The documents rarely say plainly what they mean. These are the terms, cryptonyms and filing conventions the book uses, defined once so a reader never has to guess.
- AMLASH
- The CIA cryptonym for Rolando Cubela, a senior Cuban official the agency cultivated as a potential assassin of Castro. His case officer met him in Paris on 22 November 1963 and handed over a poison device at roughly the hour Kennedy was shot.
- ARRB
- The Assassination Records Review Board, 1994 to 1998. An independent body with subpoena power that reviewed agency withholdings document by document and released roughly four million pages. Its absence since is, in this book's judgment, the largest remaining obstacle.
- Badge Man
- A shape read as a uniformed figure firing from behind the stockade fence, found in 1982 by enlarging Mary Moorman's Polaroid. Analysts who examined the original print concluded it was the grain of a 1963 instant photograph. Push any image far enough and it will show you a face.
- Bethesda
- The naval hospital outside Washington where the autopsy was conducted that night, by pathologists without training in forensic gunshot examination and under considerable pressure.
- Camelot
- The word Jacqueline Kennedy gave to a magazine writer at Hyannis Port a week after the assassination. It had never been attached to the administration before that night, and it has framed the argument ever since.
- Carcano
- The Italian bolt-action rifle found on the sixth floor and entered into evidence, ordered by mail under an alias.
- Carousel Club
- Jack Ruby's Dallas nightclub, and the reason he was known by name to a large part of the city's police force.
- Commission Exhibit 399
- The nearly intact bullet recovered at Parkland Hospital, on which the single-bullet explanation depends. Critics call it the magic bullet; the condition of it is one of the case's oldest arguments.
- Commission Exhibit 884
- The fourteen-row survey table produced for the Warren Commission in 1964, recording where the President's car was at fourteen specific frames of the Zapruder film. Every measurement in this book comes off it. Fourteen rows are the entire measured basis for the car's position at any moment.
- Dictabelt
- The Dallas police recording on which the House committee based its finding of a probable conspiracy, on the reading that it captured four impulses. A drummer later found police crosstalk underneath the sounds that timed the recording to about a minute after the shooting.
- Fair Play for Cuba Committee
- The pro-Castro organisation whose New Orleans leaflets Oswald handed out in the summer of 1963. The exile group that publicly clashed with him was handled by a CIA officer whose role was concealed from congressional investigators for decades.
- Five Eyes
- The signals intelligence arrangement between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It was seventeen years old and fully operational in November 1963, which is the foundation of this book's argument about what may still be held abroad.
- Foreign Liaison Unit
- The office handling an agency's dealings with foreign intelligence services. Correspondence through such channels is what the letters on this site are asking to see.
- frame 133
- The frame at which the numbering everyone uses begins, because Zapruder had filmed the motorcycles, stopped to save film, and started again as the limousine came round onto Elm.
- frame 313
- The frame of the Zapruder film showing the fatal head shot. Mary Moorman's Polaroid was exposed within about a twentieth of a second of frame 315, from the opposite side of the street.
- grassy knoll
- The sloping lawn on the north side of Elm Street, topped by a pergola and a wooden stockade fence, from which many witnesses believed at least one shot came. It is smaller and closer to the street than almost anyone expects.
- HSCA
- The House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976 to 1979, which re-examined the case and concluded a conspiracy was probable, largely on acoustic evidence that a National Academy of Sciences panel later undid.
- JFK Records Act
- The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, passed in the wake of public pressure after a Hollywood film. It reversed the default: agencies had to justify each withholding to an independent board rather than citizens having to argue for release.
- not recorded
- A phrase appearing in Bureau files where a document number would normally sit. Sampling of RFK and MLK files found the same habit, which suggests a filing convention rather than anything specific to this case.
- opening criteria
- The field on a National Archives identification form specifying whose approval is required before a document may be released. Twenty-seven of the 314 FBI files in the March 2025 release carry the approval of the National Security Agency in that field.
- Operation Mongoose
- The American covert programme against Cuba following the Bay of Pigs, run from 1961. It is the context in which the CIA's plots against Castro, and its use of organised crime figures, took place.
- Parkland Hospital
- The Dallas hospital four miles from the plaza where the President was taken, reached in about four minutes with a motorcycle escort clearing the junctions.
- Prayer Man
- An indistinct figure in the Depository doorway in film of the motorcade, argued by some to be Oswald and therefore an alibi. The resolution of the source material does not settle it either way.
- RIF
- Record Identification Form. The cover sheet the National Archives attaches to every document in the collection, carrying a number in the form 104-10009-10222 and the criteria under which the file may be opened. Quoting a RIF number is how a reader pulls the page instead of taking an author's word for it.
- single-bullet theory
- The proposition, constructed by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, that one bullet caused seven wounds in two men. It is the load-bearing wall of the official account: without it the number of shots does not fit the time available.
- Stemmons Freeway sign
- A highway sign on a post at the edge of Elm Street which, from Zapruder's vantage, hides the limousine completely for about fifteen frames. It matters because those are the frames in which the President is first hit.
- Texas School Book Depository
- The seven-storey brick warehouse at Elm and Houston where Oswald worked, and from whose sixth-floor corner window the official account has the shots fired.
- third party rule
- The intelligence convention that material received from an allied service is not the recipient's to release: the originator holds the veto. It means anything on this case that crossed a border acquired a foreign veto no American statute can override.
- triple underpass
- The railway bridge carrying tracks over Elm, Main and Commerce at the west end of the plaza. Railroad workers stood on top of it with an unobstructed view down onto the street.
- UKUSA
- The 1946 agreement that established the signals intelligence partnership now known as Five Eyes.
- Warren Commission
- The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1963 to 1964, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren. It produced an 888-page report and twenty-six volumes of testimony and exhibits, an act of publication no comparable inquiry has matched.
- Zapruder film
- Twenty-six seconds of 8mm home movie shot by Abraham Zapruder from a concrete pedestal at the end of the pergola. It is the clock every other piece of evidence is timed against, and the reason a frame-by-frame argument exists at all.
- ZRRIFLE
- A CIA cryptonym covering the agency's capability for what its own files called executive action. Cryptonyms of this kind are the reason a reader needs a glossary at all: the documents rarely say plainly what they mean.