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2020 postings and publications
This page shows all EBBs, News, Books, and Unredacted postings.
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Briefing Book 710
Edited by Dr. Mary E. Curry
Washington D.C., November 12, 2021 (Updated February 3, 2022) – More than four decades after the murder of Guyanese scholar-political activist Dr. Walter Rodney on June 13, 1980, Guyana’s…
News
Edited by Ian Sotnek, Emily Kunasek and Cristin J. Monahan
The Cyber Vault has gathered witness testimony and transcripts for hearings held by the first session of the 116th Congress during 2019. These documents are reflective of the scope of the legislative…
News
Compiled and edited by Cristin J. Monahan and Emily Kunasek
Washington, D.C., December 21, 2020 – With the House and Senate’s passage this month of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (hereafter…
Unredacted blog
The National Security Archive, with our partners at the scholarly publisher ProQuest, is publishing a new Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) collection of declassified “Snowflakes” memos…
Briefing Book 735
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
Washington D.C., December 18, 2020 – Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan was born on November 25, 1895, in Armenia. From a modest background and early revolutionary activity in Armenia he joined the…
Briefing Book 734
By Michael Evans and Megan DeTura
Research Interns: Shane Sullivan and Olivia Mozdzierz
Washington, D.C., December 9, 2020 – Since 2007, the U.S. government has relied on a small coterie of Mexican officials to implement the Mérida Initiative, a wide-ranging U.S. aid program…
News
Edited by Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., Dec. 1, 2020 – The National Security Archive, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, and the Citizens for Responsibility…
News
Edited by Lauren Harper
Washington D.C., November 17, 2020 - The dust is settling on the 2020 presidential election and the Biden Transition Team - if the General Services Administration will comply - must quickly get…
Unredacted blog
By Megan DeTura As the thirty-first anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, their housemaid, and her daughter dawns, the search for justice has hit a roadblock. On…
Briefing Book 724
Based on the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book #482, August 13, 2014
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Editorial assistance by Anya Melyakova and Allison Brady
Special thanks to Sidney Orlov
Remembering Professor Yuri Orlov: Physicist, Human Rights Activist, Soviet Dissident
Wednesday, November 18, 2020, 10:00am to 12:00pm
Past Virtual Event
Briefing Book 733
Edited by William Burr and
Avner Cohen
Washington D.C., November 10, 2020 — After Harvard professor Henry Kissinger met with top Israeli officials in January 1965, he told U.S. diplomats at the Embassy in Tel Aviv of his near…
Briefing Book 732
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Savannah Bock
Washington D.C., November 3, 2020 - Several days after Salvador Allende’s history-changing November 3, 1970, inauguration, Richard Nixon convened his National Security Council for a formal meeting on…
Briefing Book 731
By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., November 2, 2020 – Declassified highest-level transcripts and diplomatic cables provide new granular detail on the rise to power of Russian President Vladimir Putin 20 years ago,…
Briefing Book 730
Edited by John Prados and
Luke A. Nichter
Washington, DC, November 1, 2020—President John F.
