Rabbit's Warren

This is my fourth post on NARA 18, maybe I should start numbering them.

NARA 18 is a list of 22,933 records in the JFK Assassination Record Collection that have not yet been released in full. It is the result of an FOIA request from John Greenewald, who runs the website The Black Vault. The list is available as an excel file at NARA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room (here) or at the FOIA Online site (here)

John Greenewald’s view

After receiving NARA 18, Greenewald compared NARA 18 with NARA 17, the list of ARC documents processed and posted on-line at NARA in 2017. He found that 3082 (actually 3081) records listed in NARA 18 did not appear in NARA 17.

Based on this, Greenewald originally wrote on the Blackvault website that over 3000 documents had not yet been released at all.¹ He later revised this post to concede that the 3082 figure was probably not correct, but he still holds to the view that there is a deliberate, on-going attempt to withhold information from the public by making it difficult to determine what is released and what is not.

Jimmy Falls’ view

Following Greenewald’s revised posting, Jimmy Falls, a writer for the Who What Why website, posted his take (here). His post not only covers the NARA 17 and NARA 18 lists, it also looks at NARA 16, the list of withheld documents which the Who What Why website got from NARA in a 2016 FOIA request.

Falls offers a new version of Greenewald’s comparison of NARA 2017 and 2018: an excel sheet listing 2901 records that are in NARA 2018 and not in NARA 2017. He repeats the claim that “The majority of the files [on his new list] appear not to have been publicly released.”

Falls also compared NARA 16 with NARA 17 and NARA 18, and found that 375 files originally listed on NARA 16 were not released in 2017, nor do they appear on NARA 18. His conclusion: “there appear to be approximately 3,275 files not yet released to the public.”

This post suffers from the same problems that Greenewald’s post had, and is by no means an accurate count.

New and old comparisons

A look at the new list of 2901 records from Falls shows that it is essentially the same set of records that Greenewald described in his post. The only difference is that Falls has removed the duplicate records from his count.

Each ARC document is supposed to have a unique record number, so why there are multiple documents with identical numbers on the list is a puzzle, but putting that puzzle aside for the moment, there are indeed 2901 unique record numbers on NARA 18 that do not appear on NARA 17.²

Since these records do not appear on NARA 17, we know that they were not posted on NARA’s website last year. But this is by no means the same thing as “never publicly released at all.”

All documents in the ARC that are open to the public are available at NARA and have been so since 1998, when the Assassination Record Review Board finished its work assembling the Collection.

Why then does Falls claim that “The majority of the files [on his new list] appear not to have been publicly released”? Did he visit NARA and fail to find them? Did he write to ask for copies and get no response? In fact, he gives no basis for this claim anywhere in his post, a serious problem for his credibility.

Falls’ claim is especially puzzling because it flatly contradicts the clear content of NARA 18.

NARA 18 classifies each document it lists as either ‘redact’ or ‘withheld’. This is surely the current release status of these records, and I am 99% certain that ‘withheld’ means “postponed in full” and “redact” means “released with deletions.” This is the point of NARA 18, to clarify which records still have withheld portions.

Records “postponed in full” have not been released to the public in any form. The ARC has finding-aids for these records, so we know what they are in a general way, but the text of the documents is not available to the public. This is what Greenewald and Falls are talking about when they mention records that are not “publicly released”.

Records “released with deletions” have anything from a single word to whole pages deleted, to protect either national security, law enforcement needs, or personal privacy. It is true that in some of the documents “released with deletions” the majority of the text is gone, but these are a very small percentage; the difference between postponed in full and released with deletions is usually substantial.

So what does NARA 18 say about Falls’ 2901 records? 795 are marked ‘withheld’, i.e. not released to the public in any form. The other 2106 are marked ‘redact’, i.e. released with deletions. Yet Falls says ‘the majority of the files appear not have been publicly released.’ In other words, he doesn’t believe the record status listed on NARA 18 for some undefined portion of the 2106 documents identified as released with deletions. Why? Which ones?

Rechecking the Records

It is of course possible to resolve this question directly: just go to NARA’s College Park facility and ask to view the records. This is what publicly released means. Go to NARA, ask for the record, and they will let you read it. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor money to do this. (Besides, Falls might not believe me either.) Instead, I have tried a couple of other things.

