National Security Archive

Based on Wikipedia: National Security Archive

Somewhere in Washington, D.C., there's an organization that has spent forty years doing something the federal government really wishes it wouldn't: forcing the release of secrets. Not through leaks or hacks or whistleblowers, but through something far more mundane and far more powerful—paperwork. The National Security Archive has filed over 70,000 Freedom of Information Act requests since 1985, and in doing so, has pried loose more than 15 million pages of documents that various agencies would have preferred to keep locked away forever.

This is the largest repository of declassified U.S. government documents outside of the federal government itself.

The Most Famous Photo You've Never Thought About

Consider this: the most frequently requested photograph at the National Archives isn't of a president signing historic legislation, or a moment from a world-changing battle, or even the Constitution itself. It's a picture from December 21, 1970, showing Richard Nixon shaking hands with Elvis Presley.

The National Security Archive obtained the documents behind that meeting—the correspondence, the memos, the official records of the day the King of Rock and Roll showed up at the White House gates, unannounced, asking to be made a federal agent-at-large in the war on drugs. It's absurd and wonderful and exactly the kind of thing that makes government records fascinating rather than boring.

But the Archive's work extends far beyond celebrity curiosities. They've obtained the Central Intelligence Agency's "Family Jewels"—a chilling internal document that catalogues decades of the CIA's illegal activities, from assassination plots to domestic surveillance. They uncovered the National Security Agency's watch list of 1,600 Americans, which included civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., boxing champion Muhammad Ali, and sitting members of Congress like Frank Church and Howard Baker.

They secured the first official CIA confirmation that Area 51 exists. They obtained U.S. government plans for a "full nuclear response" in the event the President was attacked or disappeared. They got the FBI's transcripts of twenty-five interviews with Saddam Hussein after his capture in December 2003.

The pattern is clear: if there's a secret the American government would rather keep buried, sooner or later the National Security Archive is going to dig it up.

How a Bunch of Journalists Built an Institution

The Archive began in 1985, founded by Scott Armstrong. Armstrong was no amateur—he'd been a reporter at the Washington Post and had served on the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee, the body that investigated the scandal that brought down Nixon. He understood, perhaps better than most, how much the government hid and how little the public knew about what their leaders actually did.

Armstrong brought together journalists and historians with a simple but powerful idea: enrich research and public debate about national security policy by systematically using the legal tools available to extract information from the government. The Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 and strengthened after Watergate in 1974, gave citizens the right to request government records. The Archive would become the most prolific non-governmental user of that law in American history.

Since 1992, the organization has been led by Tom Blanton, who has continued Armstrong's mission of challenging national security secrecy. Under his leadership, the Archive has grown into something remarkable: part investigative journalism center, part open government advocate, part international affairs research institute, and part living library of secrets.

The Freedom of Information Act, Explained

To understand what the National Security Archive does, you need to understand the Freedom of Information Act—usually called FOIA, pronounced "FOY-uh." The law establishes a presumption that government records should be public. Any person can request any record from any federal agency, and the agency must provide it unless the record falls into one of nine specific exemptions.

Those exemptions cover things like classified national security information, personal privacy, law enforcement investigations, and trade secrets. But here's the crucial point: the burden is on the government to prove the exemption applies. The default is disclosure, not secrecy.

In practice, of course, agencies routinely deny requests, delay for years, and redact documents so heavily they become meaningless black rectangles with occasional prepositions visible. This is where the Archive's second tool comes into play: litigation.

The National Security Archive has participated in over fifty FOIA lawsuits against the federal government. When an agency wrongly withholds documents, the Archive sues. And they often win.

The Snowflake Memos and the Afghanistan Papers

One of the Archive's most consequential lawsuits forced the Pentagon to release what became known as the "snowflake" memos—fifteen thousand short notes written by Donald Rumsfeld during his years as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006. Rumsfeld called them snowflakes because they floated down constantly from his office to subordinates throughout the building, rapid-fire directives and questions and complaints.

These documents became essential evidence for "The Afghanistan Papers," a landmark series by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock that revealed how senior officials had privately harbored serious doubts about the war in Afghanistan while publicly claiming progress. The series won the George Polk Award, one of journalism's highest honors.

Whitlock himself later wrote: "The National Security Archive provides an irreplaceable public service by prying loose records from federal agencies that prefer to operate in the dark."

