The letters

To the Chairwoman, Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives · 4 August 2026

Dear Chairwoman Luna,

In November 1963 five governments were bound by a standing agreement to exchange intercepted communications with one another. The head of state of the senior partner was assassinated in daylight, in his own country, in front of hundreds of people. How is it that none of the other four appears to have held, collected, assessed or reported anything about it?

That arrangement was seventeen years old and fully operational. Exchanging exactly this kind of material is what it was created to do. Yet the entire public output of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand on the subject amounts to one memorandum about a telephone call, and that document reached the public through an American release rather than any of theirs.

There are two explanations available and I would welcome either. The first is that those four services produced nothing of substance on the most consequential political killing of the century. If so, it is a remarkable intelligence outcome and Congress would want to understand how it happened. The second is that they produced something, and no American law has ever reached it, because the provision Congress wrote for precisely this situation says the Secretary of State should ask them. Should, not shall. No deadline, no duty to report, no penalty. I can find no public record of it ever being used.

I cannot determine which is true. I have no standing to ask a foreign government anything and no mechanism to compel an answer. The Committee has both.

I am a private citizen in San Francisco. I have spent the past year reading the 2025 release document by document and building a reconstruction of Dealey Plaza accurate to the 1964 survey, in order to test physical claims against the ground rather than against photographs of it. I hold no professional position in this field and ask the Committee to take nothing on my authority.

The gap

The JFK Records Act of 1992 reaches records created by, obtained by, or in the possession of the United States government, and of state and local law enforcement. It has no reach into records held by allied governments. Congress recognized this and addressed it in one non-binding provision: a sense of Congress that the Secretary of State should request disclosure from foreign governments holding relevant information. Not shall. No deadline, no reporting requirement, no penalty, no review mechanism.

The four governments are not an arbitrary list. Since March 1946 the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been parties to the signals intelligence agreement now commonly known as Five Eyes, the text of which was jointly declassified by the United Kingdom and the United States in June 2010. Its parties undertake to exchange the products of collection: intercepted traffic, traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, decryption and translation.

Separately, the Act permits postponement where disclosure would cause identifiable harm to the conduct of foreign relations. That is the precise legal shape of an intelligence liaison relationship. Under the third-party rule observed by allied services, information received from a partner is not the recipient's to release; the originator holds the veto.

The consequence is that any assassination-related material that passed between the United States and an allied service acquired, at the moment of transfer, a foreign veto that no American statute and no executive order can override.

That this is not hypothetical is established by records the Task Force already possesses:

RIF 104-10009-10222 archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10009-10222.pdf In November 1968 Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms wrote to Sir Charles Spry, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, confirming there was no present intention to release a Warren Commission document, and indicating that ASIO's stated objections were sufficient grounds to keep it closed.

CIA Counterintelligence memorandum, 26 November 1963 James Angleton reported that the British Security Service had advised that at 1805 GMT on 22 November an anonymous caller told the senior reporter of the Cambridge News, in England, to contact the American Embassy in London for “big news.” That is twenty-five minutes before the shooting. MI5 investigated, established the timing, and assessed the reporter's reliability.

RIF 124-10058-10420 archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/124-10058-10420.pdf A listening device in the Cuban Embassy in London, operated by the Security Service and passed onward through the Secret Intelligence Service, produced assassination-related product that was routed to the CIA station in London and cabled to the Director of the FBI.

These show an operating liaison channel carrying assassination-related material in both directions. In each case the record reached the American public only because an American agency was compelled to open an American file. No allied government has released any of this independently, and none of the four partner states has enacted an equivalent of the Records Act.

A fourth agency

Since drafting the requests below I have indexed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files in the March 2025 release. That release contains 314 Bureau files. Twenty-seven of them, better than one in twelve, carry the same condition on the National Archives identification form: Opening criteria: approval of NSA. Not the originating Bureau. Not the Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency holds the release key to better than one file in twelve of the FBI paperwork in this Collection.

