Washington, D.C., November 10, 2026 - Nearly 50 years ago, in the early years of the drug war, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota believed that the Colombian justice minister and other top officials were passing information on narcotics operations to traffickers, according to a “Secret” April 1977 diplomatic cable obtained by the National Security Archive through a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request.
Washington, D.C., May 27, 2026 - State Department intelligence analysts predicted widening political fissures in Europe and warned about the rise of populist and radical political parties in response to climate action by European governments, according to a Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) assessmemt from 2021.
Washington D.C. December 4, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, Senator Frank Church convened the first public congressional hearing ever held on CIA covert operations to overthrow a foreign government, focusing on the case of Chile. His Senate Select Committee was taking this “unusual step,” Church explained, “because the committee believes the American people must know and be able to judge what was undertaken by their government in Chile.
Washington D.C., November 20, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination.
Washington, D.C., October 30, 2025 – The CIA experienced “as many failures as successes” in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency’s former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. “[T]he results of everything told us that the money expended, the effort expended, the security risk involved, when you add everything up … it was probably not a high pay-off program.”
Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025 - Covert CIA surveillance of a Soviet agent under diplomatic cover in Mexico City in 1968 led to the acquisition of intelligence on the “entire clandestine leadership” of the Colombian Communist Party and the nascent FARC insurgent group, according to declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination papers released earlier this year.
Washington, D.C., June 30, 2025 – For over 20 years, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has viewed climate change as a serious national security threat that will create “new and compounded stresses on people and societies around the world,” according to one of the records featured in a repository of U.S. intelligence reports published online today by the National Security Archive.
Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine operations in South America’s largest country.
Washington, D.C., March 28, 2025 - Both John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were briefed by CIA officials on an Agency counterintelligence operation to break into the French Embassy in Washington for the “removal of documents,” according to formerly Top Secret FBI reports declassified in full for the first time as part of the release of the Kennedy assassination papers and published today by the National Security Archive.
Washington D.C., March 19, 2025 - On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”—intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources, White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in a Top Secret memorandum on “CIA Reorganization.” In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 123 “diplomats” were actually CIA undercover agents; in Chile, 11 of the 13 Embassy “political officers” were CIA undercover operatives.