Latest Publications

The CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA

This collection explores the Central Intelligence Agency’s foray into behavioral and mind control experiments in the 1950s and 1960s. Most commonly known as Project MKULTRA, which refers to the research carried out by the CIA and affiliated institutions between 1953-1963, this codename came to be used as an umbrella term for an array of scientific, psychological, and military endeavors that began well before the official start of MKULTRA in 1953 and that continued in the years after the project officially ended. In this collection, researchers will find many documents relating to MKULTRA as well as its predecessors, Project BLUEBIRD and Project ARTICHOKE, and its various sister projects and successors, including MKNAOMI, MKDELTA and MKSEARCH. This collection also contains records relating to investigations into the CIA’s mind control program, both by the Agency itself and Congress, during the mid to late 1970s. The set has been carefully curated to highlight the clearest, most substantive documents available on MKULTRA and to focus on those records that provide insight into the scope and purpose of the Agency’s mind control program.

U.S.-Russia Relations: From the Fall of the Soviet Union to the Rise of Putin, 1991-2000

This curated collection of documents covers the formative period of U.S.-Russian relations from the birth of the new Russia in December 1991 through January 2001. It captures the highest peaks of cooperative relations under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton as well as the first notes of discord under Vladimir Putin. The product of years of archival research and hundreds of targeted Freedom of Information Act requests, this unparalleled collection features a full set of memoranda of conversations between Yeltsin, Putin, and Clinton; correspondence between the top leaders; hundreds of high-level memos from members of the Clinton administration; and analyses and assessments of the defense capabilities of the new Russia. Among other core topics, the set closely tracks negotiations on nuclear arms reductions, nonproliferation, and the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and their dismantlement in Russia. The collection also covers the Russian wars in Chechnya and Russian participation in peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia. A large number of documents deal with one of the most controversial issues in U.S.-Russian relations—the expansion of NATO to Eastern and Central Europe.

Upcoming Collection

U.S. Nuclear Nonproliferation 2, Part II: The Nixon-Ford Years, 1969-1976

This wide-ranging collection of declassified U.S. government records covers a key period in the history of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, from the Nixon presidency, when nonproliferation was considered a low priority, through the Ford years, when the issue rose to greater prominence.  Records featured in the collection illustrate how President Richard Nixon’s indifference toward nonproliferation issues shaped his position on the ratification of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and his accommodation of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.  The collection covers U.S. policy toward the creation of URENCO—the Western European gas centrifuge project—and the expansion of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards program.  The set also documents the impact of India’s peaceful nuclear explosion (1974)—which made nonproliferation a higher priority in U.S. policy—and the resulting creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Other records reveal persistent efforts by the U.S. to persuade Taiwan, Pakistan, and South Korea to abandon their nuclear weapons programs and encourage more governments to ratify the NPT.  The product of years of archival research and targeted declassification requests, this document set will be of great value to researchers exploring the U.S. government’s complex efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

For publication in 2025

CIA Covert Operations: The Truman Years, 1945-1953 

This essential collection focuses on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency and the challenges that policymakers and operatives faced in their attempts to establish a permanent peacetime agency that would engage in the arts of covert action, intelligence collection, and intelligence analysis in the service of national security. The set highlights memoranda from the highest levels of the secret government, including over 100 memos from Directors of Central Intelligence Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (1947–1950) and Walter Bedell Smith (1950–1953) to President Harry S. Truman. Hundreds of additional memos from the National Security Council’s covert action approval committees—the 10-2 Panel, the 10-5 Panel, and the Psychological Strategy Board—provide an insider's view of how America came to embrace the use of secret tools to deal with foreign crises. Within the CIA, hundreds of memos from the Office of Policy Coordination, which oversaw covert actions, and the General Counsel’s office, which was tasked with reviewing the legality of Agency actions, reveal never-before-seen details about the inner workings of the CIA. The collection also includes hundreds of documents on the CIA’s earliest projects employing peacetime psychological warfare, political action, and paramilitary actions overseas, including operations in France, Italy, East Germany, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Albania, Korea, and the Middle East.