Several of those documents are not summaries. One states in its opening paragraph that its contents were derived from Latin-American communications and cites the message, date, system and worksheet number for each item. Another is a decrypted message addressed to the Cuban Prime Minister, dated 21 August 1961, carried under a codeword and a caveat reading: Special handling required. Not releasable to foreign nationals without the express approval of the Director, National Security Agency.

I note that caveat cuts against part of my own argument, and I would rather say so than have the Committee find it. If the most sensitive American product was withheld from the partner services by design, then some of what those services did not hold may be explained without any impropriety at all. That does not answer what they collected independently, which is the question I am putting. But it is a fair objection and the Committee should have it from me.

What the count does establish is that a fourth agency has a substantial holding in this Collection, that it exercised a release veto over records it did not create, and that so far as I can determine it has never been asked a public question about any of it. My request below is narrowed accordingly.

Nine agencies, and no one adjudicating between them

I then asked the same question of the whole Collection rather than of one agency, by reading every value that appears in the opening criteria field across the March 2025 release. The result is the most consequential thing in this letter, and it is administrative rather than sinister.

Release authority over this Collection is not held by one body. It is held by nine. By my count, which is a floor rather than a total because it comes from machine-read forms:

Central Intelligence Agency about 80 files National Security Agency about 26 files Internal Revenue Service about 21 files

and then, holding a single file each: the Department of State, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Bureau of Prisons, the United States Coast Guard, and one document that cannot be opened until it has been reviewed by the Adjutant General of the Army. One hundred and thirty-one documents in the assassination records of a murdered President are held shut by nine separate bodies.

I do not believe anyone designed this. It appears to be the residue of a file-by-file review conducted in the 1990s, in which each agency that had touched a page wrote its own name into the box, and no one afterwards stood back and read the resulting list.

But consider what it means today. There is no single office a citizen, a historian or this Committee can petition. There are nine, they do not answer to one another, and the independent body that could have overruled any of them, the Assassination Records Review Board, expired on 30 September 1998 and has never been replaced. The Board was created precisely because Congress would not permit agencies to adjudicate their own disclosures.

I should be careful about one of those nine. The Internal Revenue Service condition is very likely section 11 of the Act operating exactly as written, protecting tax return information under section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code. I am not suggesting anything improper in it, and I would rather say so than have the Committee find it. My point is structural and it survives that concession: a citizen or a committee seeking a review of what remains closed has no single office to approach. There are nine, they do not answer to one another, and there is no longer any body with authority over all of them.

That, more than anything else I have found, is the argument for the seventh request below.

The negative evidence

What is absent here seems to me more telling than what is present, and I want to state it carefully, because there is a fair objection to it.

Intelligence services do not publish internal assessments. Nobody should expect them to, and the absence of published product proves nothing by itself. That is not the point I am making.

The point is narrower. Everything the American public knows about what the other four did that week comes to one memorandum about a telephone call in Cambridge, and that document reached us through an American release rather than a British one. So the question is not why those services have published nothing. It is why nothing has ever required them to look. There is no British equivalent of the Records Act, and no Canadian, Australian or New Zealand one. No mechanism, no deadline, no obligation of any kind has ever been directed at them.

What this would actually cost

The obvious objection to any of this is sources and methods, and I want to meet it directly, because I do not think it survives contact with the dates.

The material in question is sixty-three years old. The officers who collected it are dead. The techniques are obsolete by several technological generations. The principal state being collected against, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. Whatever legitimate protection applied to this material in 1964, or in 1978, or even in 1992, it is difficult to identify what is being protected in 2026.

And the minimum useful answer requires no disclosure at all. Any one of those four governments could say, in a single sentence, that it has searched its holdings for the relevant period and found nothing bearing on the assassination. That statement would release no source, no method and no document. It would cost nothing and it would settle a great deal.

In sixty-three years not one of them has said it. Nobody has asked them to.

Who decides now

One structural point underlies every request below. The Act created the Assassination Records Review Board precisely because Congress declined to let the agencies be the judges of their own disclosures: an outside body of historians and lawyers, with subpoena power, before which every withholding had to be justified. That board's authority expired on 30 September 1998.

