Intelligence and Espionage

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, 2016.

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 planning for the putsch, and what intelligence it shared with President Richard Nixon, according to redacted documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The documents, among the hundreds of President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) the CIA declassified last month, excise material that almost certainly has already been released to the public years ago.

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 activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

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 activity as a global security concern with tangible effects on everyday lives has given rise to the production of a vast amount of documentation by governments and private industry.  The Cyber Vault will serve as a centralized repository for key parts of the documentary record on this critical topic.

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 to the transcript published today in the Russian original and in English translation by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

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 many of their operations, this is understandable to a point, but as the number of reported and unreported attacks on military and civilian infrastructure increases – along with the stakes – there is a corresponding public interest in how the Pentagon (and the U.S. government in general) has responded in the past and is preparing for future eventualities.