State of the JFK Releases 2025

This page discusses the state of the JFK Records Collection at the start of 2025, with particular focus on documents which remain partially or fully withheld from the public. This collection of records, numbering over 5 million pages, is housed at the National Archives II in College Park, MD. The Mary Ferrell Foundation has approximately 25-30% of these records available for reading and searching online on this website.

Public statements regarding the potential declassification of the remaining withheld JFK documents, made by President-elect Donald Trump and allies including Robert Kennedy Jr., have refocused attention on this collection. This page outlines recent history and the current state of affairs.

Background on the JFK Collection

The files of the 1964 Warren Commission, the first of two major federal investigations into the assassination of President Kennedy, were mostly declassified during the late 1960s and 1970s. But files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and other partial reinvestigations conducted by the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee, remained fully sealed from public access, along with extensive investigative files of the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies. Even the Warren Commission's files contained documents deemed too sensitive to disclose to the public. The Freedom of Information Act, first passed in 1966 in part to gain access to JFK records, proved inadequate.

Then in 1992, in the aftermath of public outcry following Oliver Stone's film JFK, Congress passed the JFK Records Act. This Act created a temporary agency to oversee declassification of these files. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) operated from 1994 to 1998, and processed millions of pages for public release. However, tens of thousands of these documents were released to the public with "redactions" - blacked out words, phrases, and complete paragraphs and pages. And a few thousand of them were withheld in full.

The JFK Records Act set a timetable for full disclosure - October 26, 2017, 25 years from the passage of the Act. At that date, the Act's "presumption of immediate disclosure" was to finally be fully realized, applied to the still-withheld documents and portions of documents. This full and complete release was to happen unless the president personally intervened.

2017-2023: Recurring Partial Releases

And that is what happened. First President Trump, and then President Biden, provided the necessary paperwork to assert Presidential authority over continued withholding. They presided over a 6-year period of successive batches of releases of most of the remaining JFK documents, along with continuing withholding of portions of thousands more. The clause invoked states:

"Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies that -
i) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the national defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign operations, and
ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure" (JFK Records Act, section 5(g)(2)(D))

The language specifies a pretty high bar: a document-by-document rationale for the necessity of continued withholding. Trump and Biden provided only generic assertions of "national security" and specified no "identifiable harms."

For details of this process, including "by the numbers" review of each of the 15 batches of releases (the latest of which occurred on August 24, 2023), see the JFK Act Releases page and the sub-pages linked from it.

The vast bulk of the JFK Collection is available at the National Archives (NARA) only in paper form, for personal inspection, despite a plan developed in 2021 which anticipated digitizing the entire collection by now. NARA did scan all of the records released since 2017 and put them online (2017/2018, 2021, 2022, 2023). These have all been incorporated into the MFF's searchable document archive.

"Transparency" Plans

Pending decisions by President-elect Trump, the release of remaining assassination-related files is governed by two memos issued by President Biden. The Dec 15, 2022 release was accompanied by a Presidential notice announcing that new "transparency plans" would govern future declassification of the thousands of documents still not fully disclosed, rather than the review procedure described in the JFK Records Act. Five agencies created plans which listed records under their control: CIA, FBI, State, Defense, and the National Archives itself, and a second notice of June 30, 2023 put them into effect. These transparency plans include newly-devised criteria for release, including among others:

• Intelligence agents or employees (CIA)
• Human intelligence sources or assets (CIA)
• Intelligence installations or facilities (CIA)
• Intelligence operational details (CIA)
• Covert action (CIA)
• Cover arrangements (CIA)
• Foreign government cooperation (CIA)
• Living confidential source (FBI)
• Sealed MLK information (FBI)
• Social security number of living individual (FBI, NARA)
• Identifies (or would facilitate identification of) intelligence source (Defense)

Some of the criteria (Foreign government cooperation, Intelligence operational details) can and do cover wide ground. The State Department applies this blanket criteria for release of the 29 records it controls: "When the Department completes a risk assessment that determines a very minimal likelihood of hard [sic, harm] to sources, methods, and foreign relations after consultation with relevant departments or agencies." Translation: not bloody soon.

Much more information on the transparency plans can be found in State of the JFK Releases 2023.

Mary Ferrell Foundation Lawsuit

In October of 2022, the Mary Ferrell Foundation and two of our members filed suit in federal court seeking full enforcement of the JFK Records Act. Among the issues: President Biden's authority to replace the JFK Act release process with the transparency plans, Presidential authority to withhold records of legislative bodies past 2017 (HSCA, Church Committee), lack of investigation into destroyed and missing records, and serious problems with the record-keeping of the JFK Collection as required by the Act, particularly the "central directory of identification aids" which describes each released record.