Nothing replaced it. Since then the agencies have reviewed their own holdings, with the process coordinated through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an office created in 2004 by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, twelve years after this statute was written and with no role in it. The only authority above that process is a presidential signature.

The result is that a law passed to prevent self-review is now administered entirely by self-review, and disclosure proceeds only when public attention compels it. That is not an accusation against anyone. A sunset clause operated in 1998 and a reorganization occurred in 2004, and so far as I can establish no one has since examined what those two events did in combination.

Requests

I respectfully ask the Task Force to seek the following:

1. From the Department of State: a complete accounting of any request made, at any time since 1992, to the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia or New Zealand for disclosure of assassination-related records pursuant to the sense of Congress provision of the Act; and, if no such request was made, the reason.

2. From the National Archives and Records Administration: a schedule of all records in the Collection currently withheld, redacted or postponed in whole or in part on foreign-government-information or foreign-relations grounds, identified by originating government, with the date of the most recent review of each. Separately, and in view of the finding above, a schedule of every record in the Collection whose opening criteria name a concurring agency, identified by record number and by the agency named, together with the date of the most recent review of each and the statutory basis asserted in each case.

3. From the Central Intelligence Agency: the complete file relating to the Warren Commission document at issue in RIF 104-10009-10222, including all correspondence with Australian authorities concerning its release, and confirmation whether the 1968 Australian objection is still treated as operative.

4. From the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation: all records of liaison correspondence with the security and intelligence services of the four partner states concerning the assassination, its investigation, or the subsequent release of records, from 1963 to the present.

5. From the National Security Agency: an accounting of every record in the Collection for which NSA concurrence was required before release, identified by record number; the reason concurrence was required in each case; and confirmation whether any such record has been reviewed since 1998. Separately, any records generated, received or held relating to the assassination or its investigation, including any material exchanged with the partner signals intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia or New Zealand under the 1946 agreement, together with the current classification status of each.

6. From the Department of State, by formal diplomatic request: that the four partner governments be asked, in writing, to review and release their own holdings, and that their responses be reported to this Committee.

7. And for the Committee's own consideration: legislation re-establishing an independent review board on the 1992 model, with subpoena power and a fixed term, charged with adjudicating what remains withheld in this Collection and with reporting to Congress on whether the foreign-disclosure provision has ever been exercised. The original board completed its work in four years at modest cost. Its absence, rather than any individual withholding, is in my judgment the single largest obstacle remaining.

The one word

Everything above follows from a drafting choice made in 1992. The Act says the Secretary of State should request disclosure from foreign governments. Had it said shall, with a deadline and a duty to report, the question of what the allied services hold would have been asked and answered thirty years ago, one way or the other.

I would ask the Task Force to consider recommending that amendment: that the Secretary of State be required to make formal written requests to each partner government, and to report the substance of any response to Congress within a fixed period. It is a small change to an existing statute. It is also the only mechanism I can identify that would ever compel an answer.

It is not my intention to create work for a committee that has plenty of it. I have tried to keep these requests narrow and answerable, and five of the seven should be a matter of retrieving something that already exists rather than producing anything new. I raise it because I think the answer would be useful well beyond this case. If the answer is that nothing is there, that is worth knowing too, and it can be said publicly and be the end of it.

I am not asking the Committee to adopt any theory of the assassination, and I hold none that I would ask anyone to accept on my authority. Nor am I asking it to accept my account of what has and has not been done. I am asking it to find out, because it can and I cannot.

If the Secretary of State has made these requests, the record will show it and I will have been wrong about the most important thing in this letter, which would be a useful result. If no such record exists, then a standing intelligence arrangement binding five governments since 1946 has never been asked what it holds on the murder of an American president, and the reason is a word chosen in 1992. Either finding is worth having. Only the Committee can produce it.

I would be glad to provide the underlying document references, or to assist the Task Force staff in any way that is useful. I can be reached publicly at @keithadler on X.

Respectfully,
Keith Adler
@keithadler