40 YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION
2016 postings and publications
This page shows all EBBs, News, Books, and Unredacted postings.
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Briefing Book 576
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton
Washington, D.C., December 25, 2016 – On Christmas Day 25 years ago, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, stepped down and the hammer-and-sickle flags over the Kremlin were…
Briefing Book 573
Edited by Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya
For more information: nsarchiv@gwu.edu, 202.994.7000
Washington D.C., December 18, 2016 – Previously secret transcripts of the summit meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 to 1988, and then George H.W. Bush with Gorbachev from…
Briefing Book 575
Edited by William Burr
For more information contact
William Burr: 202/994-7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Ronald Reagan and Nuclear War: The SIOP Briefing and IVY LEAGUE 82*
Briefing Book 574
Edited by James E. David
For more information, contact:
James E. David, davidj@si.edu or
The National Security Archive 202/994-7000, nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., December 20, 2016 – Soviet missile and space programs were among the most frequent topics briefed to the president of the United States by U.S. intelligence during the…
Unredacted blog
Today, Colombians mark 25 years of impunity for members of the police implicated in the December 16, 1991, killing of 20 members of the Colombian Nasa-Paez indigenous group in the…
Book By Svetlana Savranskya and Thomas Blanton
“[T]his book offers the reader an exceptional chance to be ‘a fly on the wall’ at U.S.-Soviet summits ... This is exciting reading and a real textbook on the skill of statesmanship for new…
Unredacted blog
Release to One, Release to All – Law Enforcement Carve-out Citing Mosaic Theory a Slippery Slope The Department of Justice is seeking comments on the “Release to One, Release to All” policy prepared…
Briefing Book 572
Edited by Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh
For further information, contact:
Carlos Osorio: cosorio@gwu.edu
Peter Kornbluh:
peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington D.C., December 14, 2016 - Operation Condor, the trans-border, multinational effort by Southern Cone secret police services to track down and “liquidate” opponents of their regimes in…
Unredacted blog
The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) has confirmed the identification of one of the victims associated with the notorious “Death Squad Diary,” or Diario Militar, a Guatemalan…
Briefing Book 571
Edited by Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya
For further information, contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., December 12, 2016 – Newly declassified documents show that the risk of nuclear proliferation at the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 was even greater than publicly known at the…
Unredacted blog
Untrustworthy Elections A 2007 Ohio Secretary of State review to assess the security of electronic voting systems used in the state discovered that “all of the studied systems possess critical…
Unredacted blog
These comments will be presented to the Public Interest Declassification Board for its December 8 meeting and were initially published on the PIDB’s blog, Transforming Classification.…
Unredacted blog
This morning the Archive’s Executive Director, Tom Blanton, is testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its hearing on “Examining the Costs of Over-…
Briefing Book 570
Edited by William Burr and Avner Cohen
For more information contact
William Burr: 202/994-7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Anver Cohen: 831/647-6437 (office) and 202/489-6282 (cell)
Washington, D.C., December 8, 2016 - A CIA-sponsored panel of well-respected scientists concluded that a mysterious flash detected by a U.S. Vela satellite over the South Atlantic on the…
Briefing Book 569
Edited by Nate Jones
Washington, D.C., December 6, 2016 – On November 9, 1983, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a nuclear war against its nemesis, the Warsaw Pact, after NATO military commanders…
Briefing Book 568
Edited by Lauren Harper
For further information, contact: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., December 2, 2016 – 250 years ago today, two centuries before the United States enacted the Freedom of Information Act, the Swedish Parliament passed the Ordinance on Freedom of…
Unredacted blog
Chiquita Terrorist Funding A federal judge in Florida ruled that “victims of Colombian paramilitary death squads funded by Chiquita” have a right to have their case heard in the United States rather…
Briefing Book 567
Edited by Malcolm Byrne
For further information, contact: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., November 25, 2016 – Exactly thirty years ago, President Ronald Reagan announced to the nation – after weeks of denials – that members of his White House staff had engaged in a web…
Unredacted blog
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released just three lines of unredacted text in response to the National Security Archive’s FOIA request for information on a phone surveillance program the…
Unredacted blog
Transparency and Donald Trump In the nine days since Donald Trump won the presidential election reports have surfaced that he considered seeking top secret clearances for his three oldest children,…
Briefing Book 566
Edited by Corina Snitar
For further information, contact: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
The first sign of the long-suppressed dissatisfaction of the Hungarian people with a repressive and an economically inefficient regime appeared on October 6, 1956, at the ceremonial reburial of Laslo…
Unredacted blog
CIA Decennial Review – No New Categories Removed from Swath of Operational Files The CIA likely did not take the opportunity during its third decennial review to remove any categories of records from…
Unredacted blog
The National Security Archive, working with our partners at ProQuest, just published a new compilation of documents on the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the Kennedy and Johnson…
Unredacted blog
CIA Forced to Release Bay of Pigs History Agency Once Said Would “Confuse the Public” if Declassified “After more than twenty years, it appears that fear of exposing the Agency’s dirty linen, rather…
Briefing Book 565
Edited by
Roger J. Mattson, Avner Cohen, and William Burr, editors, Israeli Nuclear History Series
For more information contact
Roger Mattson: rdmattson@gmail.com
William Burr: 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?
