Two years after the massive fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis in 1973, the director of the NPRC felt the need to destroy Top Secret Air Force records that had survived the fire 

Guess where the records originated from

The last time you and I discussed the July 12, 1973, National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) fire in St. Louis, we learned something curious. We learned that, nearly two years after the firetrucks had driven away and the firefighters had gone back to their homes, after all the soggy and charred debris had been cleaned up and disposed of, after surviving files had been reshelved for safekeeping and calm and normalcy had been restored, the NPRC director felt the need to burn up some more files.

The files in question had been described in a February 1975 memo as 2,470 cubic feet of Top Secret “Air Force Research and Development case files.” They’d been housed in the now-destroyed vault on the building’s sixth floor and moved to a third-floor vault soon after the fire. The reason NPRC Director Warren B. Griffin provided for their necessary destruction now, two years later, was as follows:

“It has since been determined that the integrity of individual series and cases has been completely destroyed and that the intellectual control over the records is completely lost.” 

His dire assessment confused me. I had no idea what he was talking about with regard to the “integrity of individual series and cases,” but how was intellectual control completely lost over files that had been safely secured in a third-floor vault since July 1973? 

I thought and I thought, and I came up with a slightly different, albeit more cynical, explanation: I suggested that Air Force officials were afraid of what was about to be revealed by the Church Committee as it was beginning its investigation into abuses by the CIA, FBI, and U.S. military in their intelligence activities. I reasoned that the Air Force decided to burn the evidence beforehand and Griffin was the foot soldier who was assigned the unscrupulous task.

But that was just a hypothesis.

In March 2024, I submitted two FOIA requests to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which now oversees the NPRC. (The General Services Administration had employed the National Archives staff at the time of the fire, but that ended in 1985.) One FOIA request was for the descriptive listings of the records that were to be incinerated, and one was for the Standard Form (SF)-115, which would authorize their destruction, both of which were alluded to in Griffin’s memo. I attached a copy of Griffin’s memo to help them in their search. I then went for a run.

On August 20, 2025, NARA sent me 21 pages. I just read them yesterday. (Don’t judge. I was slammed that week, and truth be told, when I saw their email come in, I pretty much assumed I was in for a letdown. I figured that I’d have to determine what my next move would be, so I let their email sit in my inbox. Imagine my surprise when I finally opened the email and found actual responsive records. Good on them!)

I’m only going to share the SF-115 with you today. I’ll need to spend some time with the other documents, and I also happen to think the SF-115 is a big deal.

First here’s what the records to be destroyed consisted of, per the form signed by Herbert G. Geiger, who headed up the Information Management and Resources Division for the National Archives at that time:

“Fire and water damaged research and development records consisting of contractual and procurement documents, drawings, technical progress summaries, technical reports, testing documents, scientist notebooks, correspondence, and various other materials which were accumulated and maintained primarily at the Air Force Systems Command (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). ca. 1951-63.”

So that’s new information, right? Those 2,470 cubic feet of R&D records that Warren Griffin wanted destroyed ASAP originated from Wright-Patterson AFB, a base that’s 50-some miles from Miami University, and was a home away from home to St. Clair Switzer, Ron Tammen’s psychology professor. But get a load of the years: 1951 to 1963! 

Of all the Air Force bases in all the world whose records had to be purposely incinerated for questionable reasons, did they have to choose our Air Force base for the years that we happen to be most concerned about? 

Before we move on to the SF-115’s next paragraph, let’s talk quantity. What does 2470 cubic feet of R&D records even look like? According to the National Archives one cubic foot of records equals approximately 2500 sheets of paper. Granted, it’s just an estimate, but by my calculations, Griffin had felt he’d lost intellectual control over roughly 6 million pages of Top Secret Air Force records. No wonder he was feeling a little panicky.

According to the SF-115, the reason that the Wright-Patterson AFB records needed to be immediately destroyed was stated similarly to Griffin’s memo, though Geiger didn’t want to stop there. He didn’t want people to forget about the fire and the water that the documents had withstood. Also, we learned of another vault that was housing a portion of the surviving records:

“Approximately 1530 cubic feet of the above records are presently located in the third floor vault in the Military Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. The remaining 940 cubic feet are in the vault in the Civilian Personnel Records Center, St. Louis. At the time of the fire at the St. Louis Center on July 12, 1973, these records were in the 6th floor vault. The 6^th floor was completely destroyed. The records are damaged by fire and water. The integrity of individual series and cases is completely destroyed. Intellectual control over these records is completely lost. In their present arrangement, they are not serviceable. Their value for archival research is limited, and does not justify the time and labor required to reconstruct cases and series.”

