The George Washington University Gelman Library Suite 701 2130 H Street N W Washington D C 20037 Phone 202 994-7000 Fax 202 994-7005 www nsarchive org nsarchiv@gwu edu The National Security Archive in 2021 The following statistics provide a performance index of the Archive’s work • • • • • • • • • • Freedom of Information and declassification requests filed – 1 348 Freedom of Information and declassification appeals filed – 96 Pages of U S government documents released as the result of Archive requests – 362 062 including headline-making documents that shed light on CIA plans to assassinate Raul Castro Trump administration mishandling of alleged “sonic attacks” against U S diplomats evidence that both Brazil and Australia helped the CIA topple Chile’s Salvador Allende bringing Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973 the lesser-known history of the 1960 stockpile agreement that stationed nuclear weapons in the Netherlands how the U S government misled the American people about progress in Afghanistan over 20 years and the ransomware attacks that affected the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021 Pages of declassified documents delivered to publisher – 44 649 in two reference collections Donald Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes Part II The Pentagon and U S Foreign Policy 2004-2006 CIA Covert Operations Part IV The Eisenhower Years 1953-1961 FOIA Lawsuits 2 new 2 amicus briefs 2 continuing and 1 settled National Security Archive v Central Intelligence Agency filed October 27 2021 Case 1 21-cv-02857 seeking key documents on the “1983 Soviet ‘War Scare” that the Defense Intelligence Agency somehow lost The National Security Archive Fund Inc v United States Department of Defense filed December 23 2021 Case 1 21-cv03358 seeking to fix the broken appeals system at the Department of Defense The Archive joined an amicus with other historical organizations in support of Jill Lepore’s petition for release of grand jury records on the “Pentagon Papers” leak in 1971 Jill Lepore v United States filed April 12 2021 and a second amicus with the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression relating to the torture program at CIA “black sites” United States v Abu Zubaydah et al filed August 20 2021 A Notice of Voluntary Settlement filed in The National Security Archive et al v Donald J Trump et al filed January 28 2021 Civil Action No 20-3500-KBJ after achieving digital preservation of White House WhatsApp messages Archive cases continued in 2021 against the State Department for historic U S -Russia files and for records on the 43 disappeared students in Mexico Books published by Archive staff and fellows – 2 Between Containment and Rollback The United States and the Cold War in Germany by Christian F Ostermann Stanford University Press April 2021 Worlds Apart A Documentary History of U S -Iranian Relations 1978-2018 by Malcolm Byrne Kian Byrne Cambridge University Press August 2021 E-Books published by Archive staff and fellows – 48 bringing the Web site total to 783 Archive Web site usage – Sessions 1 526 056 Users 1 119 299 Page Views 2 635 027 Posts by Archive staff on Unredacted blog – 14 Readers of Unredacted blog — 143 546 page views Subscribers to the Archive’s e-mail alerts – 17 168 adding over 1 200 new subscribers Followers on the Archive Twitter feed – 21 500 Followers on the Archive Facebook page – 10 933 1 On January 13 Archive FOIA project staff published the first installment of its January 6 Sourcebook series on the Archive’s Web site “The Capitol Riot Documents You Should Read Part 1 ” marked the beginning of a systematic campaign to use the FOIA to open the documentary record of what the government knew and when and what the government did and didn’t do and when about the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6 2021 Archive staff would go on to draft more than 100 specific targeted FOIA requests to multiple federal agencies and publish two more installments of the series on March 3 and May 4 2021 The posted documents and collected digital materials serve as a permanent repository for the public historians and members of Congress on this crucial challenge to U S democracy On January 15 the Archive’s Nuclear Vault showcased recently declassified documents on the controversial issue of stationing of U S nuclear weapons in Europe – this time on the less well-known case of the Netherlands which first accepted atomic weapons shortly after signing a secret stockpile agreement in January 1960 That the U S has authorized deployments to numerous NATO states is one of those secrets everybody knows – Dutch former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers acknowledged the facts of the matter involving his own country in 2013 Nevertheless the arrangements are an official secret as is the number of weapons currently in the Netherlands and obtaining access to the historical record is a major challenge for historians The Dutch government confirmed its secretive stance when scholar Cees Wiebes went to court in 2017 to induce the declassification of documents on the origins of the deployments Wiebes lost his case but in the process raised serious questions about excessive secrecy which he addresses in this E-book The posting consists of records Wiebes obtained in the course of his research and shared with the Archive They trace the story of the U S deployments from the inception of the nuclear stockpile plan in the late 1950s to their restructuring in the mid-1970s While only a small piece of the larger history the documents help provide a clearer picture of a still-controversial matter The revelations of the documents were covered by multiple Dutch media outlets 2 On January 15 Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki pledged in a tweet that the new administration would resume publication of Secret Service logs of White House visitors an Obama transparency innovation that was canceled by Donald Trump After the Trump administration took the visitor logs down from the White House web site in April 2017 the Archive filed suit in federal court in New York Doyle v DHS filed 4 10 17 to restore the routine disclosure of these important records that help journalists and citizens to determine the influence of lobbyists and interest groups on a given presidential administration Archive staff hailed the Biden decision saying that it vindicated the argument at the core of Doyle v DHS but noted that the Presidential Records Act remained in dire need of revision updating and enforcement because it currently provides only extremely limited forms of external review for White House recordkeeping and the lack thereof On February 11 the Archive and its co-plaintiffs the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations SHAFR and the American Historical Association AHA as well as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington CREW settled the case with a notice of voluntary dismissal in The National Security Archive et al v Donald J Trump et al after achieving a formal litigation hold on White House records that were in danger of not being preserved The lawsuit was filed on December 1 2020 to prevent what Archive director Tom Blanton called a possible bonfire of records in the Rose Garden and argued that the Trump White House policy of only saving via screen shots the instant messages of government business – such as Jared Kushner’s negotiations with Saudi prince bin Salman – failed to capture the complete record that the Presidential Records Act PRA required The lawsuit also pointed to repeated media accounts of White House failures to preserve records including President Trump’s reported ripping up of documents in the Oval Office former aide Steve Bannon’s use of disappearing instant messages to communicate with campaign embeds at the agencies private email use by Ivanka Trump and other top officials and the routine use of encrypted WhatsApp messages by Kushner and others The legal proceedings achieved a litigation hold on records that lasted all the way through the transition to the Biden administration and Inauguration Day 2021 and led to Justice Department lawyers filing a notice informing the court of the successful preservation of WhatsApp messages by Kushner and others as well as confirmation from the Biden administration that instant messaging applications should not be used to conduct official business Records lawyer Anne Weismann and CREW’s senior counsel Nikhel Sus represented plaintiffs pro bono 3 On February 15 Archive Cyber Vault staff posted further documentation on the secretive Eligible Receiver 97 ER97 exercise – the seminal DOD exercise that heavily influenced the development of U S cyber operations ER97 involved a “no notice” multidimensional mock attack designed to expose holes in both civilian and Defense Department networks Its shocking results led to the formation of the U S Cyber Command yet little is known publicly about the details of the operation The findings discussed in the new documents brought up many more questions than answers surrounding agency roles – especially the role of the military – in protecting U S information operations and were even more relevant in the wake of the SolarWinds breach which showed that both government and private sector computer defenses remain dangerously vulnerable The posting was featured by Politico’s Weekly Cybersecurity The CyberWire and Hewlett’s Code Review On February 17 Archive fellow Nate Jones hailed the publication of a long-sought Defense Intelligence Agency document – once declared missing by DIA – that is key to understanding the scope and seriousness of the famous war scare of 1983 An almost completely unredacted copy of the January 1989 “End of Tour Report Addendum” by Lieutenant General Leonard H Perroots Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence US Air Forces Europe during the 1983 Able Archer exercise finally appeared in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States 1981–1988 Volume IV Soviet Union January 1983–March 1985 Jones and the Archive represented pro bono by the law firm of Beveridge Diamond took DIA to court in February 2019 after the agency declared it could not find the crucial record even when the Archive specifically identified the three boxes of retired DIA records where the letter likely existed Fortunately the State Department Historian’s Office proceeded on a separate track The Perroots letter provides extraordinary new detail on what actually happened in 1983 and asserts that a lack of intelligence of Soviet intentions and apprehensions during Able Archer 83 could have led to “a potentially disastrous situation ” The new information produced significant news coverage in such outlets as Slate Esquire The Daily Mail and The Washington Post On February 22 to promote open government during the Biden Administration’s symbolic first 100 days the Archive joined a coalition of good government groups in urging the administration to take specific meaningful steps to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act and reduce government secrecy In a letter spearheaded by the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University the coalition asked the president to among other things work with Congress to increase funding for agencies’ record-keeping activities direct agencies to proactively disclose specific categories of records likely to be of public interest something agencies should already be