35+ YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION
These unusual collections reflect special events, stimulating projects, issues of lasting significance – or just memorable historical moments – that have caught the Archive’s interest over the years.
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This Special Exhibit marking the NATO 75th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C., is a one-stop portal for thousands of declassified U.S. documents and numerous National Security Archive…
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The Cuban Missile Crisis actually lasted 59 days, not the fabled "13 days" so familiar from books and Hollywood. Soviet nuclear warheads arrived in Cuba on October 4, 1962, and did not leave until…
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Ayotzinapa Investigations is a special page dedicated to the work of the National Security Archive and others in documenting and seeking justice for the 43 disappeared students of the Ayotzinapa…
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Washington, D.C., March 2, 2021 – The first and only president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, is turning 90 years old today in Moscow. On the occasion of his…
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A Joint Project of the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the National Security Archive
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The Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair lit up the political skies over Washington for well over a year in the late 1980s. The biggest scandal since Watergate, it dominated the news starting in late…
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Over the years, we've seen countless cases of a government agency or official refusing to declassify a document on national security grounds, only to find out it's already been safely released…
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In November 1962, Cuba was preparing to become the first nuclear power in Latin America—at the time when the Kennedy administration thought that the Cuban Missile Crisis was long resolved and the…
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Starting in the early 1990s, the Carter-Brezhnev Project brought together not only policy veterans from the U.S. and USSR, but scholars from several institutions, with three main sponsors - the…
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What Were the 11 Missing Words? Enter the National Security Archive’s Reader Contest! Washington, DC, September 16, 2011 - For the first time ever, all three major editions of the Pentagon Papers are…
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Posted below is a side-by-side comparison of the Bush and Obama administration versions of the 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture.
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Washington D.C., June 17, 2004 - Noted modern artist Jenny Holzer, whose signature "xenon" film projectors have cast monumental light images of texts and truisms on the sides of buildings and…
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Press releases, selected documents, photographs, audio clips and other material from the historic conference in Havana.
Formerly secret documents from U.S., Cuban, Soviet and East Bloc archives.…
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Of all the requests made each year to the National Archives for reproductions of photographs and documents, one item has been requested more than any other. That item, more requested than the Bill of…