Federal agents seized materials from the Rockville home of a retired National Archives department head Tuesday, shortly after a government report cited “significant weaknesses” in the agency’s security.
Special agents from the National Archives and Records Administration’s Office of Inspector General searched a home in Rockville, said Archives Inspector General Paul Brachfeld in a statement to TBD. He said it would be inappropriate for him to give further comment.
U.S. Marshals Service spokesman David Ablondi said his agency helped Archives investigators serve a search warrant at former longtime Archives employee Leslie Waffen’s home in the 500 block of Saddle Ridge Lane in Rockville. They did not have an arrest warrant for Waffen and he has not been charged with a crime, Ablondi said.
Ablondi said five marshals were at the house for about 45 minutes, along with Montgomery County police, to secure the area and help Archives agents.
A law enforcement official familiar with the details of the search said agents arrived with a moving truck and an extensive list of items they were seeking. Archives investigators located boxes of materials and “identified [the items] right away as theirs” in a basement room and, after securing the contents, removed the boxes from the house and loaded them onto the truck.
The official described Waffen as “surprised” and his wife as “upset,” but indicated they were compliant and sat on the couch while talking to agents.
Waffen had worked at the Archives for more than 40 years, most recently as the head of the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video unit, before retiring in June, according to Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. A 2004 New York Times article quoted Waffen in reference to the preservation work his unit was doing on the only known audio recording of the John F. Kennedy assassination. His department also had custody of the Zapruder film, the famous 8mm color home video of the assassination.
When reached at home, a woman who identified herself as Waffen’s wife declined to comment. Waffen’s lawyer, Michael Fayad, also declined to comment.
After news of the raid broke Thursday afternoon, archivist of the United States David Ferriero issued a memo to all employees Thursday afternoon in which he commended the work of agents in returning stolen property to the National Archives:
“While we cannot comment on the story since the matter is part of an ongoing investigation, I pledge to all of you that we will fully cooperate with the authorities on this matter. As I have stated on several occasions, the security of the holdings of the National Archives is my highest priority. I will not tolerate any violation of the law that protects both records and property that belongs to the US government and the American people.”
Tuesday’s search comes on the heels of two year-long government audits that identified major problems with the National Archives’ oversight, management, and information security. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog arm, conducted the audits at the behest of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) after news broke last year that several important historical documents, including the original patent for the Wright Brothers’ flying machine, had gone missing.
One of the reports, released last week, detailed “significant weaknesses pervad[ing]” the Archives’ security protocols.
Brachfeld says theft of historical documents generally is a major issue. The National Archives’ website publishes a list of some of its most important, missing items. They include several of President Harry S. Truman’s swords, a reading copy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech, the Hiroshima target map, and the patent for Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
“The threat is there. Incidences have transpired and they continue to transpire, and my job is to, A, investigate active cases and, B, educate the public,” Brachfeld said.
See here an article in the New York Times about Waffen’s efforts to restore the dictabelt recording.
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About a year from now, one of the most vexing mysteries in American history may finally be solved: Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?
Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have begun work on a digital scanning apparatus that they believe will be able to reproduce sound from the only known audio recording of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.
The recording was made through an open microphone on a police motorcycle during Kennedy’s motorcade into Dealey Plaza, where the president was shot to death. The sounds were captured onto a Dictaphone belt at police headquarters, but scientific analyses of them over decades proved anything but conclusive, fueling arguments about how many people were actually involved in killing the president.
The federal government’s official inquiry into the assassination, the Warren Commission, concluded in 1964 that Oswald was a lone gunman, firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building high above the plaza. But a House committee that investigated the shooting 15 years later concluded that four shots were fired, including three from the book depository and one from another location, giving rise to all manner of conspiracy theories.
Like old 78 r.p.m. records, the Dictaphone belt became worn and damaged through constant replay for analysis using a stylus. When it became property of the National Archives in 1990, the technical staff recommended that no further efforts be made to replicate its sounds through mechanical means.
That left preservationists with a daunting and historically important challenge: How could the sounds on the old plastic belt be captured for posterity, and if they could, would they provide unequivocal evidence of how many shots were fired?
Leslie C. Waffen, an archivist with the National Archives, said he believed not only that the sound could be captured but also that, using digital analysis to map the sounds, scientists could remove extraneous noise like static and distant voices to reveal gun shots.
”This is big,” said Mr. Waffen, whose unit has custody of the belt as well as the original 8-millimeter home movie by Abraham Zapruder, which showed the assassination in color but utter silence. ”That’s why we called the experts in. They came up with a recommendation to do this.”
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