The following is from the introductory essay to the National Security Archive microfiche collection Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973-1990, published in 1990.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have led to major decisions by the Bush administration to conduct operations against terrorists wherever they may reside. Osama bin Laden, the apparent mastermind behind the September 11th incidents, is based in Afghanistan where U.S. military strikes are now underway. In the recent past, during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a significant role in inserting U.S. influence in Afghanistan by funding military operations designed to frustrate the Soviet invasion of that country.
Recently declassified documents from archives in the former Soviet Union and memoirs of senior Soviet military and political leaders present the complex and tragic story of the ten years of the Soviet military involvement in Afghanistan. Most observers agree that the last war of the Soviet Union created or aggravated the internal dynamics that eventually culminated in the dissolution of the country itself.
Washington D.C., April 16, 2026 - In the wake of the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy considered reconfiguring and even dismantling the intelligence agency, according to documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 65th anniversary of the paramilitary assault on Cuba.
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2025 - Newly published documents and photographs concerning the radiation and blast effects of the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide graphic details on how U.S. and British officials first assessed the deadly impact of the atomic weapons. These and other records published today are among the data and evidence that helped undermine the public claim made at the time by Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves that radiation sickness was “a pleasant way to die.”
Washington, D.C., May 22, 2025 - Early in the morning of October 7, 1963, the top leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gathered in the office of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) to discuss the brewing crisis in South Vietnam and America’s role in it. DCI John McCone warned his colleagues: “Under no circumstances” should “the Agency get into the subject of assassination or other highly sensitive matters with [U.S.
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., March 24, 2023 - On Tuesday, March 28, 2023, PBS’s “American Experience” program premieres “The Movement and the ‘Madman,’” a documentary that tells the story of how the intensity of the U.S. anti-Vietnam War movement forced President Richard Nixon to abandon plans to escalate the conflict in the fall of 1969 and instead implement his “madman” theory, approving a secret alert of U.S. nuclear forces around the world to project the idea that he was “crazy” and force adversaries to back down.
Washington, D.C., July 12, 2011 - What were the 11 words the government didn’t want you to see?
Washington, D.C., 24 August 2022 - As the U.S. contemplated a more aggressive drug war strategy in Colombia in the 1980s, top intelligence officials said success there would require “a bloody, expensive, and prolonged coercive effort” that, even then, was not likely to have an impact on the U.S. drug market, according to a declassified report published today by Colombia’s Truth Commission and the National Security Archive.