Ninety Pages, Three Exemptions, Four Years The audit was finalized on December 10, 2014. Carol N. German, Assistant Inspector General for Readiness and Cyber Operations, signed the transmittal memorandum on behalf of the Office of the Deputy Inspector General for Audit. The report runs to 90 pages and carries the designation DODIG-2015-046. Its full title, … Read more
Four Agencies, One Date, One Version Number The primary document is a joint advisory titled “New Sandworm malware Cyclops Blink replaces VPNFilter,” published as Version 1.0 on February 23, 2022. Four agencies co-authored it: the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and … Read more
Three pieces of paper in a single file Four men wrote a letter in October 1941 that bypassed every level of the institutional hierarchy inside a classified government establishment. The letter went straight to Winston Churchill. File HW 1/155, held at The National Archives, is what survives of what happened next. HW 1/155 contains three … Read more
What Arrived in the File The document carries no date of composition, no author’s name, and no case number. Its title is straightforward: “U.S.–Soviet Discussions, House of Scientists, Moscow December 28–30, 1967.” Its classification marking, at creation, was Confidential, the lowest of the three standard tiers of U.S. classified designation, routinely applied to procedural and … Read more
Two Transcripts, Two Archives, One Gap of Sixty-Two Years Two transcripts document the earliest face-to-face exchanges between Nikita Khrushchev and the Castro brothers. They come from different Russian repositories, carry different weights, and became available to English-language readers decades apart. The first is a memorandum of conversation recording Khrushchev’s meeting with Raul Castro in Moscow … Read more
One Letter Among Hundreds The envelope is still there. Postmarked Birmingham, October 8, 1888, it was addressed to the Detective Offices, Scotland Yard, London, and officially recorded by the Metropolitan Police on October 9, 1888. It is held at The National Archives under catalogue reference MEPO 3/142, page 160, within a file titled “Letters from … Read more
A Record Written Without an Audience in Mind Anatoly Chernyaev kept a diary regularly, in his own hand, with no apparent intention to perform for a reader. In 1984, while serving as deputy director of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he filled pages with observations … Read more
Among the objects photographed for the National Archives’ 2022 digitization project is a ChapStick container modified to conceal a microphone. It was entered into evidence before Chief Judge John J. Sirica of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia during the trial of United States v. G. Gordon Liddy, and it now sits … Read more
The Gimbal Briefing File What The Black Vault Pulled Out of the System Formerly SECRET-level emails don’t arrive easily. Under U.S. government standards, SECRET applies to information whose unauthorized disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security. John Greenewald of The Black Vault spent approximately three years pursuing a set of … Read more
The Repository The archive runs to 6,237 pages. Most of it is email. On February 1, 2022, The Black Vault, a privately operated document repository founded in 1996 by John Greenewald Jr. that publishes records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and equivalent state open-records laws, published a collection of materials released by … Read more
