NARA released thousands of documents yesterday. Most news outlets treated it like a big deal, but most of them thought that these documents had been previously unavailable. That is just not true -- the fact is is that most of these documents had already been available, but now they are online with fewer redactions.
Most conspiracy theorists were disappointed. Jefferson Morley was upset that the George Joannides personnel file was not released:
Of course, as I have mentioned before, the ARRB has already examined that file and it does not contain any material relevant to the JFK assassination:
Indeed, the Lopez report does mention this section on Oswald. (Page 142 of the report)
Footnote 567 reads "See Section" [sic].
However, a cursory search at the Mary Ferrell website yielded this document, in which the CIA discusses the report on Oswald:
The memo notes that the report concludes that Oswald was not an agent.
Here is the unedited report (found by my fellow researcher Paul Hoch). You can check the proposed edits in the above document with this report which confirm this is the report answering whether Oswald was a CIA agent.
For instance, the first correction refers to the CIA's 144-volume Oswald file and you can see that reference on page 3 of the report.
The bottom line:
The results of this investigation confirmed the Warren Commission testimony given by Messrs. McCone and Helms. There was no indication in Oswald's CIA file suggestive in any way that he had ever had any contact with the Agency. Moreover, the Agency employees who would have been in a position to know if Oswald had been associated with the CIA uniformly denied that he had been an agent or connected with the CIA in any capacity.
In addition, the report noted:
The Holy Grail will never be found because it doesn't exist. While I support all efforts to release all files, I am far more interested in the digitization of the JFK collection. If you really want to understand the JFK assassination and all the ancillary issues, the documents are available, they just aren't all online.
For instance, there are 301 boxes of HSCA numbered documents at NARA. Only a small percentage of these are online at the Mary Ferrell website. If you want to understand Jim Garrison, important archives such as Harry Connick, Edward Wegmann, Irvin Dymond, and Clay Shaw are not online. I could only have written my book on Jim Garrison by personally visiting NARA and photographing thousands of pages of documents.
All of this material is supposedly being digitized by NARA. This is the material that will be of utmost importance to JFK assassination researchers. The search for the Holy Grail is a distraction.