Testimonials
“The Kissinger Transcripts provides a unique and fascinating look into Henry Kissinger’s personal conduct of diplomatic negotiations and diplomatic maneuver in his contacts with the leaders of China and the Soviet Union. These near-verbatim transcripts provide an unvarnished and candid record [and] the personalities and proclivities of Kissinger’s Chinese and Soviet partners come through fully. The Kissinger Transcripts is not only an important book, but a really good read.”
- Raymond L. Garthoff, on The Kissinger Transcripts (1999)
“Utilizing a host of new material, Zubok and Pleshakov offer many insights into the causes and early years of the Cold War. Their well-written account will interest not just historians, but any reader who seeks a better understanding of why the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in costly and dangerous rivalry for more than four decades.”
- Jack F. Matlock, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, on Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (1996)
“Both Doyle and Peccerelli are indefatigable defenders of human rights who have played a seminal role in the fight against impunity in Latin America,” said Sebastian Faber, Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA). A determined and creative researcher-activist, Doyle has spent twenty years working tirelessly with Latin American human rights organizations and truth commissions — in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Peru— to obtain the declassification of U.S. government archives in support of their investigations.”
- Announcement of ALBA-Puffin International Award for Human Rights Activism awarded to Kate Doyle (2012)
“Finally a well-researched and well-written account of our leaders’ dangerous nuclear brinksmanship across the high years of the Cold War. There’s much here that’s new and much that’s troubling – for today as well as yesterday.”
- Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (2015)
“Extraordinary primary documents on this and other SALT matters can be found in the Digital National Security Archive, “U.S. Nuclear History, 1969-1976: Weapons, Arms Control, and War Plans in an Age of Strategic Parity.”
- Michael Krepon, Arms Control Wonk (2016)
“George Washington University’s excellent National Security Archive has just published a fascinating but hair-raising new account, based on newly declassified documents, of the incident in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski, then Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, was awoken by one of those fabled 3am telephone calls and told that the Soviet Union had launched 250 nuclear missiles at the United States. America had a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch a counter-strike. Not a nice start to anyone’s day. It was, of course, a false alarm ... [But] if you want to give yourself a fright, read the archive’s new documents.”
- The Economist (2012)
“In September 2008, Kate Doyle, a senior analyst at the Washington-based National Security Archive, gave expert testimony in the trial on the nature of the 21 U.S. documents that were submitted to the court as evidence by the prosecution team. During her testimony she noted that the documents reflected the conclusions of the U.S. Embassy that Fujimori had engaged in a ‘covert strategy to aggressively fight against subversion through terror operations, disregarding human rights and legal norms.’”
- Marina Litvinsky, Inter Press Service News Agency (2009)
“Russia has reverted to authoritarian type, yet there are opportunities for human rights cases and accountability in the European context. We need from you any US documents you can retrieve on Chechnya and the enormous human cost of those wars. Such information is called ‘state secrets’ in Russia.”
- Sergei Kovalev, chairman of “Memorial” and former human rights ombudsman of the Russian Federation, to Archive director Tom Blanton in Moscow (2006)
“The Chronology is an extremely valuable work and will be immensely useful during the televised Congressional hearings on the Iran-Contra affair.”
- Peter Jennings, ABC World News Tonight (1987)
“When, where, why did the Cold War end? How did it manage to end peacefully? The answers are in this wonderful collection of crucial historical documents, penetrating essays by experts, plus the record of a revealing symposium including former Soviet and American officials. [Masterpieces of History is] an invaluable source book on the end of the 20th century.”
- William C. Taubman, 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2010)
“We don’t have words to thank you, our sister organization, and you personally [Carlos Osorio] for the effort, the dedication and over all the patience on this project which we thought would take so long to complete but is already in the final stages of finishing.”
- Rosa Palau, Deputy Director, “Archivo del Terror,” Supreme Court of Paraguay (2001)
“The National Security Archive's Nuclear Vault is an essential resource for scholars and policymakers interested in nuclear weapons and nonproliferation. There is no collection of documents and other information that is more extensive, better curated and accessible than the Nuclear Vault. Indeed, the Vault is a "single point of failure" -- our community could not replace a resource of such quality and depth.”
- Jeffrey Lewis, New America Foundation
“It’s time we used the ‘information age’ to our advantage in reclaiming our democracy from the secret-keepers.”
- Jesse Ventura, former Minnesota governor, recommending the National Security Archive in his book 63 Documents The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read (2011)
“The National Security Archive in Washington DC has long served as a fantastic resource for scholars of the Cold War. Its leaders and staff members, past and present ... have worked hard to collect documents at home and abroad and to make them available to scholars, often in English translation. The Archive has had to do so in the face of great reluctance, to put it mildly, by gatekeepers both American and foreign.”
- Mary Elise Sarotte, University of Southern California (2011)
“More detailed and more international examinations of these cases and new studies of others are needed. An organization that will galvanize future research is the National Security Archive, the invaluable Washington non-profit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the declassification of U.S. government documents. When I interned at the Archive as a college sophomore, I had no idea how much I would later benefit from their work.”
- Samantha Power, 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide