How to Track Redactions in JFK Documents

Learn the art of tracing what the government seeks to conceal about the assassination

A friend came to me with a problem that arises with every release of JFK assassination files: “How do we know what’s new?”

For example, on April 27, the National Archives released several hundred JFK files including a 1975 interview with Bill Harvey, the portly chief of the CIA’s assassination program. For the first time in 48 years, the interview is entirely declassified.

Harvey’s is a story worth knowing. Renowned as an operations officer, Harvey packed a pistol, drank heavily, loved mobster Johnny Rosselli and hated President Kennedy’s. (So said his wife in this exclusive video obtained by JFK Facts.)

One longtime CIA colleague suspected Harvey might have been involved in JFK’s assassination. When John Whitten, who worked with Harvey in Berlin, was asked by JFK investigators why Harvey would have told his wife to destroy his papers after his death in 1976, Whitten replied cryptically, “He was too young to have assassinated McKinley or Lincoln.”

Of course, CIA has been reluctant to divulge certain secrets of Harvey’s. He’s a prime suspect in Kennedy’s assassination.

Digging Deeper

Here’s how can you find out what the CIA has been hiding about Harvey. You can use this same procedure to trace redactions in any JFK document held by the National Archives.

• Get the Record Identification Form number, commonly known as a RIF number.. Every JFK document has RIF number which can be found in the spreadsheet of newly released documents.

• You can access the spreadsheets and RIF numbers on the Nation Archives web site: click here. You can also view the new documents on the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) web site: click here.

• Copy the RIF number.

• Go to the home page of the MFF site, which offers the internet’s largest collection of JFK assassination records.

• On the top navigation, click on “RIF SEARCH”

• Enter the RIF number, and hit return. You'll get a link to the document that looks like this:

• Click on the red title, and you'll get a pulldown menu,  like this 

• The blue pulldown menu lists the different iterations of the document, from earliest to latest.

• To see the latest released document, click on the bottom “Document id XXXXXX"

• To see a previous version, click the next document up on the menu.

• Call up the newest version in one browser window and call up the other in another window. Then you can compare the two side by side and see exactly what was unredacted. 

So in the case of Harvey’s interview, here’s what the CIA was redacting recently as December 2022.

Excerpt of redacted Bill Harvey testimony as of December 2022

And here’s what was released last week.

Excerpt of Bill Harvey testimony, released April 2023

The CIA was concealing the role of its Technical Services Division (TSD) in developing ELINT, the CIA’s acronym for electronic intelligence. The unredacted passage shows that TSD compartmentalized assassination operations and wiretapping operations from unwitting CIA personnel.

And some people say there’s nothing new in the JFK files.

To the contrary, this latest release demonstrates that the “sources of methods” of CIA assassination operations are only just now coming to light. That’s worth remembering as the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches later this year.