CIA Oswald 201 File Online |
The Mary Ferrell Foundation has completed putting online the CIA's "201" (Personality) file on Lee Henry (sic) Oswald. This collection of roughly 50,000 pages of documents includes a small pre-assassination Oswald file, followed by a huge collection of post-assassination documents related to the Warren Commission and other investigations.
These pages were scanned from a copy made available by the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), which has also provided other voluminous CIA and FBI files to the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
The 201 file was opened by CounterIntelligence officer Elizabeth "Ann" Egerter in December 1960, with an incorrect middle name for Oswald. There are many questions surrounding the CIA's pre-assassination knowledge of Oswald and possible post-assassination falsification of the 201 file to hide knowledge of Oswald's contact with the Cuban Embassy in late September 1963. For more on the 201 file and these issues, see Peter Dale Scott's CIA Files and the Pre-Assassination Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The 201 file is divided into about 80 volumes, ordered roughly chronologically. These pages come from partial sets obtained by the AARC at different times, so the documents in some volumes feature "RIF" header sheets, and documents in volumes obtained earlier do not. Some of the those documents feature redactions (blacked-out text) which may have since been lifted. Thus, this collection is not an identical match of the set held at the National Archives, though it is substantially the same.