doing disclose key records of the previous administration and complete the National FOIA portal that was mandated by the 2016 FOIA amendments 4 Also in February Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh published two E-books on the mysterious health episodes known as the “Havana Syndrome” that would make headlines throughout the year The first posting on February 2 highlighted an 18-page CDC document titled “Cuba Unexplained Events Investigation—Final Report ” obtained by Kornbluh through the Freedom of Information Act According to the report a two-year “epidemiologic investigation” of the mysterious incidents suffered by U S personnel in Cuba could not determine the nature of the injuries nor the cause Kornbluh published a second revelatory report by the Accountability Review Board ARB on February 10 concluding that the Trump administration’s response to the episodes experienced by intelligence and diplomatic personnel in Havana in late 2016 and 2017 was plagued by mismanagement poor leadership lack of coordination and a failure to follow established procedures Kornbluh noted that the SECRET NOFORN ARB report “sheds considerable light on the ‘Havana Syndrome’ history ” but called on the Biden administration to release additional still-secret State Department CIA FBI and Pentagon records necessary to resolve the mystery Media outlets such as The Washington Post the Associated Press El Pais CNN and McClatchy all covered the growing mystery On March 12 the Archive marked Sunshine Week by publishing its 20th Freedom of Information Act FOIA Audit assessing government-wide FOIA performance The 2021 Audit highlighted agency abuse of “still interested” letters in which officials throw unanswered FOIA requests back at requesters threatening to close the requests if they fail to respond When the Defense Department – in 2020 – sent a “still interested ” letter in reply to a September 2006 Archive request the agency allowed only seven calendar days to respond Aside from being farcical this demand was in direct violation of long-standing Department of Justice Office of Information Policy OIP guidance that agencies provide requesters “a minimum” of 30 days to answer such correspondence The Audit found that the Defense Department isn’t alone many agencies continue to abuse “still interested” letters – of the 84 letters the Archive received between November 2019 and March 2021 17 provided fewer than 30 days to respond The Archive pointed out that the issues surrounding “still interested” letters are a microcosm of the broader issues plaguing FOIA inconsistent reporting agencies flouting OIP guidance with no meaningful repercussions and an unwillingness to adopt better technology 5 On March 18 the Archive published its milestone 750th documentary E-book – a major compilation of materials by project staff marking the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Allende massacre in Mexico The posting highlighted 41 key documents from an extraordinary seven-volume compendium of evidence from the Allende case acquired by invoking a section of Mexico’s access law requiring the government to divulge information pertaining to human rights violations The evidence in the compendium was gathered by prosecutors in Coahuila and included military intelligence reports indicating that current Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Sandoval’s former army brigade unit stationed near Allende Coahuila in 2011 failed to react to reports of widespread kidnappings and murders by the infamous Los Zetas cartel The files depict a town and a region that were almost completely beholden to Los Zetas—from the mayor’s office to top police commanders to ordinary police on the street Witness statements describe in graphic detail how Los Zetas undermined and criminalized the public security forces of Allende and how the latter routinely participated in kidnappings murders and other crimes on behalf of the group Publication of the report and subsequent reporting from Proceso “Masacre de Allende el silencio del general ” 19 June 2021 shone a light directly on Sandoval as well as on the broader problem of drug-related corruption in Mexico On March 23 the eve of the 45th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina Archive Southern Cone project director Carlos Osorio posted declassified documents revealing what the U S government knew and when it knew it in the weeks preceding the March 24 1976 overthrow of Isabel Peron’s government The documents provide evidence of multiple contacts between the coup plotters and U S officials and affirm U S government knowledge of the plotters their preparations for the coup and their potential plans for what State Department officials described as “military rule for an extended duration and of unprecedented severity ” They further show that the U S “discreetly” advised the military more than a month before the actual coup that Washington would recognize the new regime Osorio stated that while “there is no evidence that the U S instigated the coup the United States accepted and tacitly supported regime change because Washington shared the military’s position that the putsch was the only alternative to chaos in Argentina ” The military dictatorship that followed killed and disappeared more than 20 000 people Also on March 23 the Library of Congress selected the National Security Archive’s web site for inclusion on its January 6th Attack on the U S Capitol Web Archive “We consider your website to be an important part of this collection and the historical record ” the Library wrote This is the latest distinction of this kind for the organization Our overall web site and Sourcebooks of materials have previously been preserved under the categories