The National Security Archive

Anyone who wants to see what politicians, diplomats, and intelligence agencies say and talk about behind closed doors, the web site, The National Security Archive should be book marked and referred to as much as possible.

Loaded with thousands of declassified documents from previous American administrations, the National Archive, allows visitors to research topics grouped into several categories, Latin America, Europe, The Middle East, and U.S. Intelligence.

Just a quick review of just some of the declassified material include a report by the CIA that the Soviets Planned Nuclear First Strike to Preempt West and another report, Robert F. Kennedy urged lifting the travel ban to Cuba in '63.

Most of the reports expose the ugly side of how governments operate and the Realpolitik approach to governing by even the most liberal administrations. One such example of this is the report that Bill Clinton signed an executive order, allowing the federal intelligence agencies to reclassify previously declassified material. This report, Declassification in Reverse, The U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program, and many others released by the National Security Archive, are used by newspapers and scholars.

Here is how the National Security Archive describes itself on its website.

An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, the Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive also serves as a repository of government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the United States. The Archive won the 1999 George Polk Award, one of U.S. journalism's most prestigious prizes, for--in the words of the citation--"piercing the self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in the search for the truth and informing us all."

The Archive obtains its materials through a variety of methods, including the Freedom of Information act, Mandatory Declassification Review, presidential paper collections, congressional records, and court testimony. Archive staff members systematically track U.S. government agencies and federal records repositories for documents that either have never been released before, or that help to shed light on the decision-making process of the U.S. government and provide the historical context underlying those decisions.