? If you have, that is what a siamese twin record is. The case I am looking at in this note is the 2023-06-28 release of record 124-10328-10029, with 31 pages (available here).…

December 2022 “duplicate records”: Note 3

This note covers one final case of multiple pdfs posted at NARA under one record number. Like the other cases discussed in the previous two notes (available here and here), this note involves CIA info in FBI records. Unlike the previous notes, this time I go into problems in the 2022 CIA document index which I have tried to use to explain things.…

A flip flop zombie from 2023

Zombie redactions have been a topic on this blog several times. Check the search box for the various references. As defined more than once, “A zombie redaction is a redaction in copy X of a document which has already been released in copy Y of the same document, available in some other file or folder or microfilm reel.”…

Reconstructing the J Walton Moore OS file

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

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.…