Assassination Records Review Board

The Assassination Records Review Board was an independent agency created by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, Public Law 102-526, to re-examine for release the assassination records that federal agencies still held too sensitive to open. Representative Louis Stokes and Senator David Boren introduced the legislation on March 26, 1992; President George H.W. Bush signed it on October 26, 1992, and left the appointments to Bill Clinton, whose five nominees were sworn in on April 11, 1994: John R. Tunheim, chairman, Henry F. Graff, Kermit L. Hall, William L. Joyce and Anna K. Nelson. The act provided that "No assassination record shall be destroyed, altered, or mutilated in any way." Extended by Congress in 1994 and 1997, the board finished on September 30, 1998, leaving "more than four million pages of records" in the National Archives.¹

Releases

Among the records released through the board were the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposals of 1962 known as Operation Northwoods, made public in 1997.² The files of Edward Wegmann, lawyer for Clay Shaw, given to the board by his daughter in 1995, showed "that the Shaw defense team had retained Southern Research Company as of mid-1967," the Shreveport firm whose New Orleans office had investigated David Ferrie, and recorded Wackenhut men reporting to the defense.³ On January 18, 1996, the board's lawyer Philip Golrick telephoned the former Guy Banister partner Joseph Oster in search of Banister's files, the Ferrie investigation and the Shaw defense.⁴ The board classed four FBI headquarters records on the family of H.L. Hunt as assassination records.⁵

Records Destroyed

The board's final report recorded what it could not recover:

• The CIA "destroyed most of its formal HTLINGUAL records," the files of its 1952-1973 mail-opening program, "in 1990 at the direction of CIA's Office of General Counsel."¹
• The CIA "destroyed tape[s] containing Oswald's voice and other related calls as a matter of routine procedure," although its Mexico City station had transcribed the calls and reported them to headquarters in an October 8, 1963, cable.¹
• Among the papers of Director John McCone, a record of a dinner of May 19, 1964, with John J. McCloy "Re: Oswald" is annotated "Destroyed 1-28-72"; a record of a meeting with McGeorge Bundy on November 26, 1963, about the assassination is missing.¹
• Richard Helms directed that the notes and source material for the 1967 Inspector General's report on the plots against Fidel Castro be destroyed; no "operational diaries" of William Harvey were found.¹
• After J. Edgar Hoover's death his secretary, Helen Gandy, destroyed many of his "Personal and Confidential" files.¹
• The Army destroyed its intelligence dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald in 1973 "as part of a program to purge domestic surveillance files."¹
• In 1974 the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the destruction of the minutes and transcripts of the chiefs' meetings from 1947 to 1978.¹
• In January 1995, with the act in force, the Secret Service destroyed protection survey reports for some of Kennedy's trips in the fall of 1963; the board learned of it about a week later.¹