FOIA Audit
Edited by Lauren Harper and Claire Harvey
Update
Washington, D.C. October 27, 2020 – Nearly 60 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the upcoming presidential election. While transparency and accurate…
Briefing Book 729
Compiled and edited by
Cristin J. Monahan
Washington, D.C., October 26, 2020 - In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, the Cyber Vault has reviewed the respective 2020 platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties and how…
Briefing Book 728
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Savannah Bock
Washington D.C., October 22, 2020 - On October 23, 1970, one day after armed thugs intercepted and mortally wounded the Chilean army commander-in-chief, General Rene Schneider, as he drove to…
Briefing Book 727
Compiled and edited by Ian Sotnek
Washington, D.C., October 22, 2020 - The Department of Homeland Security describes critical infrastructure as “the physical and cyber systems and assets that are so vital to the United States that…
Briefing Book 726
Update of Briefing Book #41
(April 9, 2001)
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., October 16, 2020 - Over the years, aerial and naval encounters have threatened to destabilize U.S-China relations as the two powers contest each other's rights in international…
Briefing Book 725
Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
Washington, DC, October 9, 2020 – Fifty-three years ago, at 1:15 p.m. on October 9, 1967, Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in the hills of Bolivia after being…
Special Exhibit
A Joint Project of the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the National Security Archive
Unredacted blog
The other day I was working on a posting about John F. Kennedy’s decisions on the Vietnam war, and I had occasion to include one of the “President’s Daily Briefs” (PDBs), the super top secret…
Unredacted blog
National Security Archive Partners with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting on FOIA Litigation by Megan DeTura As Mexico marks the sixth anniversary of the tragic disappearance of 43…
Briefing Book 723
Edited by Lauren Harper
Washington, D.C., September 24, 2020 - When White House lawyers tried to block publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, a…
Briefing Book 722
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 16, 2020 – The NATO nuclear stockpile arrangements that have persisted since the Cold War were initially negotiated during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations,…
Briefing Book 721
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
Washington, D.C., September 15, 2020 – On September 15, 1970, during a twenty-minute meeting in the Oval Office between 3:25 pm and 3:45 pm, President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to foment a…
Briefing Book 713
Editado por Kate Doyle y Peter Kornbluh
Traducido por Celeste Cabral
Asistente de investigación: Megan DeTura
Becarios de investigación: Olivia Mozdzierz y Shane Sullivan
Version actualizada: 11 de septiembre de 2020
Briefing Book 713
Edited by Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh
El Salvador Project director: Kate Doyle
Research Assistant: Megan DeTura
Research interns: Olivia Mozdzierz, Shane Sullivan
Sep 11, 2020 Update
Washington D.C., September 11, 2020 – In a highly-anticipated, and long-awaited ruling, the National Court of Spain today convicted a retired Salvadoran military colonel for acts…
Briefing Book 720
By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., September 9, 2020 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev quickly decided that joint action with the United States was the most important course for the USSR in dealing with Saddam…
News
Compiled and edited by Cristin Monahan and Ian Sotnek
Washington D.C., September 8, 2020 – Now that the Republican and Democratic parties have officially confirmed President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr as their…
Briefing Book 719
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
Washington D.C., September 4, 2020 – “Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first nation in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly,” U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry…
Unredacted blog
Book Alleges Melania Trump Joins Growing List of Trump Administration Officials to Use Personal Email A new book by First Lady Melania Trump’s former adviser, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, alleges that…
Unredacted blog
A recent declassification decision by the Department of Defense illustrates the agency’s chronic inability to make wise decisions when reviewing classified historical records. In this decision,…
Briefing Book 718
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., August 31, 2020 – Under house arrest in a case linking him to a feared paramilitary bloc, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, perhaps the most important…
Unredacted blog
COUP 53: New Documentary on Overthrow of Iran’s Mosaddeq COUP 53, a new documentary that includes declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive to help re-examine the…
Briefing Book 717
Edited by Malcolm Byrne
Washington, D.C., August 17, 2020 – Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – took part in the 1953 kidnapping of the chief of police of Tehran, Iran, according to a recently recovered…
Unredacted blog
A recent declassification decision at the Department of Defense, in response to a mandatory declassification review appeal by the National Security Archive, demonstrates that over-classification and…
Briefing Book 716
Edited by William BurrOriginally posted - August 5, 2005First update - April 27, 2007Second update - August 4, 2015Third update - August 7, 2017
To mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the National Security Archive is updating and reposting one of its most popular e-books of the past 25…
Unredacted blog
Trump Administration Redacts Transition Meeting Notes Thanks to the 2015 Presidential Transitions Improvement Act amendments to the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, each presidential…
Unredacted blog
By Claire Harvey The National Security Archive, with our partners at the scholarly publisher ProQuest, is publishing a new collection of declassified President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the…
Briefing Book 715
Edited by Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh
Washington D.C., July 21, 2020 – Forty-four years after the Argentine military began disappearing thousands of citizens following the March 24, 1976, coup, human rights investigators have located one…
Briefing Book 714
Edited by William Burr
Recent debates over U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles in Western Europe make it worth looking at how those forces got there in the first place. In the 1950s, when fear of Soviet military power was…
News
Washington, D.C., July 21, 2020 - The National Security Archive is grievously saddened by the sudden passing of Bruce G. Blair on July 19, 2020. A co-founder of Global Zero and a research…
Unredacted blog
Judge Grants DOJ Extension in Mueller Report FOIA Case Federal Judge Reggie B. Walton is granting the Department of Justice a one-week extension to provide answers justifying redactions it made to…
Briefing Book 712
Edited by John Prados and Luke A. Nichter
Washington, DC, June 25, 2020 — Portions of a long-secret government blueprint for expansive surveillance of domestic protest movements during the Nixon presidency have just been released,…
News
by the National Security Archive
Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020 – As President Trump escalates attempts to quash publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, on the grounds that it…
Briefing Book 711
Edited by Robert A. Wampler, Ph.D.