Document collection and introduction by Roger J. Mattson, PhD
Unredacted blog
“Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War,” Nate Jones’s new book on how the United States “may have inadvertently placed our relations with the…
Book By Nate Jones
Briefing Book 564
Compiled and edited by Lauren Harper and Thomas Blanton
For further information, contact:
Thomas Blanton: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C. October 31, 2016 - The CIA today released the long-contested Volume V of its official history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which it had successfully concealed until…
Unredacted blog
508 Should Not Be Distorted to Undermine FOIA This week an expert panel comprised of representatives from the Access Board and the General Services Administration addressed the FOIA Advisory…
Unredacted blog
Archive FOIA Project Director and author of the new book, Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War, Nate Jones, recently presented the four key…
Unredacted blog
Good FOIA Fee Guidance from OIP The Department of Justice Office of Information Policy (OIP) has issued good FOIA fee guidance that clearly lays out for agencies the limitations the FOIA Improvement…
Unredacted blog
Recently the National Archives sent the National Security Archive a decision letter on a Freedom of Information Act request that the present author filed in 1994. It might not be the Archive’s…
Unredacted blog
On July 15, 1969, Honduran radio networks, using the country’s recent World Cup qualifier loss to El Salvador as pretext for violence, encouraged listeners “to grab machetes or other weapons and move…
Unredacted blog
It is past time for the State Department to release its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume on the 1953 Iran Coup. Malcolm Byrne – the National Security Archive’s Deputy Director and…
Briefing Book 563
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton
Research assistance from Tal Solovey and Nadezhda Smakhtina
Web design by Rinat Bikineyev
For further information, contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C. October 12, 2016 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical proposal in January 1986 to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2000 met with derision on the part of many U.S. officials…
Briefing Book 562
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
For further information, contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., October 7, 2016 -Thirty years ago, a Soviet nuclear submarine with about 30 nuclear warheads on board sank off U.S. shores north of Bermuda as Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan…
Unredacted blog
The CIA has changed its rules for access to classified historical CIA records three times since 2011. Two changes, from September 2011 and August 2016, concern 32 CFR Part 1909’s rules governing…
Briefing Book 202
Updated
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Yvette White
For further information, contact:
Peter Kornbluh: 202.374.7281 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., October 6, 2016 - On the 40th anniversary of the mid-air terrorist bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner over the Caribbean, the National Security Archive today called…
Briefing Book 561
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton
Research assistance by Tal Solovey and Nadezhda Smakhtina
Additional documentation provided by William Burr
Web design by Rinat Bikineyev
For further information, contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya: 202.994.7000 and nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., September 30, 2016 – The unilateral nuclear withdrawals announced by President George H.W. Bush 25 years ago this week drew an eager response from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev…
Unredacted blog
News
Edited by Lauren Harper and Tom Blanton
Design by Rinat Bikineyev
For more information, contact Lauren Harper, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
FreedomInfo.org, the National Security Archive’s sister site that is a one-stop portal for RTK developments around the world, has an extended list of this year’s RTK success stories here.
There are…
Briefing Book 560
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
For further information, contact:
Peter Kornbluh: 202-374-7281 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington D.C., September 23, 2016 – A CIA special intelligence assessment in 1987 concluded that Chilean General Augusto Pinochet ordered an “act of state terrorism” on the streets of Washington, D…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 559
Edited by William Burr
For more information contact:
William Burr at 202/994-7000 ornsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Washington D.C., September 14, 2016 - President Richard Nixon may never have even read the President’s Daily Briefs partially declassified and released by the CIA with great fanfare on August 24…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 558
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
For further information, contact:
Peter Kornbluh: 202-374-7281 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington D.C., September 9, 2016 – Forty-three years after the U.S.-supported military coup in Chile, the Central Intelligence Agency continues to withhold information on what it knew about…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 557
Edited by William Burr
For more information contact:
William Burr at 202/994-7000 ornsarchiv@gwu.edu.