For more information, see the JFK Records Lawsuit page.

What We Have Learned?

The information in the JFK files that remains redacted, if fully released, will not provide the answer to the still-unresolved question "Who Killed JFK?" But even small disclosures add up. What has been learned about the Kennedy assassination and the context in which it occurred over the years is enormous, and most of it derives from declassification of government files - first under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation launched by Harold Weisberg and Jim Lesar and others in the 1970s, and later under the 1992 JFK Records Act as implemented by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

While the ARRB did not reinvestigate the assassination, its work from 1994 to 1998 did generate a great deal of new information about the assassination investigations, and also about the Kennedy presidency. This included significant revelations regarding Kennedy’s policy toward Cuba and Vietnam, two hotspots of the Cold War. One primary example was the declassification, after 35 years of secrecy, of plans for withdrawal from Vietnam, drawn up in the spring of 1963, and reaffirmed two days before JFK arrived in Dallas.

The declassification of the CIA's pre-assassination file on Lee Harvey Oswald (not completed until Biden's release of April 2023) showed that, contrary to what the Warren Commission was told, top operations officers had monitored the man who would be accused of killing JFK for four years before the Dallas ambush. Other declassified CIA cables began to peel the onion of the byzantine story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. The board also uncovered a previously unknown investigation of JFK’s murder conducted by the CIA’s Miami station. Over time we have gotten closer to understanding why "the effect was electric" when Lee Oswald's name came over the wire at CIA headquarters on 11/22/63.

The central role of Cuban exile groups and individuals in the events of 1963, treated superficially by the Warren Commission, emerged from CIA files replete with cryptonyms, operational details, agent names, and officer pseudonyms. Without overstating the significance, it has also been useful to learn via these disclosures of the close relationship between the CIA and journalists covering the JFK story, such as Jeremiah O'Leary and Hal Hendrix.

The ARRB released 1962 Pentagon plans for "Operation Northwoods," which contemplated staging violent incidents in the United States and the Caribbean which could be blamed on Fidel Castro's government, and used as a pretext for invading Cuba. Never approved by Kennedy, these plans illuminate the crisis atmosphere over Cuba, and provide context for understanding the Cuban Missile Crisis later that year (the resolution of which was not considered a success by hawks in JFK's administration).

Other CIA documents showed how Agency assets sought to link Oswald to Castro in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination, and long afterward.

Presidential phone calls, declassified in the 1990s, rewrote the story of the formation of the Warren Commission, revealing Lyndon Johnson’s determination to get the "lone gunman" conclusion he wanted, and squash the alternative narrative of a Communist killer inspired or even hired by Fidel Castro or Nikita Khruschev. The ARRB's depositions of living witnesses to JFK's autopsy generated surprising testimony that photographs taken at the autopsy are not in the JFK collection, raised new questions about the destruction of the original autopsy report, and generally cast yet more doubt on the medical evidence said to support a single shooter.

In short, the declassification of JFK files in recent years has greatly clarified the history of JFK's presidency and the events leading to his assassination. It has added detail to the means by which the government willfully failed to find the truth of Kennedy's murder. It has revealed the previously unknown surveillance of Oswald in the U.S. after his return from the Soviet Union, right up to the days before the events of Dealey Plaza. The steady trickle of JFK files over the years has continued to call into question the official story of a "lone gunman" and given us a deeper and more nuanced understanding of November 22, 1963.

What Is Still Withheld from Public View?

The redactions remaining in the JFK files range from trivial to significant. Contrary to official statements, not many JFK documents concern the identities of living agents or informants. Many instead concern sensitive CIA operations that are related at least tangentially to the assassination of Kennedy. They may well contain information relevant to the causes of JFK's death.

The last release of JFK files took place on August 24, 2023. Since that time, more than 3,500 documents have remained with portions blacked out. Their redacted sections contain information in the categories listed above in discussion of the transparency plans. The criteria for withholding might seem reasonable to some observers, policymakers, covert operators, and agency chiefs in Washington. But the JFK Records Act is quite clear about the overriding public interest in disclosure; most of these "secrets" are 40-60+ years old, and too often the withholding criteria are applied more broadly than is warranted.

A June 1961 memo to President Kennedy, written by his aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. after the Bay of Pigs debacle, illuminates the alienation of the White House and the CIA that persisted throughout Kennedy’s presidency. Entitled "CIA Reorganization," the memo captures Kennedy's frustrations with the Agency. Ironically, more than a page of the memo is entirely redacted under the CIA's "Transparency Plan." The Agency is withholding White House criticism of its operations from public view 63 years after the fact.