of Public Policy Topics Researcher and Reference Services Iraq War 2003 Web Archive and September 11 Web Archive 6 On March 31 Archive staff shed light on Brazil’s involvement in the September 1973 military coup in Chile through an E-book by senior analyst Peter Kornbluh The posting supports what he called a “watershed publication” authored by Roberto Simon Brazil against Democracy the Dictatorship the Coup in Chile and the Cold War in South America detailing the clandestine role Brazil’s military regime played in bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power as well as the Brazilian contribution to Chile’s apparatus of repression during his 17-year dictatorship Multiple news media in Latin America covered the new revelations including BBC News Brasil El Observador La Jornada Ciper Chile and El Mercurio On April 12 the Archive joined an amicus brief with the American Historical Association American Society for Legal History Organization of American Historians and Society of American Archivists in support of historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore’s petition for release of grand jury records on the “Pentagon Papers” leak in 1971 Jill Lepore v United States Among other arguments the brief invoked a Supreme Court ruling that disclosure of grand jury records is “committed to the discretion of the trial judge” and contended that the appeals court ruling in Craig v United States properly applied would make public interest in disclosure a “primary consideration ” Also on April 12 the 60th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight Archive Russia Program research assistant Sarah Dunn posted records obtained from American and Russian archives that show that the two ideological rivals not only engaged in a space race but also cooperated for decades Gagarin’s flight which made him the first human in space prompted President John F Kennedy to advance an unusual proposal – that the two superpowers combine forces to cooperate in space In a posted congratulatory letter to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev Kennedy expressed the hope that “our nations can work together” in the “continuing quest for knowledge of outer space ” As ongoing joint activities involving the International Space Station demonstrate space has been one of the few spheres of collaboration that have survived the trials and tensions of the Cold War On April 16 coinciding with the retirement of Cuba’s President Raul Castro Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh posted declassified cables from 1960 revealing CIA plots to assassinate both Castro brothers The plot against Fidel was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion strategy The plot against Raul was revealed in newly declassified cables between CIA headquarters and the Havana station and debriefings the CIA handler later provided on a range of questionable activities ” The latter scheme involved CIA officers offering the pilot of a plane carrying Raul from Prague to Havana a $10 000 payment and “assurance that in event of his own death the U S would see that his two sons were given a college education ” The pilot was ultimately unable to arrange the “accident ” World-wide media coverage included El Pais Cuba Debate La Jornada Agence France Presse and NPR 7 On April 27 Archive senior fellow Christian Ostermann published his long-awaited book Between Containment and Rollback The United States and the Cold War in Germany Stanford University Press Based on new archival revelations from the U S Germany Russia and the East German archives the book won accolades from Vanderbilt’s Thomas Schwartz as “a model of outstanding historical research and argumentation” and “rare work of scholarship that truly captures the contingency of events and circumstances leading to the division of Germany ” Ostermann began the book while on staff at the Archive in the 1990s and went on to lead the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Also in April the Archive joined the more than 40 good government groups of the Accountability 2021 initiative to sign onto a series of letters advocating for recommendations to improve transparency in the Biden White House and update the Freedom of Information Act The letters requested that the Judiciary Committee hold an oversight hearing on agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and that the Justice Department issue an agency-wide Attorney General-issued memorandum on interpretation and application of the FOIA as well as conduct a litigation review of all pending FOIA litigation It further asked that the House of Representatives consider and pass the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act ACMRA establishing a central repository of all agency reports submitted to Congress On May 12 the Cyber Vault Fellow Cristin Monahan posted documents showing that ransomware attacks such as the Colonial Pipeline hack that disrupted energy supplies and caused fuel shortages for a week up and down the East Coast were predicted well beforehand The E-book includes February 2020 advisories from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA explicitly warning of the ransomware threat to pipeline operations and how to respond and prevent such attacks The documents give a glimpse of the threat that ransomware and malicious cyber actors even those without geopolitical aspirations have long posed to America’s critical infrastructure On May 21 The New York Times ran a major article featuring a major shoutout to the Archive’s longtime nuclear history expert Bill Burr The article highlighted a Daniel Ellsberg leak – a 1966 RAND study of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis The study disclosed that senior U S