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy toward Iceland, 1951-1960
Washington, D.C., August 15, 2016 – During the Cold War the United States never deployed nuclear weapons in Iceland but a recently…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 556
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Carlos Osorio, with research support fromAdeline Hite
For further information, contact:
Carlos Osorio: cosorio@gwu.edu
Peter Kornbluh: peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington, D.C., August 11, 2016 – In September 1980, the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires transmitted a detailed six-page cable, entitled “The Tactic of Disappearance,” to the State Department.…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 555
Edited by William Burr with Stav Geffner
For more information contact:
William Burr at 202/994-7000 ornsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Washington, D.C., July 22, 2016 - U.S. atomic tests in Bikini Atoll in July 1946 staged by a joint Army-Navy task force were the first atomic explosions since the bombings of Japan a year…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Book By John Prados
Briefing Book 554
Edited by Tom Blanton and Lauren Harper
For more information, call or email:
The National Security Archive, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington DC, July 1, 2016 - Fifty years ago on July 4, 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Freedom of Information Act while vacationing at his Texas ranch. But the event does not even…
Briefing Book 553
Edited by William Burr with Stav Geffner
For more information contact:
William Burr at 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll, July 1946*
Washington, D.C., July 1, 2016 - Seventy years ago this month a joint U.S Army-Navy task force staged two atomic weapons tests at Bikini atoll in the…
Unredacted blog
News 20160630
Edited by Tom Blanton, Nate Jones, and Lauren Harper For more information, contact Nate Jones, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
At 4:00 PM today President Barack Obama signed the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 (S. 337) into law. The bipartisan, bicameral bill – introduced by Senators John Cornyn, Chuck Grassley, and Patrick…
Briefing Book 552
Edited by Steve Everly
For more information, call or email:
Steve Everly, severly90@gmail.com
The National Security Archive, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington DC, June 23, 2016 – Recently discovered British documents posted today by the National Security Archive provide a new and revealing account of the CIA’s role in a top-secret plan to…
Unredacted blog
News 20160613
Edited by Lauren Harper and Tom Blanton; Design by Rinat Bikineyev; For more information, contact Lauren Harper, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington DC, June 13, 2016 – Today the National Security Archive celebrates the Freedom of Information Act’s upcoming 50th birthday by highlighting 50 of the year’s biggest news stories made…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 551
Edited by Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh
For more information, call or email: 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., May 27, 2016 - As a federal tribunal in Buenos Aires announced guilty verdicts in the historic prosecution of eighteen Argentine military officers for participating in the…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 550
Translated by Anna Melyakova, edited by Anna Melyakova and Svetlana Savranskaya
For more information, call or email: 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, May 25, 2016 – Today the National Security Archive is publishing – for the first time in English – the diary of Anatoly S. Chernyaev covering the year 1976, along with edits and…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 549
Edited by William Burr
For more information contact:
William Burr at 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Washington D.C., May 18, 2016 - Recently declassified State Department intelligence reports – posted today – illuminate a range of important questions about nuclear weapons in world…
Briefing Book 548
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Web production by Rinat Bikineyev
For more information, call or email: 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington D.C., May 12, 2016 – The legendary Moscow Helsinki Group celebrates its 40th anniversary today, marking four decades since the day in 1976 when dissident physicist Yuri…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 547
Avner Cohen and William Burr, editors
For more information contact:
Avner Cohen at 202-489-6282 (mobile), 831-647-6437 (office) or avnerc@miis.edu
William Burr at 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Washington, D.C., April 21, 2016 - President John F Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic…
News
For more information, contact Jeffrey Richelson, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., March 30, 2016 – The National Security Archive is pleased to announce the launch of its new Cyber Vault project web site.
The growing prominence of cyber…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 546
Edited by Carlos Osorio
For more information, contact:
Carlos Osorio: 301-442-7551 or cosorio@gwu.edu
Washington, March 23, 2016 – Reinforcing the Obama administration’s planned “comprehensive effort to declassify” historical records on Argentina’s dirty war, the National Security Archive today…
Briefing Book 545
Edited by Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh
For more information, contact:
Carlos Osorio: 301-442-7551 or cosorio@gwu.edu,
Peter Kornbluh: 202-374-7281 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington, March 18, 2016 – As President Obama prepares to go to Argentina next week on the 40th anniversary of the military coup, the National Security Archive hailed his decision to…
News , FOIA Audit
Alert compiled and written by Lauren Harper
Analysis and editing by Lauren Harper, Nate Jones, Malcolm Byrne, and Tom Blanton
Web publication by Rinat Bikineyev
For more information, contact Lauren Harper, 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of the Treasury's Comptroller, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are among a handful of agencies that have already admitted they will…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 544
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
For more information, contact: National Security Archive
202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., March 2, 2016 – Marking the 85th birthday of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org) today posted a…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 543
Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
For more information, contact John Prados:
202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic…
Briefing Book 0542
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
For more information, contact Peter Kornbluh:
202.994.7000 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com
Washington D.C., February 26, 2016 – With covert support from the CIA, James Donovan, who is the central figure in the Oscar-nominated movie, “Bridge of Spies,“ conducted the first secret…
Briefing Book 541
Edited by William Burr, Barbara Elias*, and Robert Wampler
For more information, contact National Security Archive: 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.
Washington, D.C., February 19, 2016 – For the first time, the U.S. government has officially declassified the fact that the United States stored nuclear weapons on Okinawa during the Cold War.…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 540
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Web programming by Rinat Bikineyev; series editing by Malcolm Byrne
For more information, contact: 202.994.7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., February 5, 2016 – The top leaders of the Soviet Union discussed the case of controversial CIA spy Adolf Tolkachev during the Politburo meeting on September 25, 1986, according…
News 20160126
Contact202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., January 26, 2016 - The National Security Archive mourns the passing of Gen. William Y. Smith, one of the Archive's original board members and longest supporters, on January 19, 2016…
Briefing Book 0539
Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson
For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, D.C., January 20, 2016 - U.S. military activities in cyberspace have been surprisingly widespread over the years, occurring mainly out of the public eye. Given the sensitivity of…