Washington, D.C., June 18, 2020 – American and South Korean assessments of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il shifted during the course of negotiations in the 1990s over the North’s controversial…
Briefing Book 709
by William Burr and Malcolm Byrne
Washington, D.C., June 4, 2020 - To mark the 31st anniversary of the massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1989, the National Security Archive today reposts its special exhibit of…
Unredacted blog
OIP Report Says Fed Has Improved FOIA Processing There is a new leader at the helm of the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy – but scant evidence in its latest summary of annual…
Briefing Book 707
Compiled and edited by Thomas Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya
Washington, D.C., June 2, 2020 – The Washington/Camp David summit 30 years ago today brought Presidents George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev together for three days of intense discussions of the…
Briefing Book 706
Translated by Anna Melyakova, edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
Washington D.C., May 25, 2020 –The National Security Archive marks what would have been Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev’s 99th birthday today with the publication for the first time in English of his…
Briefing Book 705
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., May 22, 2020 – Seventy-five years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the start of the atomic era, questions about the value, danger, and morality of nuclear weapons…
News
Edited by Tom Blanton and Lauren Harper
Washington, D.C., May 18, 2020 – The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled against the National Security Archive’s lawsuit to restore the routine disclosure, under the Freedom of Information Act (…
Briefing Book 704
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, Sarah Dunn and Brooke Lennox
Top Secret Chernobyl:The Nuclear Disaster through the Eyes of the Soviet Politburo, KGB, and U.S. Intelligence
Volume 2
by Svetlana Savranskaya
Briefing Book 703
Edited by Lauren Harper
Washington, D.C., May 13, 2020 - The Office of Management and Budget is currently accepting comments on proposed revisions to its uniform FOIA Fee Guidelines, which date from 1987…
News
Edited by Michael Martelle
Washington D.C., May 11, 2020 – For the past few years the National Security Archive Cyber Vault project has been identifying and collecting records on USCYBERCOM through several methods including…
Unredacted blog
OMB’s Proposed FOIA Fee Guideline Revisions Don’t Go Far Enough The Office of Management and Budget is currently accepting comments on proposed revisions to its uniform FOIA Fee Guidelines,…
Briefing Book 702
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Matthew Evangelista.
Translations and editorial assistance by Sarah Dunn.
Washington D.C., April 15, 2020 - As the coronavirus puts at risk Russia’s celebration of Victory Day on May 9, 2020, with its huge military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, we are reminded of another…
News
by Lauren Harper and Wendy Valdes
The COVID-19 public health crisis is having an unprecedented impact on the American work force, including the federal government and its FOIA and MDR offices.
