National Security Archive

Castle BRAVO at 70: The Worst Nuclear Test in U.S. History
- Heavy Fallout from Test Sickened People on Marshall Island Atolls and Japanese Fishermen on Lucky Dragon
- Blast Equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshimas Vaporized 10 Million Tons of Coral, Sand and Water
- “No Place to Hide”: 1954 Model Overlaid Bravo’s Fallout on Northeastern U.S.
- U.S. Weapons Designer: “We Didn’t Know What the Hell We Were Doing”

Castle BRAVO at 70: The Worst Nuclear Test in U.S. History | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., February 29, 2024 - Seventy years ago, on 1 March 1954 (28 February in Washington), the U.S. government air-dropped a thermonuclear weapon, code-named “Shrimp,” on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in what turned out to be the largest nuclear test in U.S. history.

The Kissinger Telcons: The Story Behind the Story

State Department lawyers advised Henry Kissinger that transcriptions of his telephone conversations made when he served as national security adviser and Secretary of State were his personal papers and not “subject to disclosure under the FOIA,” according to recently declassified records from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). When Freedom of Information Act requests, the possibility of lawsuits, and bad publicity complicated Kissinger’s ability to maintain control over these records, the lawyers suggested that he could stash the so-called “telcons” away in the Library of Congress. Kissinger’s subsequent decision to do precisely that put them out of reach of the FOIA for decades, until the National Security Archive forced NARA and the State Department to begin to recover more than 15,000 pages of telcons in 2001.

The newly declassified documents, which come mainly from the files of the State Department Legal Adviser, shed new light on decisions taken during the early stages of Kissinger’s effort to shield the telcons from public scrutiny.

When Kissinger joined the Nixon administration as national security adviser in January 1969, he routinely had his telephone conversations transcribed for his office files. That continued when he became Secretary of State in September 1973. For the most part, only a few White House and State Department insiders knew of this practice or that Kissinger had taken the collection of White House transcripts with him to State, under the watchful eye of Deputy Under Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger.

New York Times columnist William Safire, a former Nixon White House staffer, broke the news about the telcons in 1976 and also filed one of the first FOIA requests on the secret bugging operation, which was quickly denied by the State Department. Recognizing the sensitivity of recording conversations without the consent of the other party, Kissinger had tried to keep the transcripts secret as long as he could, claiming them as his personal property. By the end of 1976, journalists had learned more about the telcons. Media outcry and a threatened lawsuit by historians prompted Kissinger to quick action: he donated the documents to the Library of Congress where they would be out of reach of FOIA requests.

Most of the documents posted today come from the records of State Department Legal Adviser Monroe Leigh, who held the position during 1975-1977. To get access to the 17 cartons of Leigh’s records, the National Security Archive made an Indexing on Demand request to NARA’s National Declassification Center, which completed their final processing and opened them in November 2023.

Even as many important collections remain unavailable—Eagleburger’s official files are still held at State, while Kissinger’s papers remain closed—these new documents from the Leigh collection provide fascinating insights on Kissinger’s initial efforts to keep the telcons secret.

The Kissinger Telcons: The Story Behind the Story | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., February 13, 2024 - State Department lawyers advised Henry Kissinger that transcriptions of his telephone conversations made when he served as national security adviser and Secretary of State were his personal papers and not “subject to disclosure under the FOIA,” according to ...

The Clinton-Yeltsin Moscow Summit, January 1994

- Declassified transcripts show close cooperation on nuclear and regional security issues, rising concerns about failure of economic reform in Russia

- Top Clinton advisor called Yeltsin “arguably your most important foreign counterpart”

The Clinton-Yeltsin Moscow Summit, January 1994 | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., January 25, 2024 - Declassified highest-level records from the Moscow summit 30 years ago this month detail U.S. President Bill Clinton’s strong personal support for Russian President Boris Yeltsin, their close cooperation on security issues, and deep concern about Yeltsin backtr...

U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981

- Top-Level Memos to the President, NSC Records, Anchor New Publication on Carter Foreign Policy
- “Eyes Only,” Annotated Records Offer Insights into Carter’s Thinking, Relationships with Vance, Brzezinski
- “Top Secret” Memos Show Carter Dealing with Arms Control, Iran Hostage Crisis, Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
- Latest Addition to Award-Winning Digital National Security Archive Series

U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981 | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., December 14, 2023 – The National Security Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a major primary document collection on the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The latest in the Archive’s award-winning Digital National Security Archive series, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Cart...

