Kim Herd used subpoenas to force Secret Service compliance

By Desmond Okafor · August 9, 2026

Hidden JFK records became a legal battleground as the ARRB used subpoenas to coerce Secret Service compliance and probe CIA contradictions in Mexico City.

The US National Archives catalog describes a series known as the Files of Kim Herd. According to the file's catalogue entry, this collection consists of correspondence, memorandums, subpoenas, notes, and reports created and maintained by Herd. These documents were not the primary records of the 1963 assassination itself, but rather the working papers of the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the body tasked with ensuring that the secrets of that November day were finally handed over to the public.

Compliance and the Secret Service

There is a specific tension in the way the state handles its own history. The catalogue entry notes that of particular interest in this series are documents concerning the United States Secret Service's "compliance with the terms of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act."

Compliance is a word that implies a struggle. It suggests a party that must be coerced into following the law, rather than an agency acting in the spirit of transparency. In the context of the ARRB, compliance was the central battle. The Board was not merely an academic exercise; it was a mechanism to force the hand of agencies that had spent decades deciding what the American public was allowed to know about the death of its president. The presence of subpoenas in Herd's files confirms that the process of gathering these records was not a polite exchange of folders, but a legal confrontation.

Robert White

Among the official reports and legal notices, the catalogue entry lists another specific focus: Robert White, described as a "noted collector of John F. Kennedy memorabilia."

It is an odd juxtaposition. On one side of Herd's files, we have the Secret Service and the legal machinery of the US government; on the other, we have a private collector. When the state’s official records are so heavily guarded or redacted, the "memorabilia" of private citizens often becomes a shadow archive. The fact that a collector of souvenirs was of sufficient interest to warrant a place in the ARRB's working files suggests that the board had to look beyond the official channels to reconstruct the truth, or perhaps that the government was concerned with who else held pieces of the puzzle.

Mexico City and the CIA

While the Files of Kim Herd provide a window into the administrative struggle for access, related series in the same archive suggest the deeper, more volatile currents the ARRB was navigating. The catalog lists "Morning Meeting Minutes Related to the Central Intelligence Agency Segregated Collection," which cover not only Lee Harvey Oswald but also "Algerian-Chinese Communist Agreements."

This placement is critical. The assassination of a president is rarely a closed loop; it is tied to the geopolitical anxieties of the era. The ARRB's work intersected with the findings of the Church Committee and a sprawling web of intelligence that stretched from Washington to Algiers and beyond. The records indicate that the review process was forced to contend with a CIA that had integrated its internal secrets into a global strategy of influence.

Public records on animal husbandry describe the herding dog as a working animal trained to move livestock—sheep or cattle—into a controlled area. The work of the ARRB, as reflected in the files of analysts like Kim Herd and Robert J. Skwirot, was a form of political herding. They were attempting to round up disparate, scattered, and often hidden records—subpoenaing the reluctant and cataloging the fragmented—to bring them into a single, accessible pen for public scrutiny.

The Goodpasture Deposition

The scope of this effort is further illustrated by the "Anne Goodpasture Deposition Materials." The catalogue describes these as exhibits, photographs, and transcripts relating to Goodpasture, a CIA employee who was stationed in Mexico City at the time of the assassination.

Mexico City remains one of the most contested geographies in the JFK narrative, a place where intelligence reports and witness testimonies have frequently contradicted one another. The existence of these deposition materials indicates that the ARRB was still, years later, attempting to reconcile the testimony of those who were on the ground in Mexico with the redacted cables sent back to Langley.

Whether these efforts successfully pierced the veil of the Secret Service's secrecy remains a question for the records themselves. The catalogue confirms that the files exist, but it does not say how many of those subpoenas were ignored or how much of the "compliance" was merely a performance of cooperation. The record concludes with the listing of these materials, leaving the actual contents of the Goodpasture deposition to be sought in the boxes.