Trail of Destruction: The Shredded JFK Files
Here are the dirty dozen of destroyed JFK assassination files. We'll be exploring all their stories in an ongoing series at JFK Facts.
In the coming months, JFK Facts will publish a chronology of how documents and files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were destroyed.
The series, appearing every Wednesday starting March 6, will cover the destruction, or likely destruction, of evidence by federal agencies over the period from shortly after President Kennedy’s murder in 1963 through the mid-1990s.
Look for in-depth stories every Wednesday, beginning March 6. But first, we’ve got a quick rundown of the dirty dozen.
MFF v. Biden
The destruction of documents relevant to JFK’s assassination is a key issue in the ongoing civil action of Mary Ferrell Foundation v. President Biden and the National Archives. As covered on this site, the federal district court for the Northern District of California has ruled that the foundation (MFF) has a valid claim in the matter of files that were destroyed or removed.
The Department of Justice had asked the court to throw out MFF’s claim regarding destroyed files, arguing that, “even assuming the Attorney General were to act on a request by NARA, it is impossible to recover records that have been destroyed.”
The government is saying, in effect, “The files are gone, and crying to the court about it won’t bring them back.”
But Chief Judge Richard Seeborg sided with the plaintiffs, ruling 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.
Here are twelve of the most egregious examples. The most likely explanation for the destruction of records is to hide incriminating evidence. Why else destroy official records related to the ambush of the liberal president in Dallas?
The Dirty Dozen
These episodes of destruction will be in more-or-less chronological order, according to when the files or pieces of evidence in question were last known to exist:
1) LBJ-Hoover Phone Call
At 11:23 a.m. on Nov. 23, newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The conversation was automatically recorded. But the belt-type recording, now found in the LBJ Library in Texas, has been erased. The available transcript is not long enough to account for the length of the erased recording.
Who destroyed the LBJ-Hoover recording is unknown.
Documentation: Trail of Destruction, Pt. 1: The LBJ-Hoover Phone Call.
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 that he burned in the fireplace of his home the first draft of the notes he had taken during the procedure.
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. After JFK was killed, Gordon Shanklin, the top FBI agent in Dallas, ordered the note destroyed, and said nothing to the Warren Commission. The destruction of the note was first reported by a Dallas newspaper reporter 12 years later.
4) CIA New Orleans Files
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 deputy chief said he later learned the files had been “deep sixed.”
5) The Air Force One Tapes
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. Audio analysis indicates both versions are edits of original tape — which has never been made public and may have been destroyed.
6) Oswald’s Army Intelligence Dossier
The 112th Military Intelligence Group of the 4th U.S. Army based in Texas maintained a file on Oswald that was 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) DIA File on Oswald
As Carmine Savastano, a writer for the financial publication Wall Street Window, put it, the Defense Intelligence Agency exceeded the CIA, FBI, and all other intelligence groups “in its hubris” by deciding to “permanently damage the historical record” in destroying the records of its investigation of Oswald after the assassination. All that was left of U.S. military intelligence’s report related JFK’s assassination was a “sanitized” version, provided by the NSA, of the world’s reaction to JFK’s death.
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 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.
9) The Spymaster’s Files
Angleton’s JFK files were also purged. 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 Papers of an Assassination Specialist
William K. 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.
11) The Station Chief’s Papers
In 1970, the CIA found material evidence related to the JFK assassination in the home office of retired Mexico City station chief Win Scott. The material — most of which was not shared with JFK investigators — was destroyed in the 1980s after Scott’s son filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain it.
12) Secret Service Files
When the ARRB sought Secret Service files in 1995, the presidential protective service destroyed two boxes of material relating to threats to President Kennedy in the Dallas area (files that were seen by the Warren Commission), as well as presidential protection survey reports for JFK’s trips in the fall of 1963 that were never shared with investigators.
Who ordered the destruction of these files in 1995? That is a question that the Mary Ferrell Foundation is seeking to answer in its litigation.
Readers who want to support the Foundation’s lawsuit should go here.
The destruction of the JFK files by the Department of Defense is something I myself have personally experienced. Five years ago I embarked on a study of how the military responded to the assassination of JFK, and the obvious place to start was the historic offices of our military branches. To my amazement none of the historians had any information about this. This was a major event of the Cold War, and yet no official body had any documentation of it. And this had nothing at all to do with what happened in Dealey Plaza. I thus had to go and get my sources from other researchers, published accounts, interviews with veterans, and declassified documents. Fortunately the latest JFK document dump did provide me with enough material to complete my study on the military response, which is to my knowledge the first of its kind.
And by an amazing irony, I subsequently sent my study back to the military historical offices for their own reference.
A good source to start when investigating this would be to locate any existing destruction reports. DOD policy back then was that a report was required every time classified material was destroyed, listing every document by name, ID number, and classification, and had to to be signed off by an officer. If these exist then we would have at least an idea of what these documents were, when they were destroyed, and who authorized it.
Who would ever think that a government agency would keep records around that would make the agency or its bosses look bad? Especially agencies that pride themselves on their ability to keep their secret stuff, well…secret. Within hours after the identification of the patsy, Oswald, the word went out “find out what we got on that guy”. The only way any of this is still around is if some employee took it home and it’s still in his grandchildren’s attic.
With that said, researchers have done a remarkable job of piecing together the smallest tidbits. Every little bit helps.