ARRB Updates

You should be aware that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) will go out of existence this October. I, for one, do not want that to happen. This is why I am writing this article. The Assassination Records Review Board was created by an outgrowth of Oliver Stone's much-maligned JFK. This movie caused such a stir with the American public that Washington was forced to do something with the mountain of records that relate to the assassination of President Kennedy that were not scheduled to be opened until well into the 21st century. The result of this public outcry was Public Law 102-526. It was this Public Law that created the Assassination Records Review Board.

You should know that Public Law 102-526 was signed by President George Bush only days before the presidential election. The change in administrations caused quite a considerable delay in the appointment of the Board members, more than a year after they were supposed to be appointed, and the ARRB by statute lost one year of their two year life.

A new law had to be created to restart the clock to give the ARRB the time Congress originally intended it to have. Fortunately, this was done. This was Public Law 103-345.

The statute also gave the ARRB Board members the ability to grant themselves an additional year of existence. They have recently done so.

However, their work is nowhere near completed. They need extra time. I urge you to contact your elected representatives in Congress, and President Clinton, and beg them to extend the life of this Review Board. I suggest another five years.

Then-Senator David Boren said at a 1992 press conference that this law would release more than 99.999% of the records. This will not be the case if the ARRB ceases to exist this October.

Representative John Conyers in 1993 said, "A key purpose of the Records Act is to end unjustified secrecy that has fed speculation about the assassination and undermined public trust in the institutions of government." This one agency, the ARRB, is doing the most to restore faith in our democracy by revealing our largely still hidden history.

I have paid close attention to the ARRB and have written about them extensively. In addition to this Web site, my articles can be read in The Assassination Chronicles and The Fourth Decade. I have testified before the ARRB twice. I have attended nearly all of their open meetings, public hearings and presentations. I am in the process of reviewing all the documents they have released.

I can assure you that they need more time to do their work. I cite the following examples:

1. We have seen no releases from the JFK Library in Boston as a result of any Review Board action, despite the ARRB visiting the JFK Library and holding a public hearing in Boston. This needs some explanation, the Records Act allowed agencies to determine for themselves what "assassination records" are until such time as the ARRB came into existence and defined the term "assassination record".

   The JFK Library did release some material but that was at own their own initiative. A great deal of material remains to be opened. One of the items the JFK assassination research community wants released is an audiotape of a National Security Council Meeting held October 2, 1963 in which President Kennedy discuses his intention to withdrawal from Vietnam. This tape was the object of an editorial by Oliver Stone in Newsweek, October 21, 1996, p. 14, "Was Vietnam JFK's War?"

2. We have seen precious little and in many cases nothing at all from Department of Defense agencies. Peter Dale Scott has written some very interesting pieces on Oswald's Marine G-2 records that have not been released.

3. The ARRB is not going to review parts the CIA "segregated collection" created by the HSCA as was revealed at the open meeting October 16, 1996 because of time constraints. The "segregated collection" is a series of records created by the CIA at the request of the House Select Committee on Assassinaitons. They are broken down into two main categories, one in hard copy which has about 129,000 pages and the other group is 72 rolls of microfilm which equates to about 163,000 pages. A memorandum of understanding was signed between the Chairman of the HSCA and the Director of Central Intelligence that stated, "Upon termination of the Committee, all materials provided by CIA and examined by the Committee will be kept and preserved within a segregated and secure area within CIA for at least 30 years, unless the DCI and the House of Representatives agree to a shorter period of time."

   There are records in the sequestered collection that may pertain not to the JFK asssassination but to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. There are personnel files, such as Ann Goodpasture's. There are records that may concern active, ongoing CIA activities. There are records that pertain to people who have a similar name but were not the person the HSCA wanted information about, for example the files for two Bob Smiths are there where the HSCA was interested in only one.

4. The ARRB members themselves have repeatedly acknowledged that they do not have the time to do their job. The time needed to create the Assassination Records Review Board, hire it's staff and make sure all who needed to had the necessary security clearances was never addressed in the original legislation and should not be subtracted from the time of the Board's life and the task they have to perform.
   1. The first meeting of the ARRB Tuesday, April 12, 1994 Chairman Tunheim stated, "This Board does need sufficient time in which to do its work." This was when the Board met for the first time which was as Dr. Hall, a Board member, noted 18 months after the original legislation was passed. The ARRB needed to get emergency funds from the President's Unanticipated Needs Fund to the tune of $250,000 to get started as they were not then funded by the Congress.

   2. Chairman Tunheim again stressed the need for the Board to have the time it needs to do its job at the July 12, 1994 meeting of the ARRB. The Board voted to extend its life as the original legislation gave them this ability. At this time they were to expire in less than 6 months in October of 1994. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Extension Act" was passed on October 6, 1994.

   3. Five days later Dr. William Joyce, a member of the Review Board, asked Jim Lesar, president of the Assassination Archive and Research Center of the possible need for prioritizing in creating a definition for the term "assassination record" at the October 11, 1994 public hearing in Washington, D.C. because of "the reality of congressional allocations of a budget nature and time constraints" (emphasis added) see p. 11 of the transcript for this hearing.

   4. Chairman Tunheim spoke of how the first year was spent on hiring and organizing the staff in his introductory remarks at the Boston Public Hearing March 24, 1995.

