HSCA Investigators Sifted CIA Records on JFK and MLK Deaths
By Theo Marchetti ·
CIA employee names remain deleted from audio recordings while an abrupt end to files on Martin Luther King Jr. leaves an investigative trail incomplete.
The file's catalogue entry records a series of "Staff Notes" created by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). These are not the primary intelligence reports themselves, but the observations and reflections of the investigators as they reviewed records from the Central Intelligence Agency. The notes cover the circumstances surrounding the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
According to the public record, the HSCA was established on September 15, 1976, via House Resolution 1540. Its mandate was to re-examine the evidence of both assassinations, a task that required wading through the internal documentation of the nation's primary intelligence agency. The resulting archive, as described in the National Archives catalog, creates a layered history: there are the original CIA records, the copies provided to the committee, and finally, the notes written by the staff as they read those copies.
Reviewing the CIA
The catalog describes a "Segregated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Collection," which consists of copies of memoranda, reports, correspondence, photographs, and audio recordings. The term "segregated" suggests a deliberate partitioning of material, a subset of records compiled specifically for the use of the HSCA.
When an investigator reads a memo from 1963 and scribbles a question in the margin or summarizes a contradiction in a notebook, those marks become a separate historical record. That is what the "Staff Notes" series represents. It is the intellectual trail of the investigation—the moments where the staff found something relevant, something missing, or something that required further scrutiny.
Beyond these notes, the catalog lists "Subject Files Relating to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Persons of Interest." These were compiled by the CIA and later deemed relevant by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). They include newspaper clippings, organizational files, and historical data on various CIA activities. The existence of these separate series shows a fragmented approach to the evidence, where the CIA's own internal filing system had to be mapped against the HSCA's investigative needs.
Lee Harvey Oswald
A specific subset of the archive focuses on the CIA's Office of Security. The catalogue entry for these files indicates they include "media coverage surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency."
These files are not merely internal intelligence but a record of how the agency monitored the public's perception of the event. The series contains reports and memoranda created by the CIA, alongside newspaper clippings published after the assassination. By collecting public opinion and media reports on Lee Harvey Oswald, the Office of Security was tracking the narrative as it unfolded in the press, creating a parallel record of the investigation's public face.
This suggests that the HSCA staff were not only reviewing what the CIA knew about Oswald and the assassination but also how the CIA watched the world react to those facts. The staff notes likely reflect the tension between these two perspectives: the internal intelligence and the external image.
Redacted Sound
The archival scope extends into the auditory record. The National Archives lists "Sound Recordings of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Hearings," which include both unedited versions and redacted recordings. In the redacted versions, the names of CIA employees have been deleted.
This pattern of redaction persists in the written records. While the catalog describes the contents of the series, it does not provide the specific names or the substantive findings contained within the staff notes. We know the notes exist; we know they were created during the review of the segregated collection; but the catalog entry itself does not reveal the specific conclusions the staff reached while reading those files.
Related files on this subject are held in other repositories, including the UK National Archives, which contains a request from the HSCA to meet with British officials, and the NSArchive at George Washington University, which holds various district court filings. The US National Archives also holds the "Administrative Ticklars of the House Select Committee on Assassinations" and the official hearings and reports.
One detail in the catalog remains incomplete. In describing the sound recordings, the entry notes that some recordings contain "substantive Martin Luther King, Jr. investigative information from an executive session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations have "—the text ends abruptly, leaving the description of those recordings unfinished.