military officers had pressed to be allowed to launch atomic weapons against the People’s Republic of China in the event the crisis intensified Ellsberg’s initial caution over drawing attention to the leak meant according to the Times that “few noticed it One of the few who did was William Burr a senior analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive who mentioned it in a footnote in a March blog post about threats to use nuclear weapons in the Cold War ” The article went on to cite Burr’s work with FOIA and was just one of dozens of media cites the Archive generated during the year 8 On May 25 the Archive marked what would have been Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev’s 100th birthday by publishing the 15th installment of the diary of the former chief foreign policy aide to Gorbachev and leading architect of perestroika The new diary installment for 1981 was translated into English by the Archive’s Anna Melyakova and edited by Archive Russia programs director Svetlana Savranskaya and is the latest in the series published on the anniversary of Chernyaev’s birthday each year Author and journalist David Hoffman has described the diary as “one of the great internal records of the Gorbachev years a trove of irreplaceable observations about a turning point in history There is nothing else quite like it The 1981 installment provides remarkable insights into the Brezhnev era at a defining moment in world politics – the first year of the Reagan administration – and especially into one of the most critical issues of the year – whether or not the Soviet Union would invade Poland to suppress the Solidarity movement as it had in 1968 to smother the Prague Spring or in 1979 to put its favored Communist leader in charge of Afghanistan On May 28 the Archive and its publishing partner ProQuest added a 57th documentation set to the Digital National Security Archive DNSA series titled Donald Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes Part II The Pentagon and U S Foreign Policy 2004-2006 ” The collection complements Donald Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes Part I published in December 2020 covering the later years of Rumsfeld’s tenure as secretary of defense from 2004 to 2006 “Snowflakes” were the short memos Rumsfeld sent so frequently throughout the United States Government that they grew in the secretary’s own words “from mere flurries to a veritable blizzard ” According to Washington Post reporter Robin Wright one of the first to disclose the existence of snowflakes it was not uncommon for him to send up to 60 on a given day The 24 473-page set features 3 994 memos authored by the secretary and include responses when available Not surprisingly they provide unprecedented insights into consequential policy-making matters that continue to have an impact including decisions surrounding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the Global War on Terror and the controversies at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay throughout Central and South America On June 4 Archive Human Rights Evidence Project staff noted the recent arrests of 11 former military and security officials in Guatemala on charges of forced disappearances murder torture and other crimes Their cases recall the notorious “Death Squad Dossier Diario Militar ” which chronicled the kidnapping and disappearance of 183 people by government agents over a period from 1983-85 and which the Archive published more than two decades earlier in 1999 The arrests marked a major step after years of apparent inaction by Guatemalan authorities Archive staff have been working with court systems tribunals human rights groups journalists and others to provide vital documentary evidence and archival and analytical expertise to bear on cases 9 On June 10 Archive Mexico project staff added new documentary contributions to the effort to clarify the events surrounding the June 1971 Corpus Christi massacre in which a government-backed paramilitary force carried out deadly attacks against student demonstrators To coincide with the publication of the Mexican government ministry SEGOB ’s “A 50 Años del Halconazo 10 de junio de 1971 ” – a 50-year retrospective on the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre featuring several compelling declassified documents resulting from Archive FOIA efforts – Mexico project staff member Megan DeTura posted a number of previously unpublished records showing that the U S Embassy was concerned that American-trained Mexican security officials were linked to the “Halcones” paramilitary group responsible for the killings and revealing U S perceptions of the slow judicial progress in Mexico On July 16 the Nuclear Vault the Archive’s most prolific web publisher of declassified historical records posted another in its series of Electronic Briefing Books on the history and current relevance of the U S nuclear weapons program The posting focused on the United States’ longeststanding nuclear partnership – its “special relationship” with the United Kingdom – disclosing fascinating insights into the multifaceted policy and political considerations that go into the nuclear weapons calculations on both sides In this case project director Bill Burr found previously unexplored records describing British motivations for wanting advanced submarinelaunched ballistic missiles from the U S maintaining their status as a nuclear power concerns about U S reliability and staying ahead of the French and the demands Presidents Nixon and Carter made in return supporting American interests within the European Community and granting the U S military wider access to the key Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia On August 19 