Washington, D.C., September 30, 2025 - Eight months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has fundamentally distorted the federal information landscape as it continues to rewrite and erase resources about climate change, environmental justice, and climate diplomacy.
Washington, D.C., July 16, 2025 - Early in the morning of 16 July 1945, 80 years ago, the U.S. Manhattan Project staged the first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexican desert. It was the first trial of a plutonium implosion weapon—the same weapon type that devastated Nagasaki a few weeks later. The explosion on the ground produced radioactive fallout contaminating over 1,100 square miles of the state, with some debris spreading as far north as Canada.
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.
Washington, D.C., March 12, 2025 – The acting executive secretary of the U.S. Agency for International Development Monday night ordered the destruction of classified records and personnel files, according to the March 10 email reported by The Guardian, The New York Times, and other outlets.
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 of Justice case.
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 records held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
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,” according to an article in this week’s Washington Post written by National Security Archive fellow Nate Jones.
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 the Room,” a podcast produced by veteran CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.