First, I checked the list of 2901 records against NARA’s online database of finding-aids³ Second, I tried looking for the records on the largest source of ARC documents outside of NARA: the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.⁴

The on-line database at NARA consists of electronic finding-aids for documents in the ARC called Reader Information Forms (RIFs). It does not have RIFs for every document in the collection, but it does have RIFs for all the documents on Falls’ list.⁵

Most RIFs include a current status field. Checking the on-line RIFs shows these are not completely consistent with the information on NARA 18. The on-line RIFs show the current status of 1803 records as ‘released with deletions’, 1075 as ‘postponed in full’, 10 as ‘open’, and leaves the current status field blank for 13.

The main discrepancy is that instead of 795 records ‘withheld’, the on-line database lists 1075 as ‘Postponed in full’, a different of 280. Putting aside this difference for the moment, we are still far from 2901 documents that have never been released to the public.

Perhaps some might still feel free to reject the descriptions in the on-line database; the documents are not on-line to disprove our doubts, perhaps there are massive errors in BOTH the on-line database and NARA 18.

Mary Ferrell is, outside of NARA, the largest source of ARC documents on-line. It does not, however, have all the documents in the ARC. According to an FAQ on Mary Ferrell, their collection consists of approximately one third of the total documents in the ARC.⁶

Of the 2106 records that NARA 18 lists as released with deletions, one can find 1192 on Mary Ferrell. In other words, over half are available in some form at Mary Ferrell, a pretty good rate. This is good evidence that there is no large scale error in NARA 18 or the on-line database. When NARA says these files were released with deletions, they are by and large correct.

I have put the results of checking these two sources in a spreadsheet available here, including the document status as given in NARA’s online database, and links to the files available on Mary Ferrell. Although Mary Ferrell is a subscription service, its ARC documents are available to read on-line for free. Just click on the link.

Discrepancies between NARA 18 and NARA’s on-line database

Returning to the 280 records that NARA 18 says have been released with deletions but the on-line database says are postponed in full, one explanation for the discrepancy is that the on-line database is out of date. In fact, according to NARA it was last updated in 2008.⁷ There is evidence for this at Mary Ferrell, which has at least 6 documents on-line that the on-line database says are withheld in full.⁸ One of these files (124-10286-10391) is also listed as ‘withheld’ on NARA 18. Yet five pages are available at MF. The 795 ‘withheld’ documents should therefore go down to 794.

Of the 35556 records from the JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) which were processed by NARA in 2017, one of the more interesting sets was 244 records from the National Security Agency (NSA). Two of these records had been withheld in full; the 2017 release was the first time they became available to the public.¹ The rest had already been released with deletions, many as early as 1997.

The NSA records as historical sources

These records were used extensively by James Bamford in his book on the NSA, Body of Secrets (Doubleday, 2001), which discusses NSA’s role in the U.S. response to JFK’s assassination.² They were also cited by Vincent Bugliosi in his lengthy work on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History (Norton, 2007).³ In addition to works on the JFK assassination, they have also been used in more general discussions of signals intelligence, such as Secrets of Signals Intelligence during the Cold War (Aid and Wiebes, Cass, 2013).⁴

There are a couple of interesting stories in the records that the new releases tell us in more detail than previously available. One newly processed record that caught my attention was the NSA report to the Warren Commission. The Commission had asked NSA to examine Oswald’s possessions for any evidence of cryptographic messages. They found none. The version of this report originally released deleted the names of three of the four NSA employees who conducted the examination, leaving only the name of Meredith Gardner, famous for his work on the Venona decryptions. The new version (144-10001-10289) releases two more names: Ruth Bebb and Carrie Berry. I drew a blank on Bebb, but Berry is now well known, taking up several pages in Code Girls, Liza Mundy’s recent book on women in NSA (Hachette, 2017).

It should be noted that the 2017 releases do not remove all deletions from the records: in many of them, portions of the report title are still deleted (somewhat like the digraphs in CIA sluglines). Paragraph length deletions still remain in the body of most of the records as well, so most of these records show up on NARA 2018, the list of records that still have deletions.