Recent Nuclear Declassifications and Denials: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

- The Good: New Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and Other Nonproliferation Issues
- The Bad and the Ugly: Defense Department Denials on Dimona 1963, U.S. Aid to British SLBMs, SAC Censors Film on Airborne Command Posts

Recent Nuclear Declassifications and Denials: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., December 6, 2023 - Recent U.S. government decisions on the declassification of historical records on nuclear proliferation demonstrate the good, the bad and the ugly in the current national security secrecy system. On the plus side are releases that add historically valuable inform...

Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary

- The Primary Sources on Kissinger’s Controversial Legacy
- NSArchive Obtained and Published Previously Secret Records on Kissinger’s Role in Secret Bombing Campaigns in Cambodia, Illegal Domestic Spying, Support for Dictators, and Dirty Wars Abroad

Henry Kissinger’s death today brings new global attention to the long paper trail of secret documents recording his policy deliberations, conversations, and directives on many initiatives for which he became famous—détente with the USSR, the opening to China, and Middle East shuttle diplomacy, among them.

This historical record also documents the darker side of Kissinger’s controversial tenure in power: his role in the overthrow of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Chile; disdain for human rights and support for dirty, and even genocidal, wars abroad; secret bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia; and involvement in the Nixon administration’s criminal abuses, among them the secret wiretaps of his own top aides.

To contribute to a balanced and more comprehensive evaluation of Kissinger’s legacy, the National Security Archive has compiled a small, select dossier of declassified records—memos, memcons, and “telcons” that Kissinger wrote, said and/or read—documenting TOP SECRET deliberations, operations and policies during Kissinger’s time in the White House and Department of State.

The revealing “telcons”—over 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of Kissinger’s phone conversations which he secretly recorded and had his secretaries transcribe—were taken by Kissinger as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977 and used, selectively, to write his best-selling memoirs. The National Security Archive forced the U.S. government to recover these official records by preparing a lawsuit that argued that both the State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had inappropriately allowed classified U.S. government documentation to be removed from their control.

“Henry Kissinger’s insistence on recording practically every word he said, either to the presidents he served (without their knowledge that they were being taped) or the diplomats he cajoled, remains the gift that keeps on giving to diplomatic historians,” remarked Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. “Kissinger’s aides later commented that he needed to keep track of which lie he told to whom. Kissinger tried to keep those documents under his own control, his deed of gift to the Library of Congress would have kept them closed five years from now, but the Archive brought legal action and forced the opening of the secret documents that show a decidedly mixed picture of Kissinger’s legacy, and enormous catastrophic costs to the peoples of Southeast Asia and Latin America.”

Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., November 29, 2023 - Henry Kissinger’s death today brings new global attention to the long paper trail of secret documents recording his policy deliberations, conversations, and directives on many initiatives for which he became famous—détente with the USSR, the opening to Chin...

The Pinochet Dictatorship Declassified: Confessions of a DINA Hit Man

- Secret Admissions of Chilean Intelligence Agent Detail Military Regime Atrocities
- Townley Papers Describe DINA’s Role in State-Sponsored Terrorism
- Revelations on Supplying Nerve Gas to Murder Chileans, Operation Condor Mission in France, and Letelier-Moffitt Assassination in Washington
- Archive Publishes Documents on 50th Anniversary of DINA’s Creation During Pinochet Dictatorship

The Pinochet Dictatorship Declassified: Confessions of a DINA Hit Man | National Security Archive Washington D.C., November 22, 2023 - “[I]f there has been sufficient reason to open this envelope, I accuse the government of Chile of my death,” wrote Chilean intelligence agent Michael Townley in March 1978, as FBI agents pursued him for the September 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Let...

The Discovery of South Africa’s Secret Nuclear Test Site, August 1977

- Soviets Urged Western Allies to Prevent Emergence of New Nuclear Power
- U.S. Intelligence Uncovered Weapons-Related “Criticality Experiments” at South African Nuclear Facility
- Carter Administration Coordinated Diplomatic Opposition to Pretoria’s Nuclear Plans
- Brzezinski Said Dismantlement of Kalahari Test Site Was “Too Much to Ask”

Read the rest of our latest posting here:

The Discovery of South Africa’s Secret Nuclear Test Site, August 1977 | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., October 26, 2023 - In early August 1977, Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev wrote to President Jimmy Carter to inform him that the Soviet Union had detected a nuclear weapons test site in South Africa and to ask that the U.S. and other governments take “energetic e...

The American Ambassador Who Helped Stop a Coup in Chile

Everyone knows how Nixon and Kissinger paved Pinochet’s path to power. The story of Harry Barnes, who played a crucial role in the Chilean dictator’s exit, is much less well known.