“Disposition: Destroy Immediately.”

There’s also a handwritten note at the bottom: “These records are scorched, burned, and water-damaged. Because of their brittle condition, they disinte-grate if handled,” followed by the initials pL 1//7/75. The word “easily” is added below the “disinte” part of disintegrate, as if to underscore the point and ward off any potentially diehard archivists who would argue against their destruction.

Which sounds believable, right? There was a big fire. LOADS of documents were destroyed by the heat and flames and water. Why not these documents too?

I guess I could see what Geiger and pL were saying, except for one minor detail: it’s not true.

Two years earlier, when staff of the NPRC were in clean-up versus cover-up mode, they were keeping meticulous records of how they were handling the classified records that had been in the sixth-floor vault. We learned in one July 1973 memo, for example, that the Top Secret Air Force records were stored in 17, five-drawer file cabinets. The word damp is used to indicate that those records were being handled along with the damp-but-salvageable records, though they’d put that word in quotation marks when it came to the Air Force records. It’s as if they were saying they’re in the damp-but-salvageable group, but they’re not really “damp” per se. In an earlier memo, we learned that those Top Secret file cabinets were described as “safes.” They also shared some great news: “Material in safes are in wrapped packages or wrapped boxes—all numbered. Our present impression (based on previous visit to vault area) is that this material is in fair to good shape.”

So let’s see. We now know that the Top Secret Air Force files had been protected by wrapping of some sort not to mention the surrounding metal of the file cabinet safe, which sounds even sturdier than a typical file cabinet. Also, the contents were assessed to be in “fair to good shape.” Yet, two years later, Geiger and pL had decided that the materials were in terrible condition—scorched, burned, and water-damaged, and, if given the chance, they’d disintegrate easily in their hands.

What’s more, in addition to Griffin’s worry about losing intellectual control over the files, both he and Geiger had claimed that “integrity of individual series and cases has been completely destroyed.” But how could that have been possible if all of those wrapped packages and boxes were numbered in their respective file cabinet drawers? It sounds to me as if the integrity of the individual series and cases was still very much intact.

But Warren and Herb bring up an interesting point worth delving into a little. What exactly did they mean by the word “cases”? In his memo, Warren had described the Air Force files as “Research and Development case files.” I’m no expert, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the word case has a human ring to it, doesn’t it? When I think of aeronautical research, I don’t think of the study of turbines and jet propulsion engines and who knows what else as “cases.” Those investigations are usually called studies or projects. But cases? Cases tend to involve human beings…people who are research subjects. We already know that Wright-Patt researchers conducted studies on pilots, such as for instrument design, oxygen thresholds, etc. I’m guessing any of those records from 1951 through 1963 would have been intentionally burned in 1975, unfortunately. But who knows, maybe there were other human studies that would’ve been burned at the same time—perhaps they were the reason behind the burning. I’m thinking of Projects ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA, for example?

I have one last piece of news to share. Remember the study I told you about called Project Rabbit on which I could find no information? One astute reader then straightened me out and said that it’s not Project Rabbit, it’s Project “Rabbit”—with the all-important quotation marks. Project “Rabbit” was a CIA and U.S. Air Force collaboration in which human intelligence or HUMINT agents known as “Rabbits” would parachute behind enemy lines during the Korean War for intelligence gathering and other clandestine purposes.

I’d written a FOIA request to find out more about a Project “Rabbit” conference that was held at Wright-Patterson AFB on December 23, 1952. 

I heard back from their representative last Monday. He told me that “A thorough search reasonably calculated for any segregable, releasable information in existence and relevant to this Freedom of Information Act request was conducted. During that analysis, no responsive records were discovered.”

Gosh, let’s see…a conference at Wright-Patterson AFB involving a Top Secret project in which human agents were trained to carry out intelligence activities in enemy territory in 1952? I can’t imagine what happened to those records.

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Comments? Questions? If so, I’d love to hear them.