after the fall of Kabul on August 15 Archive staff teamed up to publish a selection of 20 documents showing that the U S government under four presidents misled the American people for nearly two decades about progress in Afghanistan while hiding the inconvenient facts about ongoing failures inside confidential channels The documents include highest-level “Snowflake” memos written by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the George W Bush administration critical cables written by U S ambassadors back to Washington under both Bush43 and Barack Obama the deeply flawed Pentagon strategy document behind Obama’s “surge” in 2009 and multiple “lessons learned” findings by 10 the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction SIGAR – lessons that were never learned The primary sources contradict Pentagon optimism over the decades and show that the Bush nation-building the Obama surge and the Trump deal all failed More lessons learned came as George-Polk-Award-winning Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock credited the Archive for suing the Defense Department under FOIA to obtain Rumsfeld's Snowflakes and allowing Whitlock to sift through the entire 50 000-page avalanche for his new book The Afghanistan Papers A Secret History of the War Simon Schuster 2021 On August 20 the Archive filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on a case involving the question of state secrets The case was the high-profile United States v Abu Zubaydah and the specific issue the Archive addressed related to the CIA’s refusal to acknowledged that Abu Zubaydah a Guantanamo detainee had been held at a black site in Poland Joining the brief were the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington The document argued that contrary to the government’s assertion that deposing two ex-CIA contractors would “reveal” the existence of the black site in Poland and Abu Zubaydah's detention there “these facts have all been publicly documented and widely reported for years Therefore they are not “secrets ” On August 26 the Iran-U S Relations Project published its sixth book Worlds Apart A Documentary History of U S -Iranian Relations 19782018 through Cambridge University Press Consisting of over 60 declassified American and Iranian records the volume takes readers through the 40-year conflict between the U S and the Islamic Republic Designed for professionals and students alike it features chapter essays and detailed “headnotes” for each document which include transcripts of phone conversations with the doomed Shah an NSC “Black Room” report on anti-Khomeini covert options annotated in Jimmy Carter’s hand recorded transcripts of secret bilateral negotiations military and intelligence analyses prescient policy memos by William Burns currently Biden’s CIA director internal Iranian correspondence to Khomeini by senior advisers Haleh Esfandiari called it a “fascinating collection” and “strikingly apt” while former American hostage John Limbert wrote “Thanks to the authors for giving us the raw material of history free of biases and personal agendas ” On September 10 Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh published never-before-seen Australian Intelligence Service documents revealing Australia’s little-known role in antiAllende covert operations leading up to the 1973 military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile At the behest of the CIA the Australian Secret Intelligence Service ASIS established a “station” in Santiago in 1971 and conducted clandestine spy operations to directly support U S intervention in Chile The documents shed further light on the multinational effort to destabilize the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende – the first Socialist leader democratically elected in Latin America Numerous media outlets covered the posting including CIPERChile El Pais La Tercera and The Guardian 11 On September 16 Archive Human Rights Evidence Project staffers Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh were featured in the HDIPLO discussion and publication network’s essay forum “The Argentina Declassification Project A Model of “Declassification Diplomacy” to Advance Human Rights— and History ” Osorio and Kornbluh initiated the idea with the Internet’s leading diplomatic historians’ forum and spearheaded it through to publication The posting amounted to a systematic debriefing of the key players in the three-year U S government-wide Argentine Declassification Project ADP effort to identify and provide documentation related to human rights abuses committed under Argentina’s dictatorship to the government of Argentina Osorio was specially singled out for his critical partnership with project lead John Powers Associate Director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration who praised Osorio for his expertise in assisting declassifiers providing context and supplying previously declassified documents as examples to help persuade agencies to reassess initial project declassification decisions On October 4 in conjunction with a historic $12-million judgment against a former Colombian paramilitary leader handed down the week before in U S federal court in Miami Archive senior analyst Michael Evans posted declassified State Department and CIA reports obtained by the Archive that “acknowledge the long-standing relationship between Colombian state security forces and the paramilitaries ” The records constituted key evidence in the case They show how leading paramilitary figures from the Bloque Central Bolivar and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia AUC benefitted from a cooperative relationship with Colombian security forces The judgement and the documentary evidence