Claims about the NSA records

The NSA records have also recently received attention as a symptom of problems with the continuing release of documents in the ARC. They are mentioned in the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s recent open letter to United States Archivist David Ferriero, which says of them:

We have identified 795 documents that have been released but do not appear at all in the official online NARA database of JFK records. For example, the National Security Agency released 244 JFK records in 2017 that are not listed in the database. Our question: are there other non-disclosed JFK documents from NSA or other agencies that are not in the 2018 listing or scheduled for release?⁵

They are also referenced in a recent post on Jefferson Morley’s website JFKFacts.org, in which Morley claims:

The list of still-secret JFK files is not short. Tens of thousand of files have been released since last October, including more than 200 previously unknown files from the National Security Agency.⁶

The main basis for these claims, in fact the sole basis, seems to be the omission of the NSA documents from NARA’s on-line database of finding-aids for the ARC. On this point, I certainly agree that it would be very useful to have on-line a complete list of all the ARC records with reader information forms (RIFs). I would go further: it would be a very useful project to put copies of all the riffed records themselves on-line. Last year the CIA put its entire CREST document system on-line, and this is an even more extensive collection than the ARC (900,000+ documents, as opposed to 300,000+).

But while I agree with the main suggestions of MFF’s open letter to the Archivist, the underlying theme of the letter is problematic. The idea is that NARA is deliberately, or at least carelessly and culpably, flouting the 1992 JFK ARC Act, and that this is in part a response to pressure from government agencies such as the CIA (or the NSA?) to keep information which is still redacted in the files from being released. This is not credible, and is simply another form of the exaggeration and overstatement that are common in the discussions of the ARC documents on the Internet.

I have already noted one case of “missing documents” in NARA’s on-line database for the ARC.⁷ I will post on this general point again. For now, I’ll consider a few points on the NSA documents in particular. First, has it ever been the case that these documents were unavailable at NARA? Second, did the Assassination Records Review Board, or NARA, fail to disclose the existence of these documents when they were provided by NSA? Third, were these documents generally unavailable, to researchers or the public, prior to their 2017 posting by NARA? The answer to all these questions seems to be no, as one might guess by looking at the first part of this post.

NARA and ARRB handling of NSA records

For the first point, I will just say that I have never heard or read of people who went to NARA before November 2017 looking for the NSA records and didn’t find them. Did NARA ever tell people who asked that they did not have the documents or know of the documents? Again, all comments about the “secret” or “unknown” nature of the NSA records seem to be based only on the fact that they are not listed in NARA’s on-line database of ARC finding-aids. But this is not the only way to learn of the documents.

Second, it is simply not true that the ARRB or NARA failed to disclose the existence of these documents. ARRB’s discussions with NSA and the NSA searches that produced the records are both discussed in detail in the ARRB’s Final Report, as is the number of NSA records and ARRB policy on NSA postponements.⁸

In addition to the Final Report, at the time of the documents’ release, the RIF numbers of many of these postponed documents were published in the Federal Register, as required by the 1992 JFK ARC Act.⁹ In fact, this requirement made it impossible for the Board to conceal records that were found to be assassination-related. After public notice in the Federal Register that the records had been released, as far I know, all such records were made available to any researcher who came to view them at NARA. Was anyone ever told the NSA records were not available? If no, in what way did the ARRB or NARA fail to observe the letter, or the spirit, of the 1992 Act?

As for general availability of the records, the books cited at the beginnning of this post show that interested researchers such as Bamford, Bugliosi, and Aid got access to the documents. Morley’s description of the documents as “previously unknown” is thus a substantial exaggeration. Moreover, Bamford and Bugliosi’s books were widely reviewed, so that through their books even the general public was on notice that assassination-related records from NSA existed at NARA.

