A government researcher wrote a planning paper in January 1963 explaining how American cities might be defended, hardened, or simply thinned out in the event of a nuclear war. It took until April 2024 for the public to see it, and the record offers no account of where it sat for the nine years in … Read more
A ledger, not a story The Book of Negroes is a single bound volume held by the National Archives in Kew under the catalog reference PRO 30/55/100. British officers opened it at New York on April 15, 1783, and a certifying office in London closed it out on February 19, 1784. It reads nothing like … Read more
The Document Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks issued a statement addressing the departure of Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, known as AARO. The Black Vault, researcher John Greenewald’s archive site, dates the statement itself to November 9, 2023. A separate account, published by The Debrief, dates the same statement … Read more
Two FOIA requests, filed by the same researcher roughly a year apart and worded in different ways, searched the Navy’s email systems and came back with the identical answer: one file. Not a similar file. The same file, redacted the same way, both times. That is the entire discovery here, and it is worth being … Read more
A Manual, Reopened “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” is not a new name to anyone who has followed CIA interrogation history. The manual carries a July 1963 date and was originally classified SECRET, marked NO FOREIGN DISSEM on the copies now in circulation. A version first surfaced in 1997 through a Freedom of Information Act request from … Read more
The Black Vault, an archive run by researcher John Greenewald, published a 1,922-page FOIA release on March 19, 2026, pulled from internal Federal Communications Commission (FCC) correspondence. It runs to about 11 megabytes and covers mid-2025 through early 2026. It does not settle the dispute it describes; it documents how the agency handled that dispute … Read more
Three Documents, Not One Three separate texts sit inside this case, and they are not interchangeable. The first is LVMPD’s after-action report, 78 pages, released November 3, 2025, built from bomb-scene forensics, two phone extractions, and interviews; it carries no case number in the public record, and some outlets have described it as 70 pages … Read more
Some documents exist publicly for years before anyone sees them whole. A line here, a footnote there, buried inside other FBI files that researcher John Greenewald had already obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document itself, an FBI intelligence assessment on cyber threats to the United States, only appeared in complete form … Read more
Soviet authorities had a number for the problem. By January 1946, they had added up to 10,000 soldiers to the force already hunting an underground resistance movement in the Baltic states. A decade later, the approach had changed completely: soldiers gave way to deportation trains, and whole Lithuanian families were removed instead of chased through … Read more
A Photograph and a Volume Start with the image. Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter are walking toward an aircraft at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, on February 13, 1977, about to board for the flight back to Andrews Air Force Base. The photograph is held by the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library under the catalog number … Read more
