[104-10335-10014.pdf — page 5]
## 52Unfortunately, and for reasons that I do not know, what we are dealing with is a mass of material that is not indexed, is uncatalo- gued, and is highly disorganized, all of which makes the review process more difficult. The material contains everything from the most sensitive intelligence sources to the most mundane news clip- pings.These records include documents that CIA had in its files before the assassination, a large number of records that CIA received later as routine disseminations from other agencies, as well as the reports, correspondence, and other papers that CIA prepared in the course of the assassination investigations. I should emphasize that these records were assembled into the present collection as a result of specific inquiries received from the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations.Prior to President Kennedy's assassination, CIA held only a small file on Lee Harvey Oswald that consisted of 34 documents amounting to 124 pages, some of which originated with the FBI, the State Department, the Navy, and newspaper clippings. Only 11 of these documents originated within CIA. I have brought along a copy of Oswald's file as it existed before the assassination so that you can see firsthand how slender it was at the time. As I have already noted, we have declassified the CIA documents in this file with quite minimal deletions and we are providing them to the Na- tional Archives.The records in this file dealt with Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his activities after his return in 1962. By contrast, it was only after the assassination that CIA accumulated the rest of the material on Oswald, some 33,000 pages, most of which CIA received from other agencies after November 22, 1963.The Committee has asked about documents in our possession generated by other agencies. In fact, much of the material held by CIA originated with other agencies or departments. For example, in the 17 boxes of Oswald records, approximately 40 percent of the documents originated with the FBI and about 20 percent originated from the State Department or elsewhere.Our staff is still going through the material compiled at the re- quest of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which includes 63 boxes of paper records and one box that contains 73 reels of microfilm. The microfilms, in part, overlap material in other parts of the collection. We estimate that within the 63 boxes of paper records, approximately 27 per- cent originated with a variety of other U.S. Government agencies, private organizations, and foreign and American press.Although our documents do include many documents from other agencies, we nonetheless have a substantial collection of CIA docu- ments that will require considerable effort to review, and as I said earlier, at my direction, this review for declassification is now un- derway.A preliminary survey of these files has provided us some indica- tions of what they contain. Although the records cover a wide vari- ety of topics, they principally focus on CIA activities concerning Cuba and Castro, Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union, and Os- wald's subsequent activities in Mexico City and New Orleans. They also include a large number of name traces requested by the staff## 53of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as well as mate- rial relating to the Garrison investigation and Cuban exile activi- ties.The CIA cannot release a number of documents unilaterally be- cause of the limits in the Privacy Act which protect the names of American citizens against unauthorized disclosure, the sequestra- tion of many documents by the House Select Committee on Assassi- nations, and the fact that many of the documents belong to agen- cies other than CIA.However, we have already taken steps to lift the sequestration, to coordinate with other agencies, and to begin the process of de- classification. If necessary, in the absence of legislation, I will ask the House of Representatives for a resolution permitting CIA to re- lease the results of the declassification effort on the sequestered documents.While I expect a large amount of the material can be declassified under our program, I assume that there will be information that cannot be released to the public for a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns or the exposure of intelligence sources and meth- ods. Let me take a moment to give an example of this type of mate- rial.During the investigation by the House Select Committee on As- sassinations, I understand that security and personnel files were requested on a number of CIA employees. These files contain fit- ness reports, or performance evaluations, medical evaluations, and credit checks on individual CIA officers. Although irrelevant to the question of who killed President Kennedy, these and other personal documents ultimately ended up in the sequestered collection of doc- uments. I do not believe that the benefit to the public of disclosure of this information outweighs the clear privacy interest of the indi- viduals in keeping the information confidential.Similar privacy concerns exist with documents containing derog- atory information on particular individuals where the information is based on gossip and rumor. Our files also contain the names of individuals who provided us intelligence information on a promise of confidentiality. We would not disclose their names in breach of such a promise. Where we cannot disclose such information to the public, the Agency will make redactions and summarize the infor- mation in order to ensure that the maximum amount of informa- tion is released, while still protecting the identity of an agent or the privacy of an individual.If legislation is not passed by the Congress and signed by the President regarding the JFK papers, to enhance public confidence and to provide reassurance that CIA has not held back information relevant to the assassination, I would appoint a panel of distin- guished Americans from outside of Government, perhaps including distinguished former jurists, to examine whatever documents we have redacted or kept classified. They would then issue an unclassi- fied public report on their findings.The effort required to declassify the documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy will be daunting. However, it is an important program and I am committed to making it work. Even in a time of diminishing resources within the intelligence community, I have allocated 15 full-time positions to expand the