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 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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…