Some agencies are making submitting…
Briefing Book 701
Edited by William Burr
Washington D.C., April 10, 2020 - The NPT is appropriately acknowledged as a critical means of protecting global security against the danger of unchecked nuclear proliferation. But the…
Unredacted blog
Read his 1999 Interview with the Archive on Arming the Afghan Mujahideen Against Soviet Occupation By Claire Harvey Frank Anderson, the architect of the CIA’s Afghan Task Force in charge of arming…
Briefing Book 700
Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
Washington, DC, April 6, 2020 – Cold War concerns about another Communist Cuba in Latin America drove President John F. Kennedy to approve a covert CIA political campaign to rig national elections in…
Unredacted blog
Appeals Court Rules in Favor of Forever Secrets A federal appeals court in Georgia has ruled “that federal judges do not have the authority to unseal federal grand jury records, except for a limited…
Unredacted blog
Sunshine Week Round-Up GAO Report Released Today marks the end of this year’s Sunshine Week, the annual, week-long celebration of access to information. To mark the occasion, Senators Patrick…
Unredacted blog
By Claire Harvey The National Archives and Records Administration oldest pending FOIA request is about to turn 26 years old, according to NARA’s 2019 Fiscal Year Annual FOIA Report. To put this delay…
Briefing Book 699
Edited by William BurrUpdate for Briefing Book #371 originally posted on March 1, 2012
Washington D.C., March 16, 2020 - During the Cold War, false alarms of missile attacks were closely held matters although news of them inevitably leaked. Today the National Security Archive revisits…
Briefing Book 698
Edited by Carlos Osorio
Washington, D.C., March 10, 2020 - Franklin Allen “Tex” Harris , the former political officer who took charge of reporting on human rights at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina between 1977 and 1979…
News
Edited by Michael Martelle
A USCYBERCOM Fusion Cell assigned to evaluate the impact of the 2010 WikiLeaks release of classified Department of State cables determined that information in the cables revealed U.S. intelligence on…
Unredacted blog
Court Rejects Archive Lawsuit over Trump’s Abuse of Records Law U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson made clear that her ruling in the Archive’s lawsuit seeking to compel the White House to…
Briefing Book 697
Edited by Michael Martelle and Ian Sotnek
Washington D.C., February 19, 2020 - Reporting last week in The Washington Post and Germany’s ZDF public television channel mentioned a 1951 meeting between Crypto AG’s Boris Hagelin and…
News
Edited by Lauren Harper
Washington, D.C. February 11, 2020 - U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson made clear yesterday that her ruling in the Archive’s lawsuit seeking to compel the White House to preserve…
Briefing Book 696
Compiled and edited by Peter Kornbluh and Carlos Osorio
Washington D.C., February 11, 2020 - The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption…
Unredacted blog
CBP Now A “Security Agency” With Broad FOIA Carve-Outs The Trump administration has designated Customs and Border Protection (CBP) a “security agency”, a move that puts CBP in the same category as…
Briefing Book 695
Edited by James E. David
Washington, D.C., February 5, 2020 – In the eyes of U.S. intelligence and the military services, the greatest threat to American national security during the early Cold War was the emerging Soviet…
Unredacted blog
ICE Denied “Fugitive alien FOIA Requesters Access to the FOIA Process” Judge William J. Martinez of the US District Court for the District of Colorado has ruled that Immigration and Customs…
Briefing Book 694
Edited by William Burr
Washington D.C., January 22, 2020 - On 24 February 1972 Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird’s inbox included a Joint Chiefs of Staff message concerning the ongoing efforts by military planners to…
Briefing Book 693
Edited by Michael Martelle
Washington D.C., January 21, 2020 - Today the National Security Archive is releasing 6 USCYBERCOM documents obtained through FOIA which shed new light on the campaign to counter ISIS in cyberspace.…
Unredacted blog
National Security Archive’s New Declassified Documents Publication Offers Historical Context for Current Crisis As 2020 gets underway, tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of…
Unredacted blog
Unredacted Ukraine Emails Cast Doubt on Exemption 5 Invocation A recent Just Security article from Citizen and Responsibility for Ethics in Washington’s (CREW) Anne Weismann provides a powerful…
News
Washington D.C., January 13, 2020 - Ten years ago, the National Security Archive was deeply saddened to learn that our friend and former colleague, Lisa Mbele-Mbong, was killed in the collapse of the…