On the Trail of Destruction: Who 'Deep-Sixed' the JFK Assassination Files?
Over more than three decades, America's 'deep state' agencies shredded history
A JFK Facts feature, originally conceived as a single article early this year, grew into into a 12-part weekly series, with each installment exploring a different angle of the enduring mystery behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
While fascinating to research and write, the series confronted this author with a bleak and disturbing picture of the way America treats its own historical record.
To put it bluntly, serious countries don’t destroy their historical records.
The shredding, incineration and other destruction of classified records — in many instances in cavalier fashion by agencies such as the CIA, FBI, DIA, and Secret Service — does not speak well for the U.S. government. If a government classifies materials, it should schedule a date for their release, and — when the appointed time comes — release them to the public for the benefit of scholars and historians.
In the case of the assassination of President Kennedy, the historical record looks destined never to be complete. The government has evidently left us with “the scraps.”
Why? The most likely explanation for destruction is to hide incriminating evidence. Why else shred or burn official records related to the ambush of the liberal president in Dallas?
Following is a capsulized summary of the series with links to each story. These episodes of destruction are presented in more-or-less chronological order, according to when the files or pieces of evidence in question were last known to exist:
1) The LBJ-Hoover Phone Call
The belt-type recording of a phone conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover less than 24 hours after the assassination was erased. The two men were discussing the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and his mysterious impersonation in Mexico City weeks earlier.
Left behind is only a transcript, which is clearly not long enough to account for the length of the scrubbed section of the tape now located in the LBJ Library in Lubbock, Texas.
2) JFK Autopsy Notes
Dr. James Humes, the unqualified doctor who led the autopsy on President Kennedy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of Nov. 22, acknowledged to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that he burned his notes in the fireplace of his home.
In the 1990s, Humes admitted to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) that he had also burned the first version of the autopsy report itself. The most likely explanation for the destruction: Humes realized he couldn’t reconcile his report with the “single bullet theory,” which had to be upheld to support the conclusion of a lone gunman.
3) Oswald’s Note to the FBI
The accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, visited the FBI office in Dallas shortly before the assassination to complain about harassment of his Russian-born wife. People who saw the note said it had a threatening tone.
Soon after Jack Ruby shot Oswald to death on Nov. 24, 1963, top Dallas FBI agent Gordon Shanklin ordered the note destroyed. The transcript of his testimony to the Warren Commission — and that of the agent who actually destroyed the note — includes no mention of the incident, first reported by a Dallas newspaper reporter in 1975.
Those involved in the incident of destruction never corroborated the note’s contents, which might have held clues to the crime.
4) The CIA’s New Orleans Files
The CIA maintained an office in New Orleans, where the accused assassin of President Kennedy publicly scuffled in August 1963 with anti-Castro Cuban exiles directed and funded by the CIA. No files from that office were ever made available to official investigators.
The deputy chief of the CIA office in New Orleans told a historian that on the day after the assassination, while Oswald was still alive, he was ordered to bring all the station’s documents on Oswald to Langley. He drove them up to CIA headquarters that weekend.
The same deputy chief said he later learned the files had been “deep-sixed.”
5) The Air Force One Tapes
The original recording of communications to and from the presidential jet, Air Force One, on Nov. 22, 1963, after the assassination of President Kennedy, captures conversations between generals, cabinet secretaries, pilots, and official spokesmen in the midst of national crisis.
In 1980, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library released an edited version of the recording of conversations between senior U.S. officials and Air Force One, as the presidential jet brought LBJ and JFK’s body back to Washington.
A longer version of the Air Force One tape surfaced in an estate sale in 2011. Professional audio analysis of that version indicates it may have been edited up to 40 times.
The original tape has never been made public and may have been destroyed.
6) Oswald’s Army Intelligence Dossier
The 112th Military Intelligence Group (MIG), known in 1963 as the 112th Intelligence Corps (INTC), was attached to the U.S. 4th Army, based at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The 112th MIG had opened a file on Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963, after it received an FBI report of his activities in New Orleans.
But the 112th MIG never provided the file to the Warren Commission, then destroyed it years before the next official investigation, by the HSCA, had even convened. It then told the HSCA that the file had been subject to “routine” elimination in 1973.
That raised the suspicions of congressional investigators who learned neither the FBI nor any other agency had brought the material to the attention of the Warren Commission.
7) The DIA File on Oswald
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) obtained information on the world’s reaction to JFK’s death from diplomatic wiretaps worldwide — and destroyed all of it, leaving investigators with only a “sanitized” statement of what military intelligence knew.
