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JFK Research Center

A research reading room for records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, drawn from the U.S. National Archives Catalog.

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Records sourced from the U.S. National Archives Catalog, ABBYY JFK-OCR, and allowlisted primary-source reports. Transcriptions and OCR are machine-generated and may contain errors.

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Scope: This research tool indexes 37,141 records - a curated subset of the ~300,000 documents in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. Releases indexed: 2017-2018, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025. 2,165 records have full-text OCR indexed - of those, 2,162 are sourced from the 2025 re-release (NARA has not yet published an XLSX manifest for 2025; each document’s prior-release history is shown on its page). Releases not yet indexed: 2026. Methodology

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FBI18,005CIA15,955HSCA1,226Department of Defense315NSA299SSCIA258Senate (Church Committee)253Senate236Department of State79NARA47JCS45U.S. Marine Corps45Department of Justice33U.S. Secret Service32ROCKCOM24WC24ARMY24DOS17LBJ14KISS/SCOW11MATHENY7INSCOM6OSD4BUCHEN/DAN4DUVAL78-673CAR/HARDY3BUCHEN78662DAVIS2CHENEY2

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Document matches | 1

Results for OFFICE MEMORANDUM: DEFECTION OPERATION.

Results1Current document, mention, or semantic mode Entities32People, agencies, places, and concepts Topics11Curated subject lanes TimelineChronology routes for this query QuestionsOpen-question routes

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CIA 1

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1961 1

CIA|March 28, 1961|PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT|NAID 104-10175-10070

SourceCIATextMetadata onlyRecordNAID 104-10175-10070

OFFICE MEMORANDUM: DEFECTION OPERATION.

CIA · From: JEAN PIERSON · To: C/WH/4/CI · JFK64-11 : F3 : 1998.02.19.18:54:09:356102 : · Release: Redact

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CIA / PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

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Entity name appears in the title

High confidenceCurated metadataCIAPaper - Textual DocumentRelease 2022