Three Hundred and Thirty-One Pages, Canceled The Joint Staff published Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Manual 3500.08, formally titled the “Joint Psychological Operations Task Force Headquarters Master Training Guide,” on May 26, 1999. Its purpose, as described by the requester who eventually obtained the full version, was to assist leaders in training their … Read more
What Was Published, and by Whom The record in question is a photographic gallery. The U.S. Department of Defense produced the images; John Greenewald of The Black Vault, an independent archive researcher who has been compiling government-released material since founding the site in 1996, assembled them into a single accessible collection and published it on … Read more
Six Pages, One Reference Number The record consists of two attachments to a single final report, filed under case reference 2107-0022-AS. Attachment A is the System Review Report; Attachment B is the Letter of Comment. Together they constitute the CIA Office of Inspector General’s external peer review of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Inspector … Read more
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