How to Read Declassified Documents
Top Secret means disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security. Secret means “serious damage.” Confidential means “damage.” Those are the exact words of Executive Order 13526, and the ladder between them is the first thing to read on any declassified page — before the text, before the redactions. The tags next to the marking tell you the rest: NOFORN means no foreign nationals were cleared to see it; ORCON means the originating agency controlled who else could. The redactions are labeled too. On a Freedom of Information Act release, b(1) is national security, b(3) is a statute protecting intelligence sources and methods, b(6) is personal privacy, and b(7) is law-enforcement records — so a page blanked with b(6) is hiding people, and a page blanked with b(1) is hiding what the government knew. The example in this briefing is a CIA research index card summarizing a March 24, 1964 letter from Richard Helms to Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin about three cables from Mexico City in November 1963. The events: 1963. The card: October 1975, during the congressional intelligence investigations. Approved for release: September 13, 2017 — 54 years later, under the deadline set by the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.
None of it proves anything. Proof is a courtroom standard — evidence measured against a specific law — and a declassified document isn’t that. It sheds light on a subject, it arrives without a word of official comment, and it hands you more questions than answers. That is the job: not a final answer, but a better next question. Four checks — the classification level and its tags, the redaction codes, the three dates, and the difference between disclosure and proof — will put you ahead of most of the people explaining these files on television. The FBI Vault, the CIA Reading Room, and the National Archives are open. Go look.
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information,” Section 1.2 (classification levels and damage standards), December 29, 2009.
Information Security Oversight Office (National Archives), Marking Classified National Security Information booklet; 32 CFR Part 2001 (dissemination control markings including NOFORN and ORCON).
Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b), exemptions (b)(1), (b)(3), (b)(6), and (b)(7).
Central Intelligence Agency, research index cards, document C06672724, JFK Assassination Records collection, approved for release September 13, 2017 (summarizing Helms to Rankin, March 24, 1964).
Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission Report), p. 299, 1964.
President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, 44 U.S.C. § 2107 note, and the October 26, 2017 release deadline.
FBI Vault (vault.fbi.gov); CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (cia.gov/readingroom); National Archives, JFK Assassination Records (archives.gov/research/jfk).