NSA handling of the records

In addition to the listings of NSA records from ARRB, and references in works by journalists and researchers, it is also worth pointing out that the NSA website has 373 JFK assassination related documents on-line.¹⁰ These are clearly the same documents that NSA provided to the ARRB in compliance with the JFK ARC Act, but because NSA did not provide the RIF sheets for the documents it posted, and because of duplications in the documents, it is sometimes difficult to identify which of these documents are equivalent to the NSA documents posted by NARA in 2017. I have, however, managed to match up over 200 of the documents on-line at NSA to the documents released by NARA in 2017.¹¹

These documents were posted on the NSA’s website beginning as early as 1999.¹² By 2007, NSA had posted on-line 373 of the 378 assassination related records,¹³ and they remain available on-line today.

Another 2 cents

I strongly agree that a comprehensive database of all documents with finding-aids should be available on-line. After so much time, energy, and money has been devoted to creating the ARC, it is absurd to leave it without this.

As much of the Collection itself as possible should also be on-line. In addition to the documents in the ARC with RIFs, I believe key documents from the Warren Commission should also be on-line. As an example, the 1500+ Commission documents (CDs), which provide the most complete and detailed picture of the basis for the Commission’s Report, are probably more important than many of the relatively minor items that took so much time to produce finding aids for.

As for the unreleased material, I’ll continue to look at the information we have, but in my view there is much less material unreleased than some accounts would have it. I see no point in exaggerating these numbers.

I’m working on a new web page that will serve as an introduction to the JFK Assassination Record Collection (ARC) at the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA). My guess is that I can have it up sometime next week. I had a fair number of misconceptions about the Collection, so I hope writing an introduction will improve my understanding of this unusual historical resource. In the meantime, I will resume writing about NARA’s 2017 releases from the ARC, and the additional releases which I believe will happen this year.

[Text revised and postscript added 2018-03-13]
I’ve been doing some record counting at the Mary Ferrell website (MF). This is possible through a tool added to MF in 2016, called the JFK Database Explorer. According to the FAQ for the Explorer, it is based on a copy of NARA’s on-line finding-aid database for the JFK Assassination Record Collection.

The copy was made by Ramon Herrera in the summer of 2015 and has 319,106 records.¹ Surprisingly, MF quotes NARA’s Martha Murphy, as saying that NARA’s finding aid database has only 318,866 records, 240 fewer than Herrera’s copy. MF then observes that ‘the reason for this discrepancy is as yet unknown.’

Total collection size is of course a very useful thing to know, and on this page of the Explorer, MF gives a helpful break-down of total records counts in the Explorer by prefix. NARA assigned numbers to each agency providing records to the Collection, and it uses these as prefixes to the record numbers for each item in the collection. There are 37 prefixes, from 104 (CIA) to 208 (Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations).

Adding up the number of records MF gives for each of these prefixes, however, the total is 318,733, which matches neither the Explorer total given by the FAQ, nor the NARA total given by Murphy.

I would be curious to know the story on this. I went through the sub-pages for each prefix on MF; these provide a further break-down ‘disk-by-disk’, using record counts on each floppy disk that NARA used to get record information from each agency. This gave me the same figure: 318,733. (I’d rather not count the individual records one by one.) Perhaps I should write to Mary Ferrell as well as NARA.

Postscript:

Regarding the alleged discrepancy between the number of records that Herrera scraped and Murphy’s estimate quoted by MF, NARA now states that there are 319,106 records in its on-line finding-aids database.² This number matches the count MF gives for Herrera’s copy. I checked the Wayback machine, and NARA’s new estimate was apparently added at the end of October 2017.³ The NARA page also now says that the finding-aid database was last updated May 12, 2008. This is puzzling, and I will comment on it in the not too distant future.

I am concerned that I have gotten several things wrong in recent posts, so for now I am going to stop posting about the JFKRA releases at NARA. It will probably take a while to figure out what’s what. This post is a brief note on my concerns.

Catalog issues

In my last post on the the NARA releases, I was looking at NARA 18. This list shows the records in the JFK Assassination Record Collection (JFK ARC) that are not yet released in full.

I checked these against the copy of the Collection’s on-line catalog at the Mary Ferrell website, and found that 298 records which NARA 2018 listed as available in redacted form were listed as “Postponed in full”. Mary Ferrell’s copy of the catalog, which they call the JFK Explorer, is over two years old, so I checked these records again using the current on-line catalog at NARA, and the on-line catalog gave the same result.

