National Security Archive – Eyes Only Archive

The National Security Archive is a nonprofit investigative journalism center, research institute, and public interest law firm housed at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars, including Washington Post reporter Scott Armstrong, it was created to counter rising government secrecy and to build a centralized, publicly accessible repository of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Its Digital National Security Archive alone comprises more than 150,000 documents totaling over a million pages of recovered historical records. By combining archival functions with active litigation and policy advocacy, the Archive occupies a position that no pure library and no pure law firm holds on its own.

Key facts

Country: United States
Founded: 1985
Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
Founder: Scott Armstrong
Type: nonprofit organization; archives
Website: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/

What the Archive Does

The Archive serves five overlapping functions: an investigative journalism center, a research institute on international affairs, a library and archive of declassified U.S. documents, the leading nonprofit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, and a public interest law firm that defends and expands access to government information. Materials flow in through the Freedom of Information Act, Mandatory Declassification Review, presidential paper collections, congressional records, and court testimony. Nothing in that pipeline is passive: the Archive actively files requests, appeals denials, and litigates when agencies stall or withhold.

Its flagship publication series, the Digital National Security Archive, is distributed through the academic publisher ProQuest and currently comprises more than 65 large-scale collections. On the public side, the Archive has published over 890 Electronic Briefing Books presenting more than 20,000 annotated declassified documents on U.S. foreign policy and national security topics, with new books added one or two times per week. The Archive’s website attracts approximately 2 million visitors each year and delivers more than 15 gigabytes of material per day.

Founding and Early History

Scott Armstrong and a coalition of journalists and scholars launched the Archive in 1985, a period when FOIA filings were rising but no single institution was systematically collecting and organizing what those requests produced. From 1985 to 1998, the Archive’s financial affairs were administered under the Fund for Peace, Inc., a New York-based tax-exempt corporation that acted as its fiscal sponsor; Deloitte & Touche conducted its audits from 1985 to 1992. The arrangement ended in 1998, when the Archive established its own independent financial structure.

As a matter of organizational policy, the Archive accepts no U.S. government funding. Its budget is supported by publication royalties and by donations from foundations and individuals. From 2020 through 2025, the Archive received three grants from the Ford Foundation totaling $1,575,000. In 2024, the Carnegie Corporation of New York provided a separate $560,000 grant specifically for archival programs on U.S.-Russia relations, nuclear security, and cooperative threat reduction.

Landmark Legal Actions

On January 19, 1989, the Archive filed FOIA requests and a lawsuit against President Ronald Reagan to prevent the imminent erasure of White House electronic mail backup tapes. U.S. District Judge Barrington D. Parker issued a Temporary Restraining Order at 6:10 pm, on the eve of George Bush’s inauguration, blocking the deletion.

On December 1, 2020, the Archive filed suit alongside the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington against President Donald Trump. The suit sought to enforce the Presidential Records Act and prevent the destruction of records during the presidential transition.

In November 2024, the Archive filed suit in federal court contesting a 12-year backlog of Freedom of Information requests for presidential records held by the National Archives and Records Administration. The documents at issue included 73 phone call transcripts and 19 meeting transcripts between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin from 2001 to 2008. Director Tom Blanton has stated, as of 2019, that the Archive has filed lawsuits against every president since Reagan, Democrat and Republican alike, to compel compliance with records laws.

Major Disclosures and Investigations

In May 1999, the Archive, together with the Washington Office on Latin America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Human Rights Watch, disclosed a Guatemalan military death squad logbook covering an 18-month period between August 1983 and March 1985. The logbook recorded the fate of 183 disappeared persons.

The Archive has provided documentation and expertise to post-conflict truth commissions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Panama, and other nations engaged in transitional justice efforts. It also manages over 25 active archival research projects as of 2024, including a dedicated Iran-U.S. Relations project that draws on declassified records and interviews with former policymakers.

The Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project published a briefing book on February 6, 2025, documenting the Trump administration’s removal of environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites. An updated chronology was issued on July 21, 2026.

The Archive has published more than 70 books based on declassified sources, including The Kissinger Transcripts, White House Email, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, and Back Channel to Cuba: the Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana.

Leadership

Thomas S. Blanton has served as director of the Archive since 1992. Malcolm Byrne serves as Deputy Director and Research Director.

Awards and Recognition

In 1998, the Archive shared the George Foster Peabody Award for its contributions as consultant to CNN’s 24-episode Cold War documentary series. In 1999, it won a Special George Polk Award presented by Long Island University for, in the award committee’s phrasing, ‘piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth and informing us all.’

In September 2005, the Archive won the Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in news and documentary research for the Discovery Times Channel documentary Declassified: Nixon in China, which aired on December 21, 2004. The Archive has also received three American Library Association James Madison Awards over a 20-year span, with citations going to founder Scott Armstrong in 1992, to director Thomas Blanton, and to general counsel Meredith Fuchs, all recognized for defending the public’s right to know.

The Archive’s website had received 45 citations from the Internet Scout Report of the University of Wisconsin, which the organization uses to recognize the most valuable and authoritative resources online.

Did you know

One of the most accessed collections in the Archive’s Reading Room covers the CIA’s MKULTRA human behavior control program. Former State Department official John Marks assembled it using FOIA after most of the original MKULTRA records were destroyed on the order of CIA director Richard Helms; the recovered files are now among the Archive’s most frequently consulted holdings. (nsarchive.gwu.edu)
Director Tom Blanton won the 2004 Emmy Award for individual achievement in news and documentary research and was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame in 2006. (themainemonitor.org)
The Archive’s financial affairs prior to 1999 were administered through the Fund for Peace, Inc., a New York-based tax-exempt corporation that served as fiscal sponsor from 1985 to 1998. Deloitte & Touche audited the Archive’s accounts from 1985 to 1992. (nsarchive2.gwu.edu)
When the Digital National Security Archive published the 2024 collection CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, it was built around records donated by author John Marks, completing a journey from FOIA request to published academic archive that spanned several decades. (nsarchive.gwu.edu)
According to director Tom Blanton in 2019, the Archive has filed lawsuits against every president since Reagan, Democrat and Republican alike, to compel compliance with the records laws. (nsarchive.gwu.edu)
The Los Angeles Times has described the Archive as housing “the world’s largest nongovernmental collection” of declassified documents. (nsarchive.gwu.edu)

Data sources

Data updated: 2026-10-26