Testimonials
“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)
“Masterpieces of History ... provides a fascinating array of sources from the late 1980s and early 1990, largely from Russian-language originals. Experts who have seen these documents already at conferences or the archive itself, as I did in the course of writing my book 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, already know how valuable they are.”
- Mary Elise Sarotte, University of Southern California
“[A] stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait.”
- The New York Times, review of White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy (1995)
“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)
“I am especially grateful for the work of the National Security Archive ... [It] is a national treasure.”
- Eric Schlosser, author
“Using freedom of information law and extracting meaningful details from the yield can be an imposing, frustrating task. But since 1985, the non-profit National Security Archive has been a FOILer’s best friend, facilitating thousands of searches for journalists and scholars. The archive, funded by foundations and income from its own publications, has become a one-stop shopping center for declassifying and retrieving important documents, suing to preserve such government data as e-mail messages, pressing for appropriate reclassification of files, and sponsoring research that has unearthed major revelations .... We are pleased to present this special 1999 George Polk Award to the National Security Archive ... for piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth and informing us all.”
- George Polk Award citation (2000)
“The innovative approach of critical oral history yields penetrating insights into how policy-makers and officials understood events at the time and in hindsight.”
- Nigel J. Ashton, London School of Economics
“I congratulate you for your great contribution, documented, meticulously prepared, passionate and very useful to sort the most relevant documentary evidence proving the crime of conspiracy called Operation Condor.”
- Jamie Nuguer, lawyer and father of a disappeared child
“Among the world’s document buffs – a small but tenacious tribe of journalists, researchers and historians – the archive is legendary for its prolific and skillful practice of the art of the FOIA request. ‘They craft the best FOIA requests around,’ says [Daniel] Metcalfe, the archive’s former adversary [at the Justice Department], who is now a law professor at American University. ‘If anybody does it better, I haven’t seen it.’”
- Peter Carlson, The Washington Post, (2008)
“[T]he world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents.”
- Los Angeles Times (2001)
“A remarkable book about a remarkable scandal that shook American politics more than a quarter century ago. Byrne's riveting account is not only good history and an exciting tale of espionage and White House intrigue; it is a warning about the excesses of secrecy and partisanship in American foreign policy. It offers a rewarding look backward with lessons for looking forward.”
- Bruce Riedel, former intelligence officer and author (2014)
“Carlos Osorio keeps records in his office that many people would kill to have. They are intelligence documents that reveal kidnappings, assassinations, tortures, and massacres of the recent past. … If Osorio has these it is because he works at the National Security Archive, an organization that investigates international issues drawing on confidential documents freed from the government of the United States. ...In ten years of work he has found that one really can never get used to uncovering the face of infamy.”
- El Comercio (Peru), (2005)
“A nice trove of documents was declassified and made public yesterday by the invaluable National Security Archive of George Washington University.”
- Michael Tomasky, in The Daily Beast (2012)
“The ‘nuclear vault’ is the informal name given to a division of the privately funded National Security [Archive], now housed in the library of George Washington University on H Street. The [Archive], founded two decades ago, has devoted itself to getting millions of pages of top secret, classified national security documents declassified, primarily through the Freedom of Information Act. The nuclear vault, the repository for an astonishing compilation of confidential declassified discussions about the bomb, has been presided over for two decades by Dr. William Burr, another Yoda of FOIA, using that legislative tool like a light-saber to cut through the fog of secrecy that surrounds nuclear weapons and nuclear war strategy.”
- Ron Rosenbaum, author (2011)
“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)