Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Intelligence Functions Relating to Presidential Protection at the Time of the Dallas Trip

A foundational element of presidential protection is identifying and mitigating potential threats before they materialize, a function the Secret Service carried out via its Protective Research Section (PRS) and requests for information from other federal and local law enforcement agencies. The Commission concluded that the Secret Service’s threat identification systems were critically deficient at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

Adequacy of preventive intelligence operations of the Secret Service

At the time of the assassination, the Secret Service’s Protective Research Section (PRS) was a small unit of 12 specialists and 3 clerks, processing a rapidly growing volume of threat-related information (over 32,000 items in 1963, up from 9,000 in 1943). PRS maintained 50,000 manually indexed general case files (with no automated data processing) covering individuals flagged as potential threats, with 400 people subject to periodic status reviews, 100 classified as serious risks, and 12–15 considered highly dangerous mobile risks. The Service also had arrangements to be notified of the release or escape of roughly 1,000 incarcerated high-risk individuals. For the Dallas trip, PRS only reviewed geographically indexed files (the 100 serious risk cases and 400 under regular review), as the general unindexed files were not organized by location and could not be used for trip-specific advance planning. PRS’s criteria for accepting and retaining threat information were overly broad, inconsistently documented, and its limited staffing and manual systems undermined its ability to effectively track and respond to emerging threats ahead of presidential travel.