These wiretaps would have included recordings from embassies of adversaries and allies alike. President Charles de Gaulle of France had publicly stated his belief that President Kennedy was murdered as the result of a conspiracy.
8) RFK Autopsy Photos at CIA
After CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was fired in 1974, senior agency officials searched his office and found files related to the assassination of JFK and the 1968 murder of his brother, Robert. They also found photographs from RFK’s autopsy.
Two senior officials approved the destruction of the RFK autopsy photos in 1975, a fact not publicly disclosed until 1998. No one ever established why such grisly images were in the possession of the CIA in the first place.
9) The Spymaster’s Files
On the second and third floors of headquarters in Langley, CIA counterintelligence chief George Kalaris found sealed rooms filled with files and over 40 locked safes. These were the files of Kalaris’ predecessor, James Angleton. It took more than five years and a team working in round-the-clock shifts to examine Angleton’s tens of thousands of files.
In the end, Kalaris would order the destruction of all but one half of one percent of them.
According to the 1998 report of the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA “reviewed Angleton’s records and incorporated a small percentage into the files of the Directorate of Operations. CIA destroyed other records, either because the records were duplicates or because CIA decided not to retain them.”
10) The Assassination Specialist’s Papers
The 133-page “1967 Inspector General’s report” details the CIA’s attempts to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro with help from the Mafia starting in the late 1950s and discusses assassination specialist William King Harvey’s role extensively.
Harvey ran CIA assassination operations from 1960 to 1963.
According to the ARRB, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered Harvey’s “notes and source material” to be destroyed in the 1970s.
Harvey’s widow also burned his personal papers, on his orders, after his death in 1976.
11) The Station Chief’s Possessions
The CIA seized photos and recordings of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City in late September and early October 1963 from the home office of retired CIA Station Chief Winston Scott within 48 hours of his sudden and unexpected death in April 1971. They also retrieved a manuscript by Scott.
When Scott’s son Michael began asking the agency for his father’s effects in the mid-1980s, the CIA gave him less than half of his father’s manuscript and destroyed the rest.
12) Secret Service Files
After the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) convened in 1994, it sought records from the Secret Service concerning protective measures for President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963.
It later learned that the last of such records had been destroyed in January 1995.
In other words, the Secret Service found out that the ARRB wanted to review its protective survey reports from the relevant time period, and destroyed the evidence.
Who ordered the destruction of these files in 1995? That’s one question the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation is seeking to answer in its ongoing litigation in federal court.
Seeking Justice
One of the objectives of the lawsuit, Mary Ferrell Foundation v President Biden and the National Archives — recently heard in a federal appeals court on another cause of action dismissed at the district court level — is to find out what happened to the JFK files.
And the district court — in the Northern District of California — did side with the foundation on that issue. The judge ruled that the government had the burden of proving that the destroyed files were indeed lost forever.
He also noted that there were a number of ways that a “destroyed” file could be recovered.
As a result, the foundation can compel the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to ask the U.S. attorney general to initiate official inquiries when credible evidence indicates that files that should have been included in the JFK Collection in the 1990s were removed or destroyed.
Readers who want to support the Foundation and its lawsuit should go here.
For the past five years, I have been doing research into the military's response to the JFK assassination.
My many inquiries revealed no records on file in the military archives. It is quite perplexing because this has nothing at all to do with the events in Dealey Plaza. Most of the information that I have been able to obtain has come from the recent document dumps and the accounts of veterans who were serving that day. Overall, information about this essential part of the JFK assassination story has been fragmentary at best.
A very important set of documents which could answer many questions about the military response would be the duty logs of the National Military Command Center, ( NMCC). However, according to JFK researcher Larry Hancock in his book "Surprise Attack", these logs, specifically communications between the NMCC and other alert centers are nowhere to be found.
( "Surprise Attack", page 226).
From all that I can conclude, the reason why these documents haven't seen the light of day could be that they would show a confused, disjointed, and in many cases panicked response by the National Security Establishment. Knowledge of this at the time could have damaged the confidence of the public in the reliability and continuity of the military when dealing with a catastrophic crisis.
60 years after the fact, the lack of information on the military's reaction forms a great gap in understanding the events of that awful day in Dallas.
All of the details mentioned here prove beyond doubt that the public have never been meant to see the real truth about the assassination. If the mass destruction of evidence isn’t bad enough, it’s always been my view that the really serious stuff was never written down anyway.