https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/12/01/opinion/national-security-archive/
The heroic excavators of government secrets
For 40 years, document nerds at the National Security Archive have been discovering things our leaders would rather you didn’t know. Today their job may be harder than ever.
It’s a secret, don’t tell anyone! That is the instinctive attitude of political leaders and bureaucrats in every government. They work assiduously to keep the public from learning what they are doing — and even what others did years ago.
Breaching this wall of secrecy is a daunting challenge. In Washington, the charge is led by a remarkable squad of archivists and historians at the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental organization that celebrates its 40th anniversary this month. Its seventh-floor suite of offices in Washington has become ground zero for the war against government secrecy.
That war is intensifying. President Trump casts himself as a champion of openness, citing his release of records connected to the assassination of President Kennedy, the death of Amelia Earhardt, and the friends of Jeffrey Epstein. He has indeed been willing to release more “deep state” material about the history of the CIA than his predecessors. He has also, however, been eager to limit public access to information he considers inconvenient. His administration has scrubbed official websites clean of data about issues from health care to climate change. Information that used to be routinely released, like the number of civilians killed in American drone strikes abroad, has been declared secret.
The 20 full-time document nerds at the National Security Archive work amid boxes and file cabinets in space provided by George Washington University. Their salaries are paid from an annual budget of slightly under $3 million, contributed by private donors and sympathetic foundations.
These specialized detectives pore over historical accounts to learn about memoranda, audio tapes, diplomatic cables, memcons (memos of conversations), and telcons (transcripts of telephone calls) that might be lurking in government files. Then they work to pry them loose via the 1967 Freedom of Information Act.
The Archive submits about 1,500 formal requests for classified documents each year, addressed to almost every government agency. The daily mail once brought boxes full of documents; now they come on discs or as PDF links. “Every day is like digital Christmas,” says the Archive’s director, Tom Blanton.
Trump, however, is something of a Grinch. At several federal agencies, budget cuts have led to the dismissal of staff assigned to review Freedom of Information Act requests. That, Blanton says, is already slowing the process of liberating documents.
The most striking of the declassified material that the Archive receives is assembled, with commentary, into highly revealing “electronic briefing books.”
In its 40-year history, the Archive has produced more than 800 of these. Titles include “Che Guevara and the CIA in the Mountains of Bolivia,” “Earliest Known Afghanistan Strategy Paper,” “Ronald Reagan: Climate Hero,” and “Mexico Faces the Legacy of Its Dirty War.”
These briefing books are a veritable Alladin’s cave of revelations. Here is the role that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy played in promoting the 1964 military coup that ended democracy in Brazil (“This is something that’s very serious with us, we’re not fooling around about it”). Here are handwritten notes taken by CIA director Richard Helms when President Nixon ordered him to overthrow the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, on Sept. 15, 1970 (“Not concerned risks involved—No involvement of embassy—$10,000,000 available, more if necessary—full-time job—Best men we have. . . . Make the economy scream”). Here is what Secretary of State James Baker promised the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during talks in 1990 (“Not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”). Here is a 1983 National Intelligence Estimate warning that America’s “war on drugs” in Colombia would require harsh repression (“a bloody, expensive, and prolonged coercive effort”).
Although most of the long-secret material the Archive obtains and publishes is American, it also pulls back curtains that cover dark deeds committed by other countries. It released a chilling “death squad dossier” cataloguing kidnappings and murders committed by the Guatemalan police in the 1980s, complete with photos of the victims and police notations on how each one was killed.
The Archive’s document hunters have provided evidence to post-conflict “truth commissions” in several countries and have helped write freedom-of-information laws in several others. A new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile that tells the story of the American-backed coup there in 1973 features a trove of documents provided by the Archive. One is a classic memo in which Henry Kissinger tells Nixon why a coup is necessary: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact . . . because its ‘model’ effect can be insidious.”
Not all documents the Archive publishes deal with earth-shattering events. It won declassification of notes taken during Elvis Presley’s visit to the White House in 1970. They show that Presley badmouthed the Beatles, whose music he said “promoted an anti-American theme.” President Nixon “nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise.”
Documents the National Security Archive has obtained have even become political art. In 2004 the artist Jenny Holzer turned vivid excerpts from damning documents the Archive uncovered into a monumental light show that illuminated buildings in European and Latin American cities. Many dealt with the global arms trade and the War on Terror. One was from a 2002 opinion by a White House lawyer justifying harsh interrogation at secret CIA prisons (“None of these methods individually or simultaneously would be considered torture according to law”).
Politicians and bureaucrats reflexively keep secrets. Yet in a democratic society, citizens want to know what their leaders have done and are doing. It is an eternal conflict. That has led the National Security Archive to adopt an unofficial motto: “Documents or Death!” It will need that resolve as it faces the Trump administration’s spreading culture of secrecy.
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Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.