The Email Wars

Perhaps no area of the Archive's work has proven more consequential than its fight to preserve electronic records—especially White House emails.

In January 1989, with Ronald Reagan about to leave office and George H.W. Bush about to enter it, the Archive filed a lawsuit that would span three administrations. The case, which began as Armstrong v. Reagan, established a principle that seems obvious now but was genuinely contested then: email had to be treated as government records.

Before this lawsuit, the Reagan White House was preparing to delete all of its electronic communications as if they were casual phone calls rather than official correspondence. The Archive stopped them. The result: more than thirty million White House email messages from the 1980s and 1990s were preserved for history.

Then it happened again.

In 2007, the Archive discovered that the George W. Bush White House had deleted more than twenty-two million emails between March 2003 and October 2005—a period covering the invasion of Iraq and countless other consequential decisions. They sued again. The Obama administration ultimately settled the case and recovered the messages.

Across all of its email preservation litigation—fought in partnership with academic groups, public interest organizations, and volunteer law firms working without charge—the Archive has helped preserve over a billion electronic messages. That's billion with a B. The collection spans from the clunky IBM PROFS messages of Reagan's 1980s White House to the WhatsApp communications of the Trump administration in 2020.

Technology That Nixon Could Only Dream Of

During the Trump years, the Archive faced a new challenge: messaging applications that automatically delete their contents. This is fundamentally different from email, where messages persist unless someone deliberately erases them. Apps like Signal and WhatsApp can be configured to destroy messages seconds after they're read.

The Archive, together with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the Trump administration over this practice. They lost. A federal judge ruled that the President has substantial discretion in deciding what constitutes a permanent record.

But the decision came with a remarkable judicial aside. Circuit Judge David Tatel observed in his opinion that disappearing instant messages represented a technology "that Richard Nixon could only dream of."

Nixon, of course, was brought down partly by his own tape recordings—audio he made secretly and then couldn't bring himself to destroy. The irony was not lost on anyone familiar with the Archive's origins in post-Watergate concerns about government accountability.

The Missing Boxes

In December 2020, as Donald Trump prepared to leave office, the Archive joined with three other organizations—the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—to file a lawsuit seeking to prevent any destruction of documents during the transition.

Justice Department lawyers assured Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (now a Supreme Court Justice) that a litigation hold covered all White House records. After Joe Biden took office, the government informed the court that all presidential records had been secured, including WhatsApp messages from senior staff.

This turned out to be wrong.

The National Archives gradually realized that many boxes of Trump-era records were missing. Some contained correspondence between the former president and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Recovery efforts escalated from requests to demands to, eventually, an FBI raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The Archive's lawsuit hadn't prevented the problem, but it had helped establish the paper trail that eventually revealed it.

Grading the Government

Since 2002, the Archive has conducted annual FOIA audits—systematic evaluations of how well federal agencies comply with open government laws. These audits, modeled on California's Sunshine Survey, have revealed persistent failures across the government.

Some of their findings read like dark comedy. One audit found FOIA requests that had been pending for seventeen years. Another discovered that eight federal agencies had requests more than a decade old still sitting in their queues. Multiple audits have found agencies using outdated regulations that don't reflect current legal requirements.

The Archive gives out an annual "Rosemary Award" for worst open government performance. The name honors Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon's loyal secretary, who famously claimed to have accidentally erased eighteen and a half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape while performing what became known as the "Rose Mary Stretch"—a physically improbable maneuver that no one has ever successfully replicated.

The Money Behind the Mission

All of this costs money—about three million dollars a year. The Archive operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which means donations to it are tax-deductible and it cannot engage in political campaigning. It receives no government funding, which is both philosophically consistent (you probably shouldn't take money from the entity you're constantly suing) and practically important (government funding could come with strings that compromise independence).

The Archive's funders include major foundations: the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. It also generates revenue from its publications, particularly the Digital National Security Archive, a subscription database used by university libraries that contains over a million meticulously indexed documents across more than sixty collections.

The organization operates eight distinct programs, each with dedicated funding. These cover open government advocacy, international freedom of information work, human rights documentation, Latin American affairs (with specific projects on Mexico, Chile, and Cuba), nuclear weapons and intelligence, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Iran, and publications.