The Archive’s Peter Kornbluh’s last for The Nation -

The American Ambassador Who Helped Stop a Coup in Chile Everyone knows how Nixon and Kissinger paved Pinochet’s path to power. The story of Harry Barnes, who played a crucial role in the Chilean dictator’s exit, is much less well known.

Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 30 Years Ago – U.S. Praised “Superb Handling”

- Declassified Clinton-Yeltsin Telcons Show U.S. Support No Matter What
- British Memo, Embassy Cables, Oral Histories Detail Complex Power Struggle
- Russian Independent Media Mark Anniversary As Turning Point To Autocracy

Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 30 Years Ago – U.S. Praised “Superb Handling” | National Security Archive Washington D.C., October 4, 2023 – Thirty years ago in Moscow, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered tanks and airborne troops to shell and storm the “White House,” the Russian Parliament (Supreme Soviet) building, to suppress the opposition trying to impeach and remove him – a landmark tu...

Keeping the Secrets: U.S. Silence about Ayotzinapa

Nine years ago today, 43 Mexican college students were violently abducted and disappeared by police and drug traffickers in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the families of the missing boys mark another wrenching anniversary and the investigation in Mexico grinds on, the National Security Archive takes a look at the declassified record on Ayotzinapa in the United States and asks, Why has the U.S. government released so little information about this case?

Since 2017, the National Security Archive and our colleagues at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) have filed over 150 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the attacks against the students of the Ayotzinapa teacher-training school, the investigations that followed, and a related DEA operation targeting Mexican drug traffickers who were distributing huge quantities of he**in in Chicago, Illinois. We hoped to obtain new facts about a case that had been muddied and obscured by investigators in Mexico. We also wanted to know whether the shocking crime had any impact on U.S. policy in Mexico. Did the revelations about the case affect U.S.-Mexico relations? In particular, did concerns about Ayotzinapa have any impact on the longstanding cooperation between the two countries in the so-called “war on drugs”?

Yet despite our many requests – and the filing of two FOIA lawsuits – over the years we have received what amounts to crumbs: news clips, public reports, transcripts from press conferences, emails so heavily redacted as to be illegible, and thousands of censored pages of unclassified documents.

The secrecy is especially puzzling given the intense concern expressed by American officials at the time of the attacks and throughout the years since then. But U.S. concern has not translated into U.S. transparency, and most of the relevant records remain closed to public scrutiny. In today’s posting, we examine the two most likely reasons why the U.S. government refuses to release information so clearly in the public interest.

Keeping the Secrets: U.S. Silence about Ayotzinapa | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., September 26, 2023 - Nine years ago today, 43 Mexican college students were violently abducted and disappeared by police and drug traffickers in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the families of the missing boys mark another wrenching anniversary and the investigation in Mexico grin...

Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: 20 Years Later

- Declassified Documents Chronicle 20 Years of Conflict and Violence
- U.S. Intelligence Reports Describe Grave Abuses Amid Army “Search and Destroy” Operations

On the 20th anniversary of the Peruvian truth commission’s final report, the National Security Archive posts a core collection of declassified U.S. documents chronicling 20 years of conflict across three presidential administrations along with records relating to the 2001 decision to establish a commission to investigate the violence. The collection includes previously unpublished cables and intelligence reports detailing the Peruvian government’s brutal “take no prisoners” counterinsurgency strategy and its efforts to shield from justice members of the security forces responsible for grave human rights abuses.

Among the newly published records is a State Department intelligence report from 1984 that presciently predicted that the Peruvian Army “may be tempted to try physically annihilating Sendero Luminoso by eliminating everyone suspected of being a member or sympathizer.” Another highly revealing intelligence report from May 1988 said that Peruvian Prime Minister Armando Villanueva had told top military officials “that he did not care if the military executed every Sendero Luminoso (SL) guerrilla it captured” as long as it was done “discreetly.” Villanueva told the officers that any attempt to investigate a recent peasant massacre in Ayacucho “would be immediately defeated.”

Other records show how Peru’s human rights record complicated relations with Washington, such as when the State Department was forced to invoke the diplomatic immunity of a former intelligence agent in the face of a Justice Department effort to prosecute him in the U.S. for torturing a coworker suspected of leaking information to the media.

Peru’s current political crisis demonstrates that the problems and legacies of the country’s violent past are still very present today. The Archive posts this collection as part of its continuing commitment to the long-term goals of the CVR and its mission to shed light on 20 years of abuses, identify and aid the victims, and determine those responsible for the violence.

Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: 20 Years Later | National Security Archive Washington, D.C., August 28, 2023 – On the 20th anniversary of the Peruvian truth commission’s final report, the National Security Archive posts a core collection of declassified U.S. documents chronicling 20 years of conflict across three presidential administrations along with records relating...