Can we talk a little more about my trip to the National Archives (NARA) this past summer? As you may recall, I’d contacted NARA in June, telling them that I’d be visiting them on the 14th of August in hopes of reviewing the FBI missing person records from a FOIA request I’d submitted back in 2022. The records I’d be reviewing had been transferred from the FBI to NARA in 2017, and they covered missing person cases from 1947 through 1980. My original FOIA request had been to review the full list of records, which totaled 87, but, because I’d been informed that they were experiencing an eight-year backlog, I whittled that number down to 18. Put simply (and kind of morbidly), I wanted to see them before I died, so I scaled back my request.
In my June email, I said that, if they happened to process any more of the missing person records after they’d completed processing my 18, I’d like to see those too. They let me know that they had, and those records would also be set aside for me to review. I was a little taken aback by their response—Why would they keep processing the missing person records after they completed my request?, I wondered—but I took it as good news.
I arrived on August 14, and found that all the records except one—a total of 86—were ready for viewing, with the final 20 having been processed after our conversation in June. Interestingly, it had taken them two years to process my 18 records but only two months to process the last 20. What they handed me was far beyond the scope of my request and way ahead of schedule.
Don’t get me wrong—I was grateful, but I was growing a little suspicious.
“How often does a FOIA rep give a person more than what they’ve asked for?” I asked myself.
“This is NARA we’re talking about,” I answered. “NARA employs helpful people who believe in FOIA.”
I agreed and got to the task of reviewing the digitized records.
I noticed that two different FOIA numbers had been assigned to the missing person case files. Eighteen envelopes had my FOIA number on them, which was RD 67625. The rest of the envelopes were labeled RD 87542, a number that was a lot higher than my FOIA number—by nearly 20,000. I could be wrong about this, but if NARA assigns its FOIA numbers in consecutive order, which seems like a logical thing for them to do, RD 87542 had been submitted 19,917 submissions after mine.
I felt intimidated. Who was this RD 87542? I pictured him or her as some erudite-looking NARA regular with interests similar to my own but with vastly superior FOIA skills. Other questions I had were: how did RD 87542 come to be interested in the missing person records too, which were listed in one lonely line item among hundreds of line items on a spreadsheet posted online by Government Attic? When did they submit their request and how did they manage to obtain all (minus one) of the missing person records so quickly in comparison to my measly 18 records? And was this person a local, able to visit NARA whenever they felt like it, or did they agree to spend the $760 to have copies made, which was the quote NARA had given me in 2022 if I requested all the records?
But mostly, I wondered why NARA was working so hard to complete RD 87542’s FOIA request by August 14 when it was just me, and not the erudite regular, who was coming to town to review them?
When I got back home, I sent a follow-up email asking about the record that hadn’t been processed and also if I could have a copy of FOIA request number RD 87542. I knew they’d probably redact the person’s identifying information, but I didn’t care. I wanted to learn whatever I could about that request and its requester.
My contact from NARA asked: “Could you elaborate on what you mean when you ask if you can ‘obtain a copy of FOIA request RD87542’?”
I elaborated and was subsequently told that it wasn’t a FOIA request. Here are her exact words:
“RD 87542 was the number assigned to a proactive review project for Entry UD-15D 33 Classification 79 (Missing Persons) Headquarters Case Files. There was no FOIA request for these records.”
On the missing person envelopes, RD 87542 is explicitly written as a FOIA number, but I didn’t quibble. I was too busy becoming more suspicious. By that point, I was beginning to wonder if the FBI had stepped in, making it possible for me to see all those records in record time. I felt as though they wanted to steer me in a direction other than the one in which I’d been headed with regard to the numbers in the upper righthand corners of Ron’s FBI records. (The 10’s…I’m talking about Ron’s 10’s.) As I’ve discussed in prior posts, I think the FBI has been cherry-picking its records to mislead the public about the meaning of those numbers and they wanted me to see the missing person records in their entirety (minus one) so that I would arrive at the intended erroneous conclusion. Whereas I think the numbers are indicative of a high-level person who received one or more copies of a designated record, I believe they want to make it appear as if the numbers are based on some yawn-worthy alphabetized clerical system that no one should care about. Their personal preference is that everyone should just move on.
I thanked my contact and then reached out to NARA’s operational FOIA office—the office that handles FOIA requests that pertain to how NARA conducts its own business versus the archival records it manages for other agencies. I asked for the internal operational records pertaining to NARA’s “proactive review project” for the FBI’s missing person records.
Specifically, I said, “I’m interested in one or more records that were created when the project was initially assigned by someone in a supervisory role plus any additional related instructions/guidance provided by a supervisor regarding that proactive review project.”
What I really wanted to know was if NARA had initiated this proactive review project because they wanted me to have as many records as possible even after I’d whittled down my request, or did someone else tell them to do it? And if someone told them to do it, who was that person and why were they so interested in my request for missing person records?
My new request regarding the proactive review project was simple and straightforward. Find the person who sent the email or emails instructing NARA staffers to finish processing all of the missing person files, make copies of those emails, and send them to me. If the instructions had come from in-house, then everyone involved is likely in the same building. Any questions that someone might have about my request could be resolved with a walk down the hall. Also, the timeframe wasn’t that long ago so the emails should still be on everyone’s servers. And I wasn’t asking for every email on the subject. I was asking only for the emails that came from one or more supervisors giving instructions or guidance about this particular proactive review project. How hard could that be?
Incidentally, this was a request that someone in charge should have relished. They were being proactive and it was a nice opportunity for them to brag a little.
On September 16, I received an email from NARA telling me that my request fell under one of their “unusual circumstances” categories, which means that they needed more than the requisite 20 business days to respond.
Their reason for the additional time was:
“…we need to search for and collect potentially responsive records from an office separate from our office [emphasis added] which is processing the request,” they wrote.
They also said that they would need “an additional 10 working days from the date of this letter.”
After 12 working days had passed and I received no word, I wrote to them seeking a status update.
Here’s the status update I received today:
“Our estimated time to completion is 58 months from today. This is a conservative estimate, and cases may move more quickly through the queue. If you do not receive a response within this estimated completion time, please contact us again for a status update.”
Hilarious, right? The first person guesstimated 10 additional working days, which ended several days ago, but the second person said, whoops, our bad! See you in 4.83 years, sucker!
Apparently, my simple, straightforward FOIA request has made its way to the complex FOIA queue and I’m number 579 in line.
Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but my guess is that it has to do with the office that’s “separate” from NARA’s FOIA office. Gosh, what office could that possibly be?
I have my suspicions.
