United States and Canada
May 24, 2000 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., May 24, 2000 – The release of Cold War-era Soviet and East European documents on war plans and nuclear planning raises questions about U.S. war planning during the same period. A central issue is the degree to which U.S. and NATO planning posited early or initial use of nuclear weapons like the 1964 Warsaw Pact plan from the Czech archives.
May 9, 2000 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., May 9, 2000 – Late last month, the U.S. Department of State released under the Freedom of Information Act an interagency study of recent U.S. humanitarian interventions titled, "Interagency Review of U.S. Government Civilian Humanitarian & Transition Programs." Under this turgid bureaucratic title lies an extraordinarily blunt, even scathing, "lessons learned" report from inside the U.S. government on the successes and failures of the most recent U.S.
Mar 23, 2000 | News
In May of 1978, the CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center issued this comprehensive analysis of the Pinochet regime’s responses to being identified as responsible for the most significant act of international terrorism ever committed in the United States—the September 21, 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C. This eight-page assessment, classified Secret/Sensitive, addressed the impact inside the regime if “proof of Pinochet’s complicity in the Letelier slaying” came to light. At the time, the FBI had identified Pinochet’s secret police, D
Mar 17, 2000 | News
On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named The National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 "for serving as an essential journalistic resource and for expanding access to previously classified documents" including, over the past year:
Jan 13, 2000 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., January 13, 2000 – The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the most secret (and secretive) members of the U.S. intelligence community. The predecessor of NSA, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), was established within the Department of Defense, under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on May 20, 1949.
May 13, 1999 | News
WASHINGTON, May 13, 1999 — Challenging seven years of the CIA's broken promises on declassification, the National Security Archive at George Washington University today filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the CIA to force the declassification of key documents on the agency's role in the European elections of 1948 and the coup in Iran in 1953.
Apr 14, 1999 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., April 14, 1999 – The use of overhead platforms to observe events on the earth can be traced to the French Revolution, when France organized a company of aerostiers, or balloonists, in April 1794. The United States employed balloons during the Civil War, although little intelligence of value was obtained. In January 1911, the San Diego waterfront became the first target of cameras carried aboard an airplane. Later that year the U.S. Army Signal Corps put aerial photography into the curriculum at its flight training school.
Aug 17, 1998 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C. – In August 1948, the U.S. Air Force created the Office of Atomic Energy-1 [AFOAT-1], giving it responsibility for managing the Atomic Energy Detection System [AEDS] discovering foreign atomic tests and other nuclear-weapons related activities. AFOAT/1 [later renamed the Air Force Technical Applications Center, or AFTAC] soon had an early triumph--the discovery of the first Soviet atomic test in 1949.
Mar 20, 1998 | Briefing Book
WASHINGTON, D.C. - 20 March 1998 -- Recently declassified U.S. government documents, now published by the National Security Archive disclose one of the Cold War's deepest secrets, that during the most dangerous phases of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the early 1960s top military commanders had presidentially-authorized instructions providing advance authority to use nuclear weapons under specified emergency conditions.
Jan 1, 1995 | Special Exhibit
Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of Rights or even the Constitution of the United States, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and Richard M. Nixon shaking hands on the occasion of Presley's visit to the White House.
The Meeting
The Documents
The Photos
The Meeting