Washington, D.C., July 9, 2026 - Sixty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson reluctantly signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, Americans enjoy a national transparency treasure in their ability to request, obtain, and analyze the records of their own government. Yet obtaining those records has rarely been slower, more difficult, or more uncertain than it is today.
Washington, D.C., March 19, 2026 - On August 10, 1973, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger placed a call to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to complain about U.S. officials who were participating in congressional hearings to investigate the secret bombing of Cambodia. As the Nixon administration’s cover up was unraveling, Kissinger was angry that “these @*%&* over there are acting as if it happened on the moon”; he demanded that Secretary Laird defend the original Nixon/Kissinger decision to launch clandestine attacks on Cambodia.
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., October 27, 2025 - Tonight, PBS stations across the country will begin airing a two-part biographic documentary on Henry Alfred Kissinger, depicting his life and the controversial legacy of his foreign policies. “According to the featured experts,” concludes a review of the film published in Foreignpolicy.com, “Kissinger learned the wrong lessons from his experiences with Nazi Germany.
Washington D.C. May 7, 2025 – On November 29, 2011, a Chilean judge stunned the world by indicting a retired U.S. Navy captain as an accomplice to the executions of two U.S. citizens in the days following the violent U.S.-backed military coup in Chile in September 1973. The judge, Jorge Zepeda, charged that the former head of the U.S.
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 posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up.
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 Secretary of State were his personal papers and not “subject to disclosure under the FOIA,” according to recently declassified records from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).