I am reasonably certain that all of this just means that Mary Ferrell’s JFK Explorer and the current version of the catalog on line at NARA are out of date, and that redacted versions of these documents are actually available at NARA. To really find out, of course, one has to order some of the documents in question. I’m willing to do that, as long as it doesn’t involve hocking my left, er, leg, but it will take a while for the results to come in, so a pause is in order.

Other problems

I’m also concerned that my post before that, where I discussed document fragments in NARA’s 2017 releases, may have some misconceptions. In particular, I attributed the RIF numbers on these documents to NARA’s cataloging. I now think this is quite wrong.

As I understand things now, these numbers, and the RIF sheets that include the various document metadata that NARA provides, were not all done by NARA. Many of them were done by the US government agencies that produced, or had custody of, the documents when NARA tracked them all down.

In particular, as NARA archivist James Mathis told Mary Ferrell, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not list page numbers for documents in the Database that were declared Not Believed Relevant (NBR) and indeed often used one entry for multiple documents.” (see here) I interpret “used one entry for multiple documents” to mean ‘used one record number for multiple documents.’

If it is not NARA putting these duplicate RIF numbers on documents, it makes a difference in how one treats them. For now, please put a star on that particular post; the files which I indicated are pieces of a single document still go together, but credit or blame for this situation remains to be assigned.

In addition to being out of date, I am also now sure that the current ARC catalog online at NARA is not complete. More documents are available from the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA than the on-line catalog indicates. One example: the on-line catalog lists no FBI documents with the prefix 124-10203, yet there are several hundred of these on line at Mary Ferrell.

I wrote to NARA about this, and would like to thank them here for their courteous and prompt responses. The short story: 124-10203 was the number of a floppy disk containing electronic file(s) listing up to 500 FBI documents. This disk was sent to NARA along with printed versions of the listings (the RIF sheets), and the documents themselves. The documents and the rif sheets arrived, but the disk was bad (corrupt). Because of this, the metadata on these documents were never added to the on-line catalog.

In addition to 124-10203, this also happened to disks 124-10204 and 124-10223, so as many as 1500 records do not have metadata in NARA’s on-line catalog. I checked at Mary Ferrell, and they list 1412 records with these three prefixes. I believed something like this happened in a few other cases as well, though probably not as many records are involved.

All of this has affected my figuring, and my estimates of what I can do with the information available on line. So for now a pause, until I can make sure I have a proper understanding of the ARC and its reference tools.

[See the postscript added on 3/25/2018]

I have finished looking at the 3082 records which are listed in NARA 2018, but not in NARA 2017, as discussed by John Greenewald (see earlier post). Unfortunately, I have not been able to access NARA’s JFK Records Collection catalog for over 5 days now. For whatever reason, I have usually found access to the NARA catalog on again off again, but this is really too much; for almost a week my session is killed or the search results are 0 for every query, using different networks, computers, and browsers. Just frustrating as all hell.

As a result, I have relied for this count primarily on the copy of the JFK Collection catalog at Mary Ferrell. Mary Ferrell is always reliable, and my subscription was a truly worthwhile investment. Unfortunately, the MF copy of the catalog is stale; it was done over two and a half years ago by Ramon Herrera, according to the MF FAQ. This means my result will almost certainly change, but at least I can shrink the amount of queries I have to make to the unreliable NARA system to a minimum.

I have found 298 records which are listed as ‘redact’ on NARA 2018 but as ‘Postponed in full’ on the MF copy of the Collection catalog. 136 are HSCA records, and one group, 180-10068, accounts for 66 of these. Looking at the description, these 66 are all payroll records for the HSCA staff. Similar records for the ARRB were also withheld for privacy reasons as I noted in a previous post, so perhaps these really are withheld. In any case, I would like to be able to check on the current NARA catalog.

There are other anomalies as well; 9 records are listed as ‘OPEN’ on the MF copy of the catalog; I thought this meant no deletions; if so, this also contradicts NARA 2018, which is supposed to be a list of records with deletions.

On the other side of the coin, 3 of the records which NARA 2018 lists as ‘Withheld’ are actually present on NARA 2017, and were indeed released last year.

My conclusion on this whole thing is that NARA 2018 is not the final answer to whats up and what’s not.

