National Security Archive

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Security Archive holds the distinction of being the largest repository of declassified U.S. government documents outside the federal government itself. It sits on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., operating not as a branch of any agency but as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with no government funding whatsoever. In four decades of operation, it has driven the declassification of more than 15 million pages of government documents, filing over 70,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to do it.

  The records it has unearthed range from a photograph of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, to CIA documents cataloguing decades of illegal activities, to transcripts of FBI interviews with Saddam Hussein. How did a small nonprofit, built by journalists and historians in 1985, become the institution that forced the government to preserve over a billion White House emails? And what does it mean that such an organization has to exist at all?

• 2. Founded to Fight Secrecy

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  Scott Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter who had also worked on the Senate Watergate Committee, assembled the group of journalists and historians who founded the National Security Archive in 1985. The stated purpose was to check what Armstrong and his colleagues saw as rising government secrecy. Tom Blanton took over as director in 1992 and has led the organization ever since.

  The Archive's founding gave institutional form to a frustration that individual reporters and scholars had long felt: that government secrecy made it nearly impossible to hold power accountable in any sustained way. By pooling resources and specializing in Freedom of Information requests, the Archive could pursue records that a single journalist could never have obtained alone. The George Foster Peabody Award, which the Archive shared in 1998 for CNN's Cold War series, came as early recognition that its work had consequences far beyond filing paperwork.

• 3. Documents That Changed the Record

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  On the 21st of December 1970, President Richard Nixon met with Elvis Presley. The photograph taken that day became the most requested still image at the U.S. National Archives, and the documents behind that meeting are among the many the Archive has pried loose from government files. Far weightier are the CIA's "Family Jewels" records, a collection that documents decades of the agency's own illegal activities.

  The NSA's watch list of 1,600 Americans, which the Archive also obtained, named figures including civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., boxer Muhammad Ali, and senators Frank Church and Howard Baker. The Archive secured the first official CIA confirmation that Area 51 exists. It obtained U.S. plans for a "full nuclear response" in the event the president was attacked or disappeared. After Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S. troops in December 2003, the FBI conducted 25 interviews with him; the transcripts are now in the Archive's collection. The Osama bin Laden File sits alongside comprehensive Cold War collections covering the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 "Able Archer" War Scare.

• 4. Suing the Government

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  The Archive has participated in over 50 Freedom of Information lawsuits against the U.S. government. One suit forced the Pentagon to release 15,000 memos written by Donald Rumsfeld during his tenure as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006. Those memos, which staff called "snowflakes," supplied key evidence for the George Polk Award-winning series "The Afghanistan Papers," written by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post.

  Another suit compelled the State Department to release the full notes, memoranda, and meeting transcripts that Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott recorded during the Clinton administration, covering U.S.-Russian relations in the years immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved. The Archive has also won cases forcing the release of Kennedy-Khrushchev letters from the Cuban Missile Crisis and the previously censored photographs of flag-draped caskets at homecoming ceremonies for U.S. casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 5. The Email Battles

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  In January 1989, the Archive filed Armstrong v. Reagan, a lawsuit that would grow into one of the most consequential records battles in American legal history. The core question was whether email counted as a government record that had to be preserved. The case ran through three successive administrations, challenging Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. By the time it resolved, it had established that email must be treated as an official government record and had secured the preservation of more than 30 million White House email messages from the 1980s and 1990s.

  A second email lawsuit, filed in 2007 against the George W. Bush administration and settled by the Obama administration in 2009, recovered and preserved more than 22 million White House email messages that had been deleted from White House computers between March 2003 and October 2005. Across both battles and the litigation that followed them, the Archive's cumulative effort to protect White House electronic records has resulted in the preservation of over a billion emails and messages, stretching from the IBM PROFs messages in the Reagan White House through the WhatsApp messages generated by Trump White House staff in 2020.

  During the Trump years, the Archive challenged record-keeping practices directly. In April 2017, alongside the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Archive filed Doyle v. DHS to compel continued release of White House visitor logs. A federal judge in New York and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled that the Trump administration had converted those Secret Service records into presidential records not subject to FOIA. In December 2020, the Archive joined a coalition seeking a court order to block document destruction during the Trump-Biden transition. Justice Department lawyers told then-District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that a litigation hold covered all White House records. When the National Archives later discovered that boxes of Trump records were missing, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the recovery effort ultimately led to an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

• 6. Audits, Awards, and the Rosemary

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  Since 2002, the Archive has conducted annual FOIA audits modeled on California's Sunshine Survey to assess whether federal agencies are actually complying with open-government laws. The audit titles alone chart the landscape of failure: "A FOIA Request Celebrates Its 17th Birthday," "40 Years of FOIA, 20 Years of Delay," "File Not Found: 10 Years After E-FOIA, Most Federal Agencies Are Delinquent." One audit was devoted entirely to agencies still using outdated FOIA regulations.

  Each year the Archive also presents the Rosemary Award for worst open government performance. The award is named after Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon's secretary, who erased a crucial stretch of Watergate tape. Past recipients include the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Air Force, the Department of the Treasury, and the White House itself. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has also received the honor. In September 2005, the Archive won an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in news and documentary research, and Forbes Best of the Web that same year credited it with "singlehandedly keeping bureaucrats' feet to the fire on the Freedom of Information Act."

• 7. Conferences at the Flashpoints

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  In Havana in 2002, during the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban president Fidel Castro and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sat together and discussed newly declassified documents. Those documents showed that President John F. Kennedy, in meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law Adzhubei in January 1962, had compared the U.S. failure at the Bay of Pigs to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The Archive organized that conference.

  In 1997, the Archive brought McNamara to Hanoi, where he met his Vietnamese counterpart, General Vo Nguyen Giap. A year before the Havana meeting, the Archive's Openness in Russia and East Europe Project co-organized a conference in Budapest in 1996 focused on the 1956 uprising. Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash described the resulting exchange as "not ordinary at all... this dramatic confrontation of documents and memories, of written and oral history." In December 2016, the Archive co-hosted a conference in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the U.S. Senate marking the 25th anniversary of the Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction legislation, attended by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar alongside American, Russian, and Kazakh veterans of the program.

• 8. What the Archive Publishes

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  The Digital National Security Archive, published through the commercial service ProQuest, holds over 61 digitized collections totaling more than a million meticulously indexed documents. Recent additions include collections on the Iraq War from 2002 to 2011 and on the Afghanistan War from 1998 to 2017. The Archive's website draws more than 2 million visitors each year and serves more than 13.3 gigabytes of downloads daily. Over 800 Electronic Briefing Books, each organized around a specific newsworthy topic in international affairs, are available there.

  Staff and fellows have written roughly 100 books. Among them are the winners of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, the 1995 National Book Award, and the 1996 Lionel Gelber Prize. A 1999 Boston Globe Notable Book and a 2003 Los Angeles Times Best Book came from Archive researchers, as did the 2010 Henry Adams Prize and the 2010 Link-Kuehl Prize. The Archive runs on an annual budget of around $3 million, supported by foundations including Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlock wrote in 2021 that the Archive provides "an irreplaceable public service by prying loose records from federal agencies that prefer to operate in the dark."