This September 1964 memo redacts the names of the chief and nine members of an "infiltration team with the mission of assassinating" Castro. In light of published reports that JFK's assassination was retaliation for the plots to kill the Cuban leader, the identity of the would-be assassins is obviously relevant to the JFK story.

Other redactions conceal how the CIA covertly influenced journalism about JFK's assassination. This document conceals the names of two sources who helped the Agency infiltrate Miami news organizations. Another withheld name is the CIA source who told the Agency that journalist Priscilla Johnson "would cooperate with us." (As Priscilla Johnson McMillan, she later wrote a best-selling book about Oswald that depicted him as the lone assassin.)

Reporting drafted by the Church Committee about the 1970 assassination of Chilean General Rene Schneider, left out of their final report, remains heavily redacted. Is this story relevant to Kennedy’s assassination, which happened seven years before? Indirectly yes. The ringleader of the plot to kill (or kidnap) Schneider was David Phillips, the Cuba operations chief who was involved in the pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald. Phillips' role in Schneider's assassination is relevant to understanding his actions in 1963.

Some of what is withheld is best categorized as "embarrassing secrets." This includes information on Robert Maheu, hired by the CIA in its attempts to murder Castro. Some of the background information still redacted concerns Maheu's previous role as procurer of prostitutes for foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S.

Another example is the withholding of details about CIA officer Sam Halpern's involvement in an operation to make a fake porno film for the purpose of discrediting Indonesia's independent leader Sukarno. Irrelevant to the JFK story? No. Halpern was one of the very few people in a position to know who has claimed that Robert Kennedy condoned the CIA plots to assassinate Castro. An informed assessment of Halpern's credibility requires disclosure of his involvement in dirty tricks operations.

And some of what is supposedly secret behind the redactions is no secret at all. One example is the Church Committee's copy of a November 1963 FBI memo related to Mexico City, regarding a Soviet officer and an FBI operation around him code-named TUMBLEWEED. The CIA has re-released this memo with successively fewer redactions on 4/26/2018, 12/15/2022, and 4/13/2023. What is so sensitive? Nothing. The CIA's own copy of the very same FBI memo was released in full in 1998, more than 25 years ago.

See State of JFK Releases 2023 for further examples of records which still feature redactions. Jefferson Morley's JFK Facts substack is another great source for both what's being revealed in the new records as well as what's still hidden.

Redactions: By the Numbers

How many JFK records remain redacted? An exact number is harder to come by than one might suppose. The National Archives for its part in its 2023 releases page put the number at 3,648, but NARA has not published a list of record numbers. The number of documents listed as covered in transparency plans is a little higher - 3,886 by MFF's count - but some of these documents appear to have been released in full in 2023 after the plans were finalized (two examples: 104-10003-10001 and 104-10052-10058). So NARA's number may well be right. Then again, documents have been discovered that contain redactions but are not covered in any transparency plan and are incorrectly marked "Open in Full" (see 157-10014-10044, 157-10014-10045, and 157-10014-10083 - there may well be more). Are these on NARA's list? And more importantly, who is attending to their review and eventual release?

At left are the counts of documents covered by each agency's transparency plan.

Note that the 3,936 total is 50 more than the actual total of 3,886 - this is due to records which appear in more than one transparency plan and thus are double-counted in this total. Also again remember that some of these records were released in full in 2023, so NARA's number of 3,648 is likely more accurate.

See the State of JFK Releases 2023 page for a table with more details on the documents in the transparency plans, and further discussion of them. The sidebar on the right side of this page contains links to the plans themselves.

Withheld in Full

In addition to the redacted documents, there are over 500 which remain withheld in full, not available even with blacked-out sections. These are kept from public view in accordance with sections 10 and 11 of the JFK Records Act. Those records exempted from release are primarily tax returns and other documents with IRS information. But there are also some fully-withheld grand jury records, and, most interestingly, materials provided to the National Archives under a restrictive "deed of gift," marked Donor Restricted.

This last category, Donor Restricted, includes:

• 5 "Very personal letters of Mrs. Kennedy" to President Johnson, circa 1963
• 4 transcripts of interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy conducted by author William Manchester in May 1964
• 2 transcripts of interviews with Robert Kennedy conducted by Manchester in May 1964 and Jan 1965

Given what we now know about both Kennedys' disbelief in the lone assassin story, what they might have revealed is especially interesting for history.

But the interview transcripts are withheld until 2067; Jackie Kennedy's letters specify no "opening criteria". And it does not appear that presidential discretion extends to these.

