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.…
Category Archives: Record issues
When is a release not a release?
I have been looking at the ARC 2017-2018 releases again and there are still many questions I cannot answer. One question that I am looking at now is what makes some of these documents “releases” to begin with.
Here is an example of this problem. CIA record 104-10001-10042 was released on April 26, 2018.…
Record number error in the 2018 releases
I have been looking at the ARC records released by NARA on 26 April 2018 again, and there is at least one error identifying a record.
NARA 18 lists the record 104-10012-10037; it is available here
In fact, this record has the identification sheet for ARC 104-10012-10037 on top of it, but the document that follows the sheet is not ARC 104-10012-10037.…
Two more files
Just when I think I’ve squeezed all the data out of the various sources for the JFK ARC, another drop comes out. After checking NARA’s main page for the 2017-2018 releases, I discovered that there were two more pdf files I had not previously downloaded.
The page, www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release, features a fancy html table that gives all the data from the NARA18 spreadsheet online — or so I thought.…
NARA 18 errata corrections
[First posted on May 9, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
This is a minor book-keeping note on NARA 18 (the excel file that NARA released on 26 April 2018).
I had previously found 20 record number errors in NARA 17 (the excel file that NARA released on 15 December 2017), and posted these in a table here.…
ARC Release 6: Different versions
[First posted on January 28, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
As I noted in an earlier post, there are a number of records listed twice in NARA’s spreadsheet of the JFK ARC documents which it has posted on line.
These double listings come in two varieties: in one case there are actually two files posted at NARA: one from release ‘A’ and one from release ‘B’, both files presenting the same document, but with various differences between them.…
ARC Confusion at NARA
[First posted on January 24, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
Most of my posts about the JFK records act releases at NARA are on very trivial subjects, but the problems I discuss are, nonetheless, quite confusing (to me). The subject of the post today is confusing++.
There are three entries on the NARA Release 6 spreadsheet that are problematic.…
ARC Release 6: The two missing files
[First posted on January 12, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
NARA’s announcement of JFK AR release 6 stated that 3,539 files were posted on NARA’s website. As I noted in an earlier post (here), I was only able to find 3537, leaving two unaccounted for. This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, so I’ve been looking for them for almost a month now.…
ARC Release 6: Replacing files at NARA
[First posted on January 9, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
This post continues a discussion of the sixth release of ARC records from NARA. This time I will look at a quirk of release 6 that I call replacement files.
As I noted a while ago (here and here), in releases 1-5 there were a number of records listed twice in NARA’s spreadsheet of documents posted on line.…
2017 JFK ARC releases: Errata
[First posted on January 5, 2018, 2017 at rgr-cyt.org.]
I had hoped to have another post on JFK ARC release 6 from NARA, but there are some problems with the release metadata. For one thing, there are some typos in the RIF numbers that have made it hard to figure out what some of the documents released are.…