Testimonials
“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
“This book reopens the vitally important argument over Ronald Reagan's presidency — particularly, as Malcolm Byrne asserts with his use of many newly available documents, that Reagan was not passive, but "the driving force" behind the unconstitutional and embarrassing scheme to ignore congressional legislation by secretly sending arms to an enemy (Iran) in order to give the proceeds to help preserve embattled Central American dictatorships. Valuable also is Byrne’s analysis of the effects of the Reagan administration's questionable use of presidential powers in shaping pivotal foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.”
- Walter LaFeber, Cornell University, author (2014)
“Outside of government, the National Security Archive at George Washington University maintains the world’s largest library of declassified material and has used it to build a detailed set of online volumes called The September 11th Sourcebooks. Drawing from documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and from individual scholarly research, the sourcebooks provide fascinating primary data and analysis on Afghanistan, U.S. foreign policy, bioterrorism, and U.S. policy against terrorism.”
- National Journal (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
“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)
“I have never read a book quite like this. Becoming Enemies is the latest product of the indispensable National Security Archive, the Washington non-profit that has given new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act. They not only use their skills to get major U.S. policy documents declassified, but they take those documents and find innovative ways to illuminate important historical episodes. This book is a living example.
“No one can emerge from this book without a sense of revelation. No matter how much you may know about these tumultuous years, even if you were personally involved or have delved into the existing academic literature, you will discover new facts, new interpretations, and new dimensions on virtually every page.”
- Gary Sick, Columbia University, review of Becoming Enemies (2012)
“Even historic documents like the KGB surveillance reports that you have found on me and the other dissidents have a political impact in today’s Russia, since there is a new crackdown against civil society, and since our president [Putin] once served the KGB, so we need more such documents both from the history and from the present.”
- Ludmila Alexeyeva, co-founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, to Archive Russia programs director Svetlana Savranskaya in Washington D.C. (2006)
“Subtly devastating .... The most revealing of the newest books [on Nixon] is Nixon’s Nuclear Specter by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball ... Burr and Kimball neatly recreate the Vietnam dilemma that Nixon and Kissinger confronted: they couldn’t win, but they couldn’t face losing. Nixon’s Nuclear Specter is a detailed and careful account of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fruitless efforts during 1969 to find an ‘honorable’ way out of Vietnam. As events that year unfolded, these authors demonstrate, honor had little to do with it .... Quite amazingly, Nixon and Kissinger, according to documents cited by Burr and Kimball, also ordered an unannounced, worldwide nuclear alert: an elaborate military exercise that put US strategic forces – missiles, missile-carrying submarines, and bombers – in a position of high readiness, as though the US was preparing to launch a nuclear attack. These details were particularly fascinating for me because, as a young correspondent in Vietnam for most of 1969 and 1970, I knew nothing about any of this secret maneuvering.”
- Robert G. Kaiser, The New York Review of Books (2016)
“Thank you for sending me a summary of the Musgrove Conference on U.S.-Soviet Relations. I found the analysis and comments very useful. As the project proceeds, I would welcome continuing assessments. Congratulations on such a successful conference.”
- Former President Jimmy Carter, letter to James Blight (1994)
“It is gratifying that my February 2006 memo has now been released. Thank you for your contribution to that.”
- Philip D. Zelikow, former State Department Counselor and National Security Council, e-mail to Malcolm Byrne (2012)
"‘This thing about eyeball-to-eyeball, it never was. That confrontation never took place,’ said Kornbluh, who is a Cuba analyst at the nongovernment National Security Archive, which has spent decades working to get missile crisis documents declassified.”
- Peter Orsi, Associated Press (2012)
“The National Security Archive is a wonderful resource in general—dogged, aggressive, fair, and with mad organizational skills.”
- Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
“This is the missing book – the primer – on the craft of intelligence. It is a highly informed briefing, set in historical perspective, by the best of the spy watchers.”
- William E. Burrows, on A Century of Spies (1995)
“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)
“[T]he world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents.”
- Los Angeles Times (2001)