The mission of the Intelligence Documentation Project is to expand the public’s understanding of one of the most sensitive areas of U.S. national security policy – the Intelligence Community (IC). Through extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the project has placed in the public domain thousands of previously classified records that describe and contextualize many facets of the IC’s history, organization, structure, mission and operations.
Over the years, the project has published more than a dozen major collections of declassified records. Many of these records were first declassified in response to FOIA requests by project directors Jeffrey Richelson and John Prados. Among the first were a series compiling every publicly available presidential decision document from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, featuring both policy instructions and study directives (along with many of the resulting reports and recommendations). Another series detailed the organization and management of the Intelligence Community as a whole and of the highly sensitive National Security Agency. CIA covert operations forms the focus of a third series. Other publications highlight more specific topics such as the President’s Daily Brief, weapons of mass destruction, the history of electronic surveillance, and U.S. spying on the Soviet Union and China.
The project has also produced many Electronic Briefing Books – more concise web postings that take on particularly topical subject areas. These include: the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA’s relationship with the intelligence community, the CIA and signals intelligence, the Soviet space program, U.S. tracking of foreign missile launches, the impact of 9/11, and U.S. torture policy. Revelations from these postings have made international headlines and broadened public discussion of a historically delicate component of U.S. foreign policy.