CIA Manipulated 63 JFK-related Boxes to Mask Its Own Role
By Desmond Okafor ·
CIA agents erased their names from audio recordings and shifted records to a congressional collection to hide what the agency did while investigating the death of President John F. Kennedy.
The National Archives catalogue entry for the "Segregated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Collection Files" describes a cache of memoranda, reports, correspondence, photographs, and audio recordings. These are not the records themselves, but the archival scope-and-content description of a series created by the CIA and compiled for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the death of President John F. Kennedy.
To the casual researcher, a catalogue entry is a map. But to those used to the way intelligence agencies manage their legacies, the map reveals a curated landscape. The description outlines a specific administrative divide between two series: A1 69 and A1 70.
A1 69 and A1 70
According to the catalogue, series A1 69 contains the "largest portion of the CIA-originated material" transferred to the archives in August 1993. In contrast, A1 70 contains material generated by the HSCA itself, transferred a year later in December 1994. On the surface, this is a distinction between the source of the document—the agency versus the committee.
However, the description notes a complication: some material was "withdrawn" from the CIA-originated series (A1 69) and instead included with the HSCA-generated material (A1 70). This is an administrative sleight of hand. When an agency moves its own records into a collection attributed to a congressional committee, it alters the provenance of the paper. It shifts the narrative from what the agency did to what the committee found.
For the historian, the most vital part of this description is the mention of "withdrawal slips." The catalogue entry states that it is possible to correlate the HSCA-generated material in the 1994 consignment with these slips found in the August 1993 boxes. A withdrawal slip is a ghost; it is a placeholder that tells you something was once here and was intentionally removed. The presence of these slips suggests a process of scrubbing and re-categorization that happened long after the events in Dealey Plaza.
Algerian-Chinese Agreements
While the primary focus of the collection is the assassination of the 35th president, the archive's related series descriptions suggest a much broader net of surveillance. The "Morning Meeting Minutes Related to the Central Intelligence Agency Segregated Collection" show that the agency's internal discussions were not limited to Lee Harvey Oswald.
These minutes cover a dizzying array of interests: the Church Committee, the work of the House Assassination Committee, and "Algerian-Chinese Communist Agreements." The inclusion of Algerian-Chinese diplomatic maneuvers in the same meeting minutes as the investigation into a presidential murder speaks to the CIA's worldview. In this framework, the stability of a US president and the geopolitical alignment of North Africa and Asia are simply different entries on the same ledger of "interests."
This pattern of expansive surveillance extends further. The catalogue entry for the "Sound Recordings of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Hearings" notes that some recordings contain "substantive Martin Luther King, Jr. investigative information from an executive session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations."
It is telling that in the effort to document the assassination of a white president, the records encompass the surveillance of a Black civil rights leader. The archive proves that the CIA's gaze was never fixed on a single event, but was instead a wide-angle lens capturing anyone who threatened the established order, whether through a sniper's rifle or a movement for racial equality.
Boxes 1-63
The physical scale of this effort is captured in a simple detail: the series contains material originally housed in CIA Boxes 1-63. Sixty-three boxes of "segregated" files—a term that, in an archival sense, means separated, but in a political sense, often means hidden or compartmentalized.
These boxes were supplemented by the files of Kim Herd, whose records include subpoenas and reports from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The existence of these subpoenas suggests that the transfer of materials from the CIA to the National Archives was not a voluntary act of transparency, but a forced extraction.
The catalogue entry for the sound recordings adds one final detail: some of the audio has been "redacted" to delete the names of CIA employees. Even in a collection compiled for a congressional committee, the agency maintained the power to erase its own actors from the tape.
The record leaves a lingering question regarding the "withdrawal slips" in the A1 69 boxes. While the catalogue says it is "possible to correlate" these slips with the A1 70 consignment, it does not say that every slip has a corresponding document. It remains unclear how many records were moved to A1 70, and how many simply vanished.