Nathan Reeve 
The manual is easy enough to find. It is the paperwork behind it that is missing. The Document The record under discussion is a manual titled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare” (in its original Spanish-language form, “Operaciones sicológicas en guerra de guerrillas”), credited to an author using the name “Tayacán.” The copy carries an internal … Read more
The Release A government slide deck describing a classified NASA briefing on unidentified aerial phenomena surfaced through two requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law that lets the public ask federal agencies for their records. The result, sent to The Black Vault’s John Greenewald by the U.S. Navy on October 10, … Read more
The National Archives issued a research guide in March 2026 explaining how to find the papers of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry, the statutory inquiry into the Novichok nerve-agent death of Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury on July 8, 2018. It is a short, practical document: what the collection is called, what is in it, what is … Read more
A President’s Daily Brief is not a historian’s judgment written after the fact. It is what the Central Intelligence Agency told one reader, on one morning, about what it believed was happening in the world. Two such briefs went to Richard Nixon in September 1973, and read together they do something a single document never … Read more
A File That Arrived by Inheritance, Not by Request Most of what The Black Vault publishes comes from a Freedom of Information Act request, the federal law that lets anyone ask a government agency to release records it holds. This one didn’t. On January 10, 2022, researcher John Greenewald posted a 180-page, 27.2-megabyte FBI file … Read more
The Officer Who Signed in Lieu of an Oath (HS 9/612) An officer working out of Cairo once decided he didn’t need the British Consulate to put a signature on an oath. He put his own name to it instead, on a wartime form that still sits in a Special Operations Executive file at The … Read more
Two Documents, Two Years Sidney Gottlieb ran the CIA’s Technical Services Division, the unit responsible for the chemical and technical side of covert operations, including the behavior-control research known as MKULTRA. His name appears in two separate paper trails, and it is worth being exact about which is which, because they do not say the … Read more
The File The CIA’s declassification office logs it as CIA-RDP96-00787R000500240021-0: eight pages, filed under the Stargate collection, originally marked with a classification code recorded only as “K.” Stargate was the government’s umbrella name for a long-running program under which scientists, soldiers, and civilians were paid to try to perceive distant places and events by means … Read more
A Planning Paper for a Flight That Hadn’t Happened Yet Before an American astronaut had been launched into orbit, someone was already working out how to get him out of the ocean afterward. The record of that work is a 241-page document titled “Preliminary Study of Capsule Recovery for the First Series of Project Mercury … Read more
A political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wrote his objection on March 28, 1994, and sent it through the one internal State Department channel built specifically to carry dissent. The document The cable is titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.” It went out through the Dissent Channel, … Read more