Digitization of the JFK Collection

The National Archives has made only a small portion of the JFK Collection available online - some select Warren Commission files, a few other collections such as the ARRB's digital files, and significantly all of the files released since 2017. But this is a tiny fraction of the total.

The accessibility problem has been worsened by onsite access policies put in place during Covid and never fully rescinded. Visits to the College Park facility require significant advance notice and are short in duration. Copying fees are high. In any case, what worked decades ago seems more and more archaic - by 2025, digitization and online access seems more than warranted for what the U.S. Senate called "the most publicly sought-after unreleased records of our government."

Note that the 1992 JFK Records Act did not specify a requirement for online access - after all, 1992 was two years before the World Wide Web first appeared. But in December 2021, in response to a directive from President Biden, the National Archives announced a plan to digitize the full collection. The timetable set in that brief plan called for the project to be completed in late summer of 2023.

That was over a year ago, and the public is still waiting. There are some indications that the project is (barely) underway. In 2022, NARA put the Warren Commission's "key persons" file online (see MFF's copy), though it's not clear if that project was officially part of the digitization plan. And more than one researcher seeking access to Warren Commission records has been told that they are unavailable due to being currently scanned.

NARA has been silent about the state of this project and a new timetable, if any, for completion. Any new initiatives around release of the remaining records should include discussion about how to make the full Collection truly accessible to the public via the internet.

Record-Keeping and the "Central Directory of Identification Aids"

A collection this vast needs a system for finding documents, identifying them uniquely, and tracking their status. The JFK Records Act mandated the creation of "a central directory comprised of identification aids created for each record transmitted to the Archivist..." Each document processed by the ARRB was assigned a unique 13-digit record number, where the first 3 digits specified the agency supplying the document (104=CIA, 124=FBI, 180=HSCA, etc.) and two sets of 5 digits specified a batch id (literally a floppy disk number) and a unique id in the batch. Thus 104-10004-10386 would be record 10386 in CIA batch 10004.

Beyond the unique record number, each document received 17 fields of metadata: agency, title, subjects, from and to fields, page count, a date, current release status, and more.

Each released paper document was accompanied by a printed form containing this metadata. But the metadata, also known as an "identification aid," was also loaded into a "central directory" of such aids. This directory is currently available in the form of a set of 6 downloadable spreadsheets on NARA's website. It contains 319,106 entries, representing as many documents (including those released in full, with redactions, and even those withheld in full). Note that documents released before the JFK Act, which includes most Warren Commission files, are not included in this system.

Problems with the Central Directory

But the central directory of identification aids represented by the six spreadsheets has not been updated since 2021, and much of the information in it has not been updated for much longer. It has several serious problems:

• Current status out-of-date: The "current status" field, meant to track whether a document is open in full, redacted, or withheld in full, is wildly out of date. It currently lists 16,283 documents with status "REDACT"(ed), more than four times the actual number.
• Redactions. Over 5,000 documents in the central directory feature redactions in the metadata entries (title, subjects, from, to, etc.). These are left over from when the same information in the document itself was previously blacked out. The number of redacted metadata entries should now probably be a couple of hundred at most.
• Missing agencies. Records from four entire agencies do not appear in the central directory at all, even though those agencies have released many hundreds of documents, and those documents even include the printed forms of metadata. These agencies missing entirely from the central directory are: Secret Service, National Security Agency, National Security Council, and Army/Investigative Records Repository.
• Other missing entries. Well over a thousand documents from other agencies including the FBI, released in 2017-2023 with attached identification aid form pages, are nonetheless missing from the central directory spreadsheets. The public has no way of knowing how many additional records may be missing from this finding aid.

Fixing these issues is crucial to fulfilling Congress' mandate specified in the JFK Records Act, and critical to making the JFK Collection fully accessible. Addressing these flaws is one aspect of the Foundation's lawsuit.

Other Collection Access Issues

While NARA's JFK digitization project languishes, and with public access restrictions put in place during the Covid era not fully lifted, the public's access to these records is limited. The Mary Ferrell Foundation has tried to fill this gap, but our archive has only 25-30% of the complete collection, and is missing several of the major sub-collections.

And there is reason for concern about the ongoing state of the physical JFK Collection at the College Park facility, and NARA's record-keeping beyond the central directory. The MFF noticed that some records originally slated for release in 2017 were not then subsequently put online. Our inquiry generated a response from NARA, listing 337 records that NARA claimed had been found to have already been released in full prior to 2016, and thus had been mistakenly added to the to-be-released list.