The Russia program has become particularly poignant. The Archive maintains a Russian-language page publishing primary sources from Soviet and Russian archives—materials that are, increasingly, no longer accessible in Moscow itself as Russia has re-closed archives that briefly opened after the Soviet collapse.

The Books and the Prizes

Staff and fellows at the National Security Archive have authored approximately one hundred books. These aren't obscure academic monographs read only by specialists. The winners include the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, the 1995 National Book Award, and the 1996 Lionel Gelber Prize (one of the most prestigious awards for books on international affairs).

The organization itself has collected an impressive array of honors. In 1998, it shared the George Foster Peabody Award for CNN's documentary series Cold War. In 1999, it won the George Polk Award—named for a CBS correspondent murdered while covering the Greek Civil War—for "facilitating thousands of searches for journalists and scholars."

In 2005, the Archive won an Emmy for outstanding achievement in news and documentary research. That same year, Forbes said the organization was "singlehandedly keeping bureaucrats' feet to the fire on the Freedom of Information Act."

The Cuban Missile Crisis Letters

Among the most historically significant documents the Archive has obtained are the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters exchanged during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962—thirteen days when the world came closer to nuclear war than at any other time before or since.

President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev communicated through both official diplomatic channels and secret back-channels during those terrifying days. Their correspondence reveals the confusion, the fear, and ultimately the mutual recognition that neither side could afford to let the crisis spiral beyond control.

The Archive has also obtained extensive documentation on the 1983 "Able Archer" war scare, a less famous but arguably equally dangerous moment. During a NATO military exercise that November, Soviet leaders became convinced—incorrectly, but not unreasonably given the heated rhetoric of the early Reagan years—that the exercise might be cover for an actual first strike. Soviet nuclear forces went on alert. Western intelligence only gradually realized how close things had come.

These documents matter because they reveal how nuclear crises actually unfold: through miscommunication, misperception, bureaucratic confusion, and sheer bad luck, as much as through deliberate decisions. Understanding past close calls is essential to preventing future ones.

The Flag-Draped Caskets

Not all of the Archive's victories involve high-level diplomatic correspondence. One FOIA lawsuit forced the release of photographs showing homecoming ceremonies for American casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—images of flag-draped caskets that the government had fought to keep from public view.

The Pentagon's argument was that releasing such images would violate the privacy of grieving families. But the policy also conveniently shielded the public from seeing the ongoing human cost of two long wars. The Archive argued that the public had a right to witness what its government was doing in its name.

The Archive won.

Why This Matters

The National Security Archive exists because democracies don't function well in the dark. Citizens cannot hold their government accountable for decisions they don't know about. Journalists cannot report on secrets that remain secret. Historians cannot learn from mistakes that are never acknowledged.

The default posture of government bureaucracies is toward secrecy. This isn't necessarily malicious—officials often have legitimate reasons to protect sensitive information, and the path of least resistance is usually to say no to disclosure. But left unchallenged, this tendency toward secrecy expands until it encompasses far more than genuine national security concerns.

The Archive provides a systematic, persistent, legally sophisticated challenge to that tendency. When agencies wrongly withhold information, someone sues them. When they ignore FOIA deadlines, someone publishes embarrassing audits. When they try to delete records, someone goes to court.

Over four decades, this relentless pressure has opened millions of pages to public scrutiny. Some of those pages revealed illegality. Some revealed incompetence. Some revealed the mundane reality behind dramatic events. Some just revealed that Elvis really did meet Nixon.

All of them belong to the public now.

Location and Access

The National Security Archive is physically located on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., though much of its work is accessible online. The Archive's website attracts more than two million visitors annually, who download over thirteen gigabytes of documents daily. More than eight hundred "Electronic Briefing Books"—curated collections of documents on specific topics—are available for free.

The organization also maintains a blog called "Unredacted" (a play on the practice of blacking out sensitive passages in released documents) where staff post about declassification news and new document releases.

For researchers who need deeper access, the Digital National Security Archive—the subscription database available through ProQuest—offers comprehensive searching across the full million-plus document collection. Recent additions include extensive collections on the Iraq War and the two-decade American involvement in Afghanistan.

The Archive is, in short, exactly what its founders envisioned: a permanent institutional challenge to government secrecy, using the government's own laws to force transparency, and making the results available to anyone who wants to understand what their government has actually done.

Forty years in, the work continues.