Open Questions: Dealey Plaza

Open Questions in Dealey Plaza

The records concerning Dealey Plaza, the site of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, reveal a series of unresolved questions that extend beyond the immediate events of November 22, 1963. While many documents detail witness accounts and physical evidence, a significant portion of the collection focuses on the aftermath: how government agencies, particularly the CIA, processed, documented, and internally communicated about the assassination and its subsequent investigations. The open questions that emerge from these records are often not about the sequence of shots, but about the administrative and operational histories of the files themselves. They point to unexplained connections between individuals in intelligence records, internal agency reflections that remain opaque, and the specific information that was deemed important enough for high-level dissemination. Reading these records requires attending to the gaps, the unexplained references, and the structural oddities of the archive.

A notable structural anomaly appears in the CIA's security files, suggesting a recorded link between two figures of interest to assassination researchers: Gordon Novel and Richard Case Nagel. A security file for Nagel is explicitly marked as having been "ORIGINALLY PART OF UNIT INDEX AS 104-10305-10000" ^[1]. That index number corresponds to the security file for Gordon Novel ^[2]. This notation indicates that at some point, the files for these two individuals were combined or indexed as a single item before being separated. The administrative logic for this initial consolidation and later separation is not explained in the available records. This leaves open the question of what information was contained in the original, unified file and why the CIA's record-keeping system once treated these two men as a single unit of interest.

The collection also contains evidence of internal agency reviews and reflections whose substance remains unknown. A 1998 memo from the CIA's Historical Review Program (HRP) is titled simply "LESSONS LEARNED" ^[3]. The HRP was the group tasked with reviewing historical records for declassification, and other documents show its deep involvement in complying with the JFK Records Act ^[4]. The 1998 memo was generated at the height of the Assassination Records Review Board's (ARRB) work, suggesting these "lessons" likely pertain to the agency's handling of its JFK-related files. However, the content of the memo is not detailed, leaving it unclear what specific conclusions the CIA's own historians drew from the decades-long process of managing, and eventually releasing, its assassination records.

Similarly, the precise nature of the ARRB's inquiries to the CIA is not always fully transparent in the files. One document is an ARRB request for information sent to the CIA's Historical Review Group concerning the Zapruder film ^[5]. The document is identified as "CIA-IR-25," signaling it was a formal, numbered information request as part of the ARRB's official mandate. While the subject is clearly identified as the famous home movie of the assassination, the specific questions the ARRB posed to the agency are not included in this particular record. It is therefore unknown what specific aspect of the film, or the CIA's potential connection to its analysis or handling, the ARRB was investigating with this request.

Beyond the processing of records, questions also arise from the selective internal distribution of public information. In February 1965, months after the Warren Report had been released to the public, the Chief of a CIA component known as KUDOVE circulated a memo titled "WARREN COMMISSION TESTIMONY--SELECTED EXCERPTS" to all CIA station chiefs worldwide ^[6]. The public availability of the full Warren Commission testimony makes this internal, targeted distribution noteworthy ^[7]. The memo does not specify which excerpts were chosen or explain the operational purpose behind highlighting them for senior intelligence officers in the field. This action raises the question of what specific passages from the vast body of testimony were deemed essential for the CIA's global leadership to review, and why.

Ultimately, these documents illustrate the limits of archival research. The records can confirm that the CIA linked the files of Novel and Nagel, that the agency's historians documented "lessons learned," and that selected Warren Commission testimony was circulated to station chiefs. However, they often cannot, without further context or declassification, explain the underlying rationale for these actions. The resulting open questions are therefore less about solving the assassination itself and more about understanding the institutional behavior and hidden information architecture of the organizations that investigated and documented it.