40 YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION
2024 postings and publications
This page shows all EBBs, News, Books, and Unredacted postings.
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Briefing Book 881
By Malcolm Byrne with Autumn Kladder
Washington, D.C., December 29, 2024 – The late President Jimmy Carter, contrary to the views of some critics, was typically focused, knowledgeable, and strong-willed on matters of foreign policy,…
Briefing Book 880
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., December 23, 2024 – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making…
Briefing Book 879
Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire DorfmanSpecial thanks to Salvador Leyva and Laura Sánchez Ley
Washington, D.C., December 20, 2024—Half a century ago, Mexico was convulsed by state violence and social upheaval. The year 1974 witnessed some of the most emblematic human rights abuses to occur…
Briefing Book 878
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., December 18, 2024 – A now-legendary but long-secret 70-paragraph telegram written by the top political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in March 1994, E. Wayne Merry,…
Briefing Book 877
Edited by William Burr and Avner Cohen
Washington, D.C., December 17, 2024 - A recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to…
News
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., December 6, 2024 - Yesterday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that he has asked the United States to expedite the declassification of archival records on the 1985 Palace…
Briefing Book 876
Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., December 5, 2024 – Thirty years ago, the Budapest Memorandum ensured the destruction of dangerous post-Soviet nuclear stockpiles but was overshadowed at the time by Russian…
Briefing Book 875
Edited by: Claire Dorfman and Rachel SantarsieroSpecial thanks to Sajit Gandhi and Vivek Ramkumar
Washington, D.C., November 26, 2024 - U.S. officials had an “unusual” degree of concern about the “potential ecological and social impacts” of the Camisea natural gas pipeline in Peru, according to…
Briefing Book 874
Edited by Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya
Washington, D.C., November 21, 2024 - The National Security Archive filed suit in federal court today to contest the estimated 12-year backlog of Freedom of Information requests for presidential…
Briefing Book 873
By James David
Washington, D.C., November 20, 2024 – The failure of the U.S. intelligence community to adequately warn policymakers about the poor Soviet grain harvest of 1972—resulting in higher food prices in the…
News
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., November 1, 2024 - A recently declassified “after-action” report from a 2002 war game “triggered internal warnings that the U.S. military was vulnerable to low-tech warfare,”…
Briefing Book 872
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., October 30, 2024 - A 1983 study from scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory said that a full-scale nuclear war between the superpowers would “…
News
Washington, D.C., October 18, 2024 – National Security Archive director Tom Blanton reflects on 40 years of working “to dislodge and declassify U.S. government secrets” in the latest edition of “In…
Briefing Book 871
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents,…
News
Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman
Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive…
Briefing Book 870
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
Washington, D.C., September 9, 2024 – Fifty years ago, as the New York Times prepared to break a major exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile, the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger,…
News
By Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman
Mexico City, Mexico, August 19, 2024 - From 1965 to 1990, the Mexican State was responsible for “systematic and widespread” human rights abuses “against broad sectors of the population,” according to…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 869
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., August 8, 2024 – On the week of the 79th commemoration of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the National Security Archive today publishes a fascinating new…
Briefing Book 868
Edited by Rachel Santarsiero
Washington, D.C., August 1, 2024 – The most successful multilateral environmental treaty of all time drew Ronald Reagan’s support despite opposition from his more conservative advisers, because the…
Briefing Book 867
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., July 23, 2024 - A major report on the current state of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently released by the National Coalition for History (NCH) includes…
Briefing Book 866
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., July 16, 2024 - On 16 July 1945, 79 years ago, the United States, under the Manhattan Project, staged the first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexican desert. The first trial…
Briefing Book 865
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and William M. LeoGrande
Washington, D.C. July 12, 2024 - “Cuba,” as former Foreign Service officer, Wayne S. Smith, was fond of observing, “seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon has on…
Briefing Book 864
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., July 9, 2024 - Hailed at the time as an historic change “burying” a Cold War rivalry, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 was privately characterized as a “forced step” by Russian…
Special Exhibit
This Special Exhibit marking the NATO 75th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C., is a one-stop portal for thousands of declassified U.S. documents and numerous National Security Archive…
News
By Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., June 28, 2024 – This week, Washingtonian magazine published a glowing profile of the National Security Archive, its executive director Tom Blanton, and the Archive’s decades-…
Briefing Book 863
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., June 21, 2024 – On Wednesday, a Colombian court condemned former Colombian Army Gen. Iván Ramírez Quintero to 31 years in prison for the death of Irma Franco, a member of the M-19…
Briefing Book 862
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and John Dinges
Washington, D.C., June 18, 2024 - On June 18, 1974, the official registry of the Chilean military dictatorship published Decree 521 on the “creation of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA…
News
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., June 10, 2024 – Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization, the…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 861
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., May 31, 2024 - On 6 October 1977, President Jimmy Carter and top U.S. national security officials dialed into a secret “Missile Attack Conference” (MAC) to coordinate a response to…
Briefing Book 860
Translated and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya with assistance from Anna Melyakova
Washington D.C., May 25, 2024 - The National Security Archive today marks what would have been Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev’s 103rd birthday with the publication for the first time in…
Briefing Book 859
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya
Washington, D.C., April 29, 2024 - New evidence from Russian archival sources and published today by the National Security Archive details Fidel Castro’s extraordinary April-May 1963 trip to the USSR…
Briefing Book 858
Edited by Rachel Santarsiero
Washington, D.C., April 26, 2024 - High-level officials inside the Nixon administration debated climate change and the impacts of sea-level rise, extreme temperatures, and fossil-fuel consumption as…
Briefing Book 857
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., April 18, 2024 - After nine years of unwanted delays, the State Department’s Office of the Historian (OH) last month published a new Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)…
Briefing Book 856
Edited by Michael Evans
Washington, D.C., April 15, 2024 – A highly sensitive blacklist of allegedly corrupt Colombian officials assembled by the U.S. government and presented to Colombian President Alfonso López Michelsen…
Briefing Book 855
By Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton
Washington, D.C., April 4, 2024 - Top NATO and U.S. officials worked out cooperative agreements with senior Russian leaders including the defense minister of the newly independent Russian…
Briefing Book 854
By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, with Natalie Sherman
Washington, D.C., March 21, 2024 - Vladimir Putin’s first election as president of Russia 24 years ago was “reasonably free and fair,” according to a declassified U.S. Embassy message from Moscow,…
FOIA Audit 789
Edited by
Lauren Harper,
William Burr,
Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., March 15, 2024 - The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is requesting less funding for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 than it received in FY 2024, threatening to worsen an…
Unredacted blog
Briefing Book 853
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., February 29, 2024 - Seventy years ago, on 1 March 1954 (28 February in Washington), the U.S. government detonated a thermonuclear weapon, code-named “Shrimp,” on Bikini Atoll in the…
Briefing Book 852
Edited by William Burr
Washington, D.C., February 13, 2024 - State Department lawyers advised Henry Kissinger that transcriptions of his telephone conversations made when he served as national security adviser and…
Briefing Book 851
By Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton
Washington, D.C., January 25, 2024 - Declassified highest-level records from the Moscow summit 30 years ago this month detail U.S. President Bill Clinton’s strong personal support for Russian…