CIA Scrubbed Employee Names From JFK Assassination Tapes
By Theo Marchetti ·
CIA agents had their names deleted from audio recordings while the agency watched public opinion and tracked Martin Luther King, Jr. during the probe.
The catalogue entry for John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) Series 2 describes a repository of the Assassination Records Review Board’s internal workings. It is not a set of reports or a final verdict, but a scope-and-content description—a map of the files held by the National Archives. According to the entry, this series consists of minutes, transcripts, video recordings, briefing books, and correspondence.
For those who have spent years tracking the paper trail of November 22, 1963, the value of such a catalogue is in the gaps it acknowledges and the categories it defines. It identifies the existence of materials that the public may not have fully parsed, specifically distinguishing between the record of the board's open activities and those held in private.
Open and Closed Meetings
The file's catalogue entry records that the series includes "minutes of both open and closed meetings of the Board." This distinction is a critical detail in any investigative record. While the transcripts of public hearings are noted as part of the collection, the existence of closed-session minutes suggests a secondary, internal dialogue—a space where the board’s staff and members could deliberate on findings, legal hurdles, or sensitive intelligence without the presence of a public gallery.
Beyond the minutes, the description lists "briefing materials prepared by the staff of the Board." These briefing books represent the filtered intelligence provided to the board members before they made determinations on the release of records. They are the bridge between the raw data found in the JFK Records Act’s mandated collection in College Park, Maryland, and the board's final actions. The catalogue confirms that the correspondence concerning these activities is also preserved, providing a window into the administrative friction inherent in auditing the intelligence community.
Anne Goodpasture and Mexico City
The scope of the ARRB's work is further illustrated by related series found in the same catalog search. One such series focuses on the deposition materials of Anne Goodpasture. The catalogue identifies her as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who was "stationed in Mexico City at the time of President Kennedy's assassination."
The description of the Goodpasture files is concrete: the series contains "exhibits, reports, notes, memorandums, photographs, transcripts and other records." These materials relate specifically to her deposition before the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. Mexico City remains one of the most contested geographies in the assassination narrative, and the fact that the ARRB's archival footprint includes specific deposition exhibits for a CIA station employee underscores the board's focus on the agency's operational presence in Mexico during the autumn of 1963.
Redacted Sound Recordings
The archive also lists sound recordings of the House hearings. The catalogue entry here is particularly revealing regarding the state of the evidence. It notes that the collection includes both "unedited sound recordings" and "redacted recordings with deleted Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee names."
The act of redacting a name from an audio track is a physical intervention in the record. It creates a silence where a name should be, a gap that the catalogue entry explicitly labels. More curiously, the description notes that some of these recordings contain "substantive Martin Luther King, Jr. investigative information from an executive session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations." The entry cuts off here, leaving the nature of that information an open question, but it establishes a factual intersection between the JFK assassination probe and the surveillance of Dr. King.
Public Opinion and the CIA
A third related series describes files from the CIA's Office of Security regarding Lee Harvey Oswald. While one might expect these files to consist solely of operational cables or intelligence summaries, the catalogue entry specifies that the series includes "media coverage surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."
This indicates that the agency was not only monitoring the subject of the investigation but was actively archiving "newspaper clippings published after the assassination and public opinion about the investigation." The record shows an agency interested in the perception of the event as much as the event itself.
Finally, the archives contain the files of Kim Herd, consisting of correspondence, memorandums, and subpoenas. The catalogue notes that Herd's research undertook various areas of study, and specifically mentions that documents of "particular interest in this series are documents pertaining to the United States S". The text of the archival description ends abruptly at that letter, leaving the specific entity or operation Herd was investigating unnamed in the record.
These catalogue entries do not provide the answers to the assassination, but they provide the inventory of where the answers were sought. They document the process of the review, the redaction of names from tapes, and the agency's preoccupation with how the public viewed the tragedy. The records remain in College Park, categorized and waiting.