Oliver Stone’s letter to Marco Rubio follows:
Oliver Stone
Ixtlan Productions
Los Angeles, CA 90064
Dear Secretary of State Rubio:
I am writing you as the Acting Archivist at NARA. As you may recall, in 1991 I co-wrote and directed JFK. That film caused the passage of the JFK Records Collection Act, and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). This legislation certified that all the records about President Kennedy’s assassination should be released by 10/26/17.
I have testified about this twice before congress: once in 1992 and again in April of this year. I had to appear this second time because the JFK Records Act has been disobeyed. Almost eight years after the terminal date, and seven months after President Trump’s executive order, all of the JFK records have not been declassified. It is disturbing to see the intelligence agencies defying both congress and the president.
I have since learned about four issues you and the president should be informed of, since they negatively impact this reluctance to obey the will of congress. The ARRB issued over 27,000 binding and enforceable declassification orders called Final Determinations. By law, these should have been the last word on JFK Records. Not so. In fact, for all intents and purposes, they have not even been made public or searchable by NARA--even though they have been subject to repeated FOIA requests. It is not clear that either you, or Presidents Trump or Biden were aware of these strictures. Legally, they should have impacted any and all decisions on the remaining JFK closed records.
We now know that President Clinton signed onto a Memo of Understanding with the ARRB. And he did not override any of their Final Determinations. These are crucial precedents concerning the efficacy of those decisions. Yet, it troubles me that these binding orders have been ignored and buried for over 25 years. It is my information that only 2 percent of the tens of thousands have been released to the public; and that neither congress nor the White House appear to be cognizant of this crucial fact.
Secondly, there is evidence that the CIA tried to subvert the JFK Records Collection Act by submitting a large amount of material to NARA before the Board was appointed and started working. This is contained in a 1992 secret Agency memo to the Archives. This information is complemented by ARRB chair John Tunheim’s testimony before the Luna Committee Task Force on declassification in May. There he stated that “many of the recently released records were never shown to the ARRB.” If records were transferred before or after the four-year term of the Board, then they likely escaped proper review.
Third, according to all interested visitors to NARA, the state of the JFK Records Collection is simply and frankly a mess. There is no comprehensive, usable index or catalog. Even though the JFK Act specifies their function to maintain one for each record.
Fourth, at the closing of my film, I displayed a card which stated that the records of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)—the last formal inquiry into Kennedy’s murder-- were largely classified, 13 years after the committee shut down. Yet, to this day, some of those HSCA files are still partly closed. That secrecy also applied to another congressional body of work, the Church Committee, which preceded the HSCA. This, in spite of the fact that the JFK Act declares presidential postponement should only apply to executive branch records.
These conditions have been allowed to fester because there has been no proper supervision of the Board decisions since 1998. There should have been: by either congress or the archivist or both. Therefore I would hope that you would make a formal request to the full House Oversight Committee to fulfill the mandate of the JFK Records Act, which ordered full and complete release by October of 2017. There should be an explanation as to why these records are still closed and why the Final Determinations are not fully open to the public 62 years after President Kennedy’s death. Both representatives Anna Luna and Eric Burlison have called for accountability by the CIA in the wake of their release of George Joannides records. In my view we should not be limited to just that. The CIA and FBI should finally be called upon to release every last document in full.
I would be glad to inform you and/or the president more fully on these matters if you so desire.
Yours Sincerely,
