[Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in the 12-part JFK Facts series, “Trail of Destruction.” All the episodes can be viewed here.]
On April 1, 1997, Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) senior analyst Joan Zimmerman called James “Mike” Mastrovito, an ex-Secret Service agent who had been in charge of the agency’s JFK assassination file in 1975. As she discovered, Mastrovito had destroyed most assassination-related Secret Service files decades earlier.
As Zimmerman explained in a memorandum of her call:
When Mastrovito took charge of the JFK assassination file, it consisted of 5 or 6 file cabinets of material. After Mastrovito finished “culling” irrelevant material, the collection was down to one five-drawer file cabinet. Mastrovito guessed that his purging of extraneous material took place around 1970. He said that the extraneous material consisted of records of 2000-3000 “mental cases” who called the Secret Service after the Kennedy assassination to claim responsibility for the shooting.
