National Security Archive

The National Security Archive, at George Washington University in Washington, was "founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy." It describes itself as an investigative journalism center, a research institute, a library of declassified documents, a leading nonprofit user of the Freedom of Information Act, a public interest law firm and a publisher of former secrets.¹

Releases Forced or Published

After a two-year effort under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA declassified on February 22, 1998, the 1961 report of its inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, on the Bay of Pigs, published that year as Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by the archive's Peter Kornbluh.² The CIA released the Family Jewels, under Director Michael Hayden, on June 26, 2007, after a lawsuit by the archive.³ On February 13, 2001, the archive drafted a complaint against the Archivist of the United States and the Secretary of State over the telephone transcripts that Henry Kissinger had removed on leaving office and shipped to Nelson Rockefeller's estate; the government recovered copies in August 2001.⁴

Its electronic briefing books have published the planning record of the 1964 coup in Brazil, in No. 118 (2004), edited by Kornbluh, and No. 465 (2014), edited by Kornbluh and James G. Hershberg;⁵ the drafts showing that the Gerald Ford White House altered the Rockefeller Commission's report, including Dick Cheney's handwritten comments, in 2016;⁶ the 1978 confession of the DINA agent Michael Townley in 2023;⁷ documents on the assassination of General Carlos Prats in 2024;⁸ and in October 2025 the transcripts of Sidney Gottlieb's Top Secret testimony to the Church Committee in October 1975.⁹ In 2025 it added a note to its 2000 publication of State Department documents on the killing of Charles Horman stating that the theory of an American role was now in doubt.¹⁰