But two on-site spot-checks of a sample of dozens of these 337 records told a different story. More than half of those checked could not be located or were discovered to not be released in full. Some were not present in the boxes; some featured withholding notices; there were other issues. Details are included in the State of JFK Releases 2022 page.

Missing and Destroyed Records

The JFK Collection was created by the ARRB and NARA, and holds what was supplied to them by the various agencies of government (and some private donations). The ARRB cast a pretty wide net, including even Kennedy-era foreign policy records, Kennedy's and Johnson's recorded phone calls, and much more beyond the assassination investigation records per se.

But the ARRB was time-limited, operating for about four years, which allowed relevant records to fall through the cracks, whether by accident or via intentional delay. Those familiar with the case may remember an earlier disclosed memo whereby CIA CounterIntelligence chief James Angleton had elected to "wait out the [Warren] Commission" instead of providing information related to Mexico City.

Among the records now known to be available but which did not make it into the JFK Collection are documents related to CIA psychological warfare officer George Joannides, whom the CIA brought out of retirement to serve as liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But the HSCA was never told that Joannides in 1963 and 1964 had been case officer for the Cuban exile group known as the DRE, the group with whom Oswald had interactions and altercations in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. When HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey was later informed of this dual role by journalist Jeff Morley, who uncovered the story, Blakey was furious, insisting he would have had Joannides on the witness stand instead of processing document requests, had he known. See Blakey's addendum to his Frontline interview (scroll to bottom of page).

Other records were discovered to have been destroyed. The Secret Service destroyed two boxes of 1963 trip reports in 1995, much to the newly-formed Assassination Record Review Board's dismay. There are many other cases of records destruction - as another example, the first presidential phone call between FBI Director Hoover and the new President Johnson was intentionally erased. The State of JFK Releases 2023 page lists a few more of the many known cases of document destruction.

In some cases records destruction is suspected but not confirmed. 17 months of monthly reports from the CIA-funded Cuban exile group DRE, precisely during the tenure of George Joannides, are said by the CIA not to exist and perhaps never to have been created at all, an assertion which defies belief. The records of the CIA's JMWAVE Miami Station's investigation into possibly complicity in the assassination by anti-Castro exiles has never been found.

Release of the documents already placed into the JFK Collection is one matter. But it is also true that time spent studying what has been released has revealed the existence or likely existence of other records which should be in the Collection. Regarding the Joannides files, former ARRB chair Judge John Tunheim has said these records "should be released" and that the ARRB relied on "inaccurate representations made by the CIA" when it skipped over them.

What's Left to be Discovered?

What might be learned if the remaining JFK Collection records were released? Or even if the effort were extended to files known to exist, like the Joannides records? Is there a "smoking gun" that will finally reveal the truth behind Kennedy's murder?

The history of revelation in this case says no, but with an asterisk. Certainly for those who believe Oswald acted alone, the information in recent releases is entirely irrelevant, perhaps interesting as history but unrelated to the assassination.

But for those who have come to believe that the lone nut scenario is a fiction, the steady unfolding of the stories and details in these files over the decades have, at minimum, continued to define what has been called the "context of the crime" in ever-greater detail. Those paying attention to this case have learned far more than has filtered out to the public generally, and the full history has yet to be written.

This was the whole point of the JFK Records Act, which was not to ask the government to solve the case but instead create a means of, in the words of the ARRB, "providing the American public with the opportunity to judge the surrounding history of the assassination for themselves." And the details steadily revealed may in the end provide more than just context, as the unfolding record continues to help winnow out some theories of the case and bolster others.

Many recent books about the assassination which mine these records in search of new understanding could not have been written without them. The revelations of the 1990s led to groundbreaking works including Oswald and the CIA, The Assassinations, JFK and the Unspeakable, and many others. And the more recent releases have contributed more details in newer books including Our Man in Mexico and books like Tipping Point and the new The Oswald Puzzle that point past the cover-up toward a solution to the mystery of Kennedy's murder.

The federal government's well-documented failure to fully pursue the truth in this matter has left that effort in the hands of its citizenry. That situation is far from ideal. But it is a testament to human (and in some ways uniquely American) ingenuity that we have gotten as far as we have in unearthing the story about which one well-placed foreign observer said the US government "clearly prefers to consign the whole business to oblivion as soon as possible."

As for the necessity of keeping hidden the secrets in these aging records, former ARRB chair Judge John Tunheim said in 2017 "I just don’t think there is anything in these records that require keeping them secret now." It is time to complete that Board's work and let history be the ultimate judge of truth in this tragedy.

- Rex Bradford, January 2025