Richard Helms and William Colby Forced to Account for Hidden JFK Records
By Theo Marchetti ·
Families of the fallen waited 30 years for answers while CIA architects Richard Helms and William Colby scrubbed records and hid files to maintain plausible deniability.
Families of the fallen and a public cheated of a full accounting waited thirty years for the truth about November 22, 1963. The cost of that silence was a permanent cloud of suspicion over the American presidency and a legacy of distrust in the agencies tasked with protecting the state.
For those who spent decades staring at the gaps in the official story, the struggle was never just about the event in Dallas, but about the paperwork that followed. The battle to unlock those records culminated in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This law mandated that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gather every government record relating to the assassination, housing them in College Park, Maryland, to ensure that the search for answers was no longer a matter of bureaucratic whim.
Richard Helms and William Colby
Much of the heavy lifting in this process fell to the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The file's catalogue entry for the "Files of Mary S. McAuliffe" records the specific, grinding labor required to force the Central Intelligence Agency to be honest about what it possessed. This is not a collection of the secrets themselves, but rather a record of the hunt for them—a ledger of correspondence, memoranda, and interview notes.
Of particular note in the catalogue are the interview notes and summaries between ARRB members and two men who once held the highest seat at Langley: former Directors of Central Intelligence Richard M. Helms and William E. Colby. These were the architects of the agency's mid-century secrecy, the men who knew exactly which files had been scrubbed, which had been hidden, and which had been destroyed before the public ever knew they existed. The series documents the ARRB's efforts to use these former chiefs to identify assassination-related documents that the agency might otherwise have claimed did not exist.
Samuel Halpern
The search for the truth did not stop with the directors. The catalogue entry indicates that the ARRB pursued other former CIA officers, including John Whitten—who also operated under the name "John Scelso"—and Samuel Halpern.
The inclusion of Samuel Halpern is a critical link to a wider history of intelligence failure and cover-up. The catalogue specifically notes that copies of Halpern's testimony before the Church Committee are included in the McAuliffe files. This connects the ARRB's narrow focus on the 1963 assassination to the broader 1970s investigation into the "rogue elephant" of the CIA, where the Senate sought to understand how an agency created for foreign intelligence had turned its eyes and its weapons toward American soil.
The State Department and the HSCA
While the CIA was the primary target of the ARRB's scrutiny, the catalogue entry shows that the search for missing pages extended across the federal government. The series documents the board's work with the Department of State and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), suggesting a fragmented landscape of records that the ARRB had to piece together.
This effort to synthesize the record is mirrored in other archival series. The National Archives holds the records of the Church Committee, including memorandums on intelligence connections to the assassination, and a separate compilation of FBI headquarters and field office case files. There are also the Secretariat Files of the National Security Council, containing administrative materials and the Jeanne Davis files.
When viewed together, these series paint a picture of a government that had compartmentalized the tragedy of 1963 across multiple agencies, each keeping its own version of the truth. The Files of Mary S. McAuliffe represent the attempt to break those compartments open. They record the friction between a board mandated by law to find the truth and an intelligence community conditioned by decades of plausible deniability.
Whether the CIA eventually surrendered every page the ARRB sought, or whether the "identification" of documents remained a selective process, is a question the catalogue entry leaves for the records themselves to answer.