Postscript (3/25/2018):
I have a later post up that gives different numbers. This is in part because the new post looks at NARA 2018 after removing duplicate records

This is another post on the JFK Records Act Release 6 at NARA. To get up to speed on the subject, I suggest looking at the other posts in this category (JFK ARCA).

As I noted at the end of a recent post, NARA’s spreadsheet for JFK record act release 6 lists a number of records where there are two different files having the same record number. Some of these are different versions of the same file, but in a few cases, the two files appear to be simply different documents.

As I said, this seems to defeat the purpose of the record numbers, which are supposed to be unique for each document in the collection. Is there really a reasonable explanation? Yes, Virginia, there is!

Bit and pieces of files

This link has a list of six cases where NARA seems to do this, assigning the same record number to two files with large differences between them. But a closer look shows that these documents are closely related.

Take the case of 124-10328-10025. This number is assigned to two separate pdf files: one from release 5 with 4 pages, and one from release 6 with 20 pages. When you go through them carefully, however, the two are actually one document: a 1958 report by FBI agent Malcolm Carr. In the report, Carr details his surveillance of Rafael Medan, an assistant press director for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations.

The report is captioned ‘Espionage Case’, but there’s not really enough information to tell us what is going on. (I’ll try to explain later on why this report is in the collection.) The 20 page document (19 minus the cover sheet) includes the original report and a carbon copy. The carbon copy is complete, but the original is missing 3 pages. The 4 page document (3 minus the RIF sheet) is the missing 3 pages of the original report.

Why was the document released in two pieces? Perhaps this is just how NARA got it from the HSCA. No need to ask too many questions; by statute, all documents from the HSCA are automatically part of the collection, so into the collection it goes. The only real question is how do we handle these two chunks of one document? NARA’s answer is to release it in two pieces, but to index it as one document. Index here means to give it the same document number.

124-10173-10382 is also one FBI document in two pieces: one pdf from release 5 with 7 pages, and one pdf from release 6 with 11 pages. The 7 page pdf includes a RIF sheet, a JFK ARCA “cross-reference” sheet, an administrative memo (I think) that gives the name of informants and is mostly blacked out, and a letterhead memo which is completely blacked out except for the date. Then a postponement sheet that says pages 2 and 3 are not here. Then a page marked ‘3’ at the top and blacked out except for the middle, which says that (name blacked out) claimed that Oswald worked for the FBI. Then another postponement sheet that says 8 more pages are not here. Notice that only one page, page 6, actually has any content. Cheez.

The 11 page pdf from release 6 is a cover sheet (105-NY-66954 sec 11), then a ten page 302 form, the record of an interview with Walter George Sikora. This is the part that the pages in the 7 page pdf postponed (no 2 pages, no 8 pages). It does not have the administrative sheet, the LHM, or the page mentioning the claim about Oswald, but clearly this is something that must have come up in the course of interviewing Sikora. Like the two chunks of the report about the surveillance of Medan, NARA gives these two files the same record number.

The other documents in the list are even more complicated. For example, 124-10193-10031 and 124-10193-10032 are two related documents put together from 4 chunks, with bits of each document distributed across all four chunks, and all the pages out of order. 124-10164-10276 and 124-10164-10277 are two documents put together out of three chunks, one of them a humongo 571 pages.

Some thoughts

I take all this as evidence that NARA sometimes uses one record number (RIF#) for multiple files when it determines that all the files are fragments of a single record. This is very distinct from the other cases we looked at before, when the same number was assigned to two files that were trivially distinct from each other (different case nos, with RIF without RIF etc).

In fact, this multiplicity of files with the same record number occurs in material on Mary Ferrell as well. In what must be an extreme case, I have found one record number, 124-10289-10035, which is assigned to 10 different files. Can these all be pieced together into one large file? Possible, I think, but a tough job; there are 848 pages in these 10 files.

On the other hand, the fact that these different files have the same RIF# tells us that NARA believes they belong together. This is an essential aid. If we non-adepts had to do this unassisted, we are in the same spot as the Chinese archaeologists trying to reassemble the tortoise shells used to record royal divinations, after they have been broken up and sold to herbal doctors as dragon bones.