   5. At the October 16, 1996 open meeting Dr. Anna Nelson spoke of how the ARRB does not have the time to look at everything which, is why they were holding this particular meeting to decide what to do with the "sequestered collection", roughly some 290,000 pages of documents.

5. Mr. Steve Tilley, National Archives liaison to the ARRB and the man in charge of the JFK Records Collection at College Park has commented on numerous examples of agencies that have assassination material that the National Archives is still awaiting.

6. District Attorney Harry F. Connick of New Orleans is still refusing to turn over documents from the Garrison investigation of Clay Shaw. This material was catalogued by the HSCA. Mr. Connick testified to the ARRB on June 28, 1995 that the reason why some material from that investigation might be missing was because when Garrison lost the election for D.A. to Connick, Garrison staffers took material with them. This was proven to be a lie when a staffer came forward with the grand jury transcripts and stated in a sworn affidavit that Connick ordered the material destroyed. Instead this staffer, Gary Raymond, kept them for more than 20 years before turning them over to a WDSU-TV reporter who then forwarded them to the ARRB. Connick won convictions against Raymond, the staffer and Richard Angelico, the reporter. These convictions were later thrown out.

7. Mr. Tilley commented that time was taken up in the creation of the database that the Act required the Archives to create. "The database which we devised was required by law to be set up in 45 days. Because of that it was a fairly simple system...it had to be usable in almost any kind of hardware government wide...that led to some problems...the computer problems were part of the problems that led to some of the delays.

8. Records the JFK Research Community still awaits:
   1. Audiotapes and transcripts of 3 telephone conversations President Lyndon Johnson made. This is developed further in Harold Weisberg's "Never Again!" p. x-xi, "Contrary to the impression given the public, the disclosed transcripts were selected with some care. All were not disclosed, nor by far were all the tapes heard. What was disclosed -and I have copies of what was-includes no indication of any kind of the three Johnson phone conversations concerning the Hoover-Katzenbach conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself. (This concerns the infamous Katzenbach memo.) Not (Bill) Moyers call to Johnson, not Johnson's immediate call to Hoover, and not his call to Katzenbach placed as soon as he spoke to Hoover. Also, not disclosed was Johnson's call made early the night of the day of the assassination, that according to Hoover's Warren Commission testimony, directed him to investigate and report on the crime.

   2. Materials used by William Manchester for his book Death of a President.

   3. Materials from foreign governments:
      1. Minsk, Belorussia, where Oswald lived while in U.S.S.R.
         
      2. Japan-Oswald was a Marine in Japan. Dick Russell spoke at the ARRB's public hearing in Boston that the Cabinet Research Office, essentially the Japanese equivalent of the CIA, may have files on Oswald.
         
      3. Mexico, particulary an audiotape of a telephone intercept of someone identifying himself as Lee HArvey Oswald to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City.
         
      4. Holland - Oswald stayed at an apartment in Amsterdam, reputedly a CIA safehouse, when returning to America from his stay behind the Iron curtain.
         
      5. Cuba
         
      6. Italy. The alleged assassination weapon was an Italian Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle. SIFAR, the Italian armed forces intelligence service identified the rifle as a 7.35mm rifle in appearance rebarrelled to 6.5mm. These documents in their original Italian would be important to acquire.

   4. The Garrison material subpoenaed by the ARRB that D.A. Harry F. Connick has still not turned over.

Don't know who your representatives are? Click here for an easy way of finding out!

CIA Records
The Review Board voted to release 164 CIA documents, 11 in full and 153 in part. The Board voted to postpone two records in full. The documents acted upon by the Board include CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's testimony to the HSCA, cables from the Mexico City station regarding Oswald's visit in September and October 1963, and correspondence between the CIA and the Warren Commission, including a Counterintelligence Staff response to the Warren Commission's questions regarding Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union. The redacted portions of these documents include intelligence sources and methods, true names, and file number prefixes.

FBI Records
The Board also voted to release 22 FBI documents (including duplicates), 10 in full and 12 in part. The documents relate in large part to the Bureau's investigation of the assassination. The redacted portions of these documents include informant names and symbol numbers. An additional eight FBI records will be available by consent release.

HSCA Documents
The Review Board voted to release 23 HSCA documents, five in full and 18 in part. These documents include Bureau of Prisons records regarding E. Howard Hunt, memoranda written by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi regarding Antonio Veciana, leader of the Cuban exile group Alpha 66, as well as Fonzi's interview with U.S. Army Colonel (Ret.) Samuel G. Kail, army attache at the U.S. Embassy in Havana from 1958 through 1961. In addition, 277 HSCA records will be available by consent release.

Notification to the President and the Agencies
The Review Board notified the President and relevant agencies of its determinations on the above documents on January 6, 1997. The President has 30 days to agree or disagree with the Review Board's decisions.

Other Board-related Activities
At its October 1996 meeting, the Review Board designated United States Secret Service protective survey reports for President Kennedy's trips from March 1963 through November 1963 as "assassination records." These reports consist of 45 documents and have been transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration for inclusion in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. In addition, the "United States Secret Service: The Evolution of Its Protective Policies, Practices and Procedures (1932 to 1973)" [RIF # 154-10002-10426] and the "Report of Investigation by Inspector Arvid J. Dahlquist" (on Abraham Bolden) [RIF # 154-10002-10427] are now available at the National Archives.

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