Latest Publications

CIA Covert Operations: The Truman Years, 1946-1953 

This essential collection focuses on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency and the challenges that policymakers and operatives faced in their attempts to establish a permanent peacetime agency that would engage in the arts of covert action, intelligence collection, and intelligence analysis in the service of national security. The set highlights memoranda from the highest levels of the secret government, including over 100 memos from Directors of Central Intelligence Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (1947–1950) and Walter Bedell Smith (1950–1953) to President Harry S. Truman. Hundreds of additional memos from the National Security Council’s covert action approval committees—the 10-2 Panel, the 10-5 Panel, and the Psychological Strategy Board—provide an insider's view of how America came to embrace the use of secret tools to deal with foreign crises. Within the CIA, hundreds of memos from the Office of Policy Coordination, which oversaw covert actions, and the General Counsel’s office, which was tasked with reviewing the legality of Agency actions, reveal never-before-seen details about the inner workings of the CIA. The collection also includes hundreds of documents on the CIA’s earliest projects employing peacetime psychological warfare, political action, and paramilitary actions overseas, including operations in France, Italy, East Germany, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Albania, Korea, and the Middle East.

U.S. Nuclear Nonproliferation 2, Part II: The Nixon-Ford Years, 1969-1977

This wide-ranging collection of declassified U.S. government records covers a key period in the history of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, from the Nixon presidency, when nonproliferation was considered a low priority, through the Ford years, when the issue rose to greater prominence.  Records featured in the collection illustrate how President Richard Nixon’s indifference toward nonproliferation issues shaped his position on the ratification of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and his accommodation of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.  The collection covers U.S. policy toward the creation of URENCO—the Western European gas centrifuge project—and the expansion of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards program.  The set also documents the impact of India’s peaceful nuclear explosion (1974)—which made nonproliferation a higher priority in U.S. policy—and the resulting creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Other records reveal persistent efforts by the U.S. to persuade Taiwan, Pakistan, and South Korea to abandon their nuclear weapons programs and encourage more governments to ratify the NPT.  The product of years of archival research and targeted declassification requests, this document set will be of great value to researchers exploring the U.S. government’s complex efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Upcoming Collections

Targeting Iraq, Part III: Sanctions, War, and Occupation, 1997-2004

In this collection, researchers will find documents concerning the decision-making that led to the 2003 U.S. war with Iraq and the aftermath of the invasion. Included is documentation from the 1990s on the Clinton administration’s policy of isolating Iraq, the George W. Bush administration’s targeting of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, its overthrow of Iraq’s  government, the ensuing occupation, and the titular restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in mid- 2004. The records show that the Clinton presidency’s punishing economic sanctions and  imposition of intrusive weapons inspections failed to achieve the intended goal of ousting the Hussein government through coup or capitulation, leading to the enactment of 1998’s Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change official U.S. policy. In 2001, the Bush administration took office determined to overthrow Iraq’s government and from the start developed military plans while simultaneously disseminating justifications, often spurious, for war. Records in the collection document the initial years of the U.S. occupation following the 2003 invasion, as the anticipated painless achievement of U.S. objectives was stymied by rising resistance to the American presence, the exposure of human rights violations (including prisoner abuse), disclosures regarding the environmental threat of toxic weaponry, and the failure to find evidence upholding the claimed links of Iraq to weapons of mass destruction and to the September 11 attacks on the United States, links that were asserted as justifications for war. This set ends with the titular re-establishment of Iraqi sovereignty as the U.S. continued policies pursuing political and military influence and economic advantage. The documents included here complement those in other collections concerned with U.S. policy toward Iraq, policy toward Iran, U.S. intelligence, and the Pentagon tenure of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Capitol Attack of January 6, 2021

In late January 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice removed an online database of case files behind the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The probe had led to the filing of federal charges against over 1,500 individuals, about a third of whom were charged with violent crimes. The removal of the records came shortly after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2025, when one of his first official acts was to pardon and commute the sentences of all of the January 6 defendants, including members of far-right militant groups and many of the accused or convicted whose cases were still pending resolution or sentencing.

This new collection recaptures the censored history of this pivotal moment, restoring access to the criminal court records on hundreds of January 6 defendants, including the sworn statements of those charged with assault, resisting, or interfering with law enforcement, and other case documents. The collection integrates and cross-references these deleted records with a carefully curated selection of evidence from other U.S. government sources on January 6, including the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, postmortem reports from other federal agencies, and records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Together, the thousands of government exhibits, deposition transcripts, emails, photographs, and other verified evidence featured in this new primary source collection from the National Security Archive and ProQuest provide an extraordinarily detailed picture of a chaotic and consequential day in U.S. history.