Another more general thought after going through this material is how hard it is to understand these documents without context. The Carr report on Medan is a typical example of this problem. Why is this an assassination record? The answer is to look up the record number on Mary Ferrell and see where it came from. The Carr report, in a very mutilated condition, in the HSCA’s FBI subject files, under the name of Joseph Shimon. Shimon is indeed mentioned in the report, in a couple of places, but without checking I would never have suspected that his mention in this 1958 report is what made it an assassination record.

On similar lines, it is also hard to avoid the thought that for those interested in the JFK assassination, the amount of dross, as opposed to silver, in these materials is very very high. The 10 page interview with Walter George Sikora that omits the remark about Oswald is marked NAR: not assassination related. This FBI annotation is not arbitrary; it is apt.

I am still looking at NARA 2018, the new list of JFK records from NARA which The Black Vault website posted January 29. It is interesting and helpful information, but as I said in my last post, I don’t think the list indicates there are still over 3000 JFK records that have never been released.

Jefferson Morley, owner of the JFKFacts blog, posted a note I sent to him on the problem (here), and noted that Rex Bradford at the Mary Ferrell Foundation also does not agree with the figure of over 3000 unreleased records.

The Black Vault’s John Greenewald has since written more on the subject, in a comment posted at JFKFacts (link here).

I will post again when I have finished going over the 3082 records in NARA 2018 which did not appear in NARA 2017, the spreadsheet for the 2017 releases of JFK records. The 798 ‘withheld’ records in NARA 2018 are also worth a separate post.

Another list from NARA has been posted, this time at The Black Vault. The link can be found here.

According to the link, the list is the result of an FOIA case (#NARA-NGC-2018-000072), and the BV was nice enough to provide both a pdf and excel version of the list, very handy indeed. The list seems to be NARA’s latest assessment of the state of the JFK Assassination Records Collection. BV cites a letter from NARA which states:

We conducted a search and were able to locate an EXCEL spreadsheet that lists everything that has not been released since December 15th, 2017 (the last release date). We are releasing this document in full with no redactions. The spreadsheet lists the JFK record number, the decision, the file number, document date, number of pages, and the origination agency.

The list totals 22933 rows (excluding the field list at row 1). Counting up, 798 rows are listed as ‘Withheld’, the remaining 22135 are listed as ‘Redact’.

I interpret this as follows: ‘Withheld’ means the document has not yet been released. ‘Redact’ means the document has been released, but not in full. (As the 2017 releases show, these redactions can be anywhere from 2 letters to whole pages.) I also think the list is intended to be comprehensive. This is a description of the entire JFK ARC collection.

I thought this was a straightforward explanation, but BV has a different interpretation. They write:

However, upon investigation, NARA also listed the entire set of PARTIALLY released records, along with those completely withheld. Digging deeper, and with the help and verification of Jimmy Falls of the news agency WhoWhatWhy we came up with the same numbers, using two entirely different methods. It confirms there are 3,082 Documents, totaling 217,114 Pages that are not yet released to the public.

I was quite puzzled by this and left a note on the BV forum asking about this. I haven’t yet seen their response, but will post if they do. In the meantime, I have probably figured out what they did. They compared the new list, (hereafter NARA 2018) to the release 6 spreadsheet posted at NARA here (hereafter NARA 2017). There are indeed 3082 records on NARA 2018 which do not appear on NARA 2017, and using the number of pages listed in NARA 2018, these add up to 217,114.

The 3082 figure includes all of the 798 records that are ‘Withheld’, and these are indeed not yet released, I believe. The remaining 2284 records were not posted at archives.gov in 2017, but most, if not all, of these records were released long ago, as indicated on the NARA on-line catalog of the JFK Assassination Record Collection. Many of them are available at Mary Ferrell. As an example, all of the records in the group ‘124-90104’ which appear in NARA 2018 but not in NARA 2017 (a total of 70) are up at the MFF.

Of the total of 2284 records, all the ones I have checked so far are listed at either Mary Ferrell or on the NARA catalog as ‘Released with deletions’. It would be nice to see the deleted material, but one cannot say that these records are not yet released.