were covered in multiple media outlets including El Espectador El Colombiano Semana El Pais and El Tiempo On October 27 the Archive filed suit against the CIA seeking the remaining classified “1983 Soviet ‘War Scare” files of Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots The Archive is represented pro bono by the law firm of Beveridge Diamond whose attorneys John S Guttmann and Hilary T Jacobs previously spearheaded the Archive’s suit against the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2019 The case is 1 21-cv-02857 National Security Archive v Central Intelligence Agency 12 On November 24 Archive staff published their 3rd in a series of E-books on NATO expansion showing that Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in U S decisions at the highest levels The latest installment featured documents on the “Budapest Blow Up” on December 5 1994 when Russian President Boris Yeltsin accused in front of Clinton and other heads of state gathered for a summit of the CSCE a “domineering” U S of “trying to split the continent again” through NATO expansion The posting includes a series of revelatory “Bill-Boris” letters in the summer and fall of 1994 and the previously secret memcon of the presidents’ one-on-one at the Washington summit in September 1994 which revealed that Clinton kept assuring Yeltsin any NATO enlargement would be slow with no surprises building a Europe that was inclusive not exclusive and in “partnership” with Russia The Archive acquired many of the documents from a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that opened the files of Strobe Talbott – from when he was ambassador at large for the former Soviet republics during the Clinton administration and then elevated to Deputy Secretary of State These records have already changed the scholarly and policy narrative on Russian grievances about NATO expansion Former U S ambassador to Moscow John Beyrle commented that reading Archive documents had changed his mind and convinced him that the West had in fact provided assurances to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev against potential NATO expansion On December 1 the Archive and its publishing partner ProQuest added a 58th documentation set to the Digital National Security Archive DNSA series titled CIA Covert Operations IV The Eisenhower Years 19531962 – adding 1 824 documents to its growing collections on covert operations within the DNSA series The new set details CIA clandestine missions throughout the Eisenhower presidency a period of almost frenetic activity including the joint CIA-MI6 1953 coup in Iran the 1954 overthrow of the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala and operations against Cuba at the start of the 1960s The documents also cover covert operations during the Korean War and in Albania Tibet and the Dominican Republic All of the document collections in the CIA series have been curated by award-winning intelligence authority John Prados On December 21 Archive staff marked the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union by posting a selection of key documents that show that holding the Union together and backing Gorbachev were the core U S policy through 1991 motivated by fear of another bloody disintegration similar to Yugoslavia The collection includes never-before-translated transcripts of the USSR’s State Council meetings in the fall of 1991 obtained by Archive staff from official repositories in Moscow Those records illuminate Gorbachev’s struggle to preserve the Union against the independentminded leaders of the various Soviet republics 13 On December 23 the Archive filed suit against the Department of Defense The National Security Archive Fund Inc v United States Department of Defense filed December 23 2021 Case 1 21-cv-03358 to fix its broken FOIA appeals system that is part of a pattern and practice of extreme delay resulting in a large and growing backlog of unprocessed appeals The Archive has identified more than 50 individual appeals crafted by Archive staff relating to U S nuclear weapons policy dating back to the 1950s These appeals included specific examples of related materials that were formally declassified exposing a pattern of unjustified withholding by the Department Additionally approximately half of the records sought are more than fifty years old and subject to presumptive automatic declassification The documents targeted in the lawsuit cover a number of turning points in the evolution of nuclear weapons policy such as the launch-on-warning force posture and the Single Integrated Operational Plan SIOP FUNDERS AND SUPPORTERS 2021 The National Security Archive is grateful towards the following organizations and law firms whose philanthropic support and pro bono legal services assisted the Archive’s work during 2021 Carnegie Corporation of New York Sally and Dick Roberts Coyote Foundation Democracy Fund Inc Ford Foundation William and Flora Hewlett Foundation James and Kinsella Family Fund John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Stewart R Mott Foundation New-Land Foundation Open Society Foundations Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust Warsh-Mott Legacy of the C S Fund Wellspring Philanthropic Fund Baker McKenzie Ballard Spahr LLP Beveridge Diamond PC Davis Wright Tremaine LLP DLA Piper Ryan Griffin James Hoffman P C Peter Karanjia Melissa Knight Knight First Amendment Institute Scott Nelson Public Citizen Litigation Group Skadden Arps Slate Meagher Flom LLP David Sobel Anne Weismann Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic And thank you to the many individuals who have donated to the work of the National Security Archive Special thanks to Peter Grabosky Jenny Holzer and David Rosenberg 14