Declassification


Vatican's Secret Archives no longer officially secret after renaming

The Vatican Secret Archives, containing millions of documents spanning 12 centuries, are no longer officially “secret”.

Pope Francis has renamed the priceless archives, which include letters concerning King Henry VIII’s request to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, which led to the English church breaking away from Rome in 1534.

They also hold the original acts of the 1633 trial of the astronomer Galileo by the Roman Inquisition, which condemned him as a heretic for teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun.

The Vatican said on Monday the new name would be the Vatican Apostolic Archives. This removes any potentially “negative nuances” from the Latin word “secretum”, which the pope said in a decree was closer to “private” or “reserved” than “secret” when the archives were first named in about 1610.

Declassification

IG report on possible Russia investigation misconduct is still in declassification process: source

The long-awaited report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on potential surveillance abuses by intelligence officials during the 2016 Russia investigation is still in the declassification process, a DOJ official told Fox News on Wednesday.

“The FBI and the DOJ are working together smoothly on the declassification process,” the official said.

In comments to reporters at the White House on Thursday, President Trump -- he retains the authority to declassify and release as much of the report as he wants -- speculated that the final report could even implicate former President Barack Obama.

"Now, we’ll see what happens," Trump said. "The IG report is going to come out soon, and we’ll see what happens. I think people -- I know nothing about it, in terms of the report. ... I’m waiting for the report like everybody else. But I predict you will see things that you don’t even believe, the level of corruption -- whether it’s [James] Comey; whether it’s [Peter] Strzok and his lover, [Lisa] Page; whether it’s so many other people -- [Andrew] McCabe; whether it’s President Obama himself. Let’s see whether or not it’s President Obama. Let’s see whether or not they put that in."

Declassification

Letelier-Moffitt Assassination: State Department Officials Pushed for Pinochet’s Ouster

 In the aftermath of the September 21, 1976, car-bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington D.C., four State Department officers began pressing for a policy to force General Augusto Pinochet from power, according to a declassified “Dissent Channel” memorandum published today by the National Security Archive. “It is probable that President Pinochet ordered the assassination of Letelier and others,” the authors wrote in their appeal for an aggressive policy of ending normal relations with Chile until Pinochet was removed.  “Our only hope for justice is for the U.S. to take action that will bring it about.”

The “Dissent Channel” is a special--and carefully used--mechanism for State Department officials to provide constructive opposition to established policies. Department procedural regulations define it as“a serious policy channel reserved only for consideration of responsible dissenting and alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues that cannot be communicated in a full and timely manner through regular operating channels and procedures.”

The National Security Archive obtained the Dissent Channel memorandum on the Letelier-Moffitt assassination through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

Declassification

Jesus Prepared People for END TIMES, Wild Declassified CIA Files Claim

Declassified files from the CIA archives have revealed a book, titled “The Adam and Eve Story”, which was published in multiple editions over years and was widely available, but which conspiracy enthusiasts somehow thought was banned.

Author Chan Thomas made a series of bizarre claims in his book “The Adam and Eve Story”, suggesting that civilisation is wiped out every 7,000 years by “cyclical pole shifts”– a cataclysmic phenomenon which has been foreseen by various people throughout history, including Jesus Christ, Daily Star Online reported.

Thomas is said to have written that Jesus was not a Biblical prophetic figure, but rather a scholar who trained in India and attempted to help people prepare for the end times, with the last cataclysmic event being Noah’s Flood.

Declassification

Declassification Diplomacy: Trump Administration Turns Over Massive Collection of Intelligence Records on Human Rights and Argentina

The revealing CIA “intelligence information cables” on Operation Condor are part of a major collection of records released on April 12 at a government event in Washington D.C., "Declassification Diplomacy: The United States Declassification Project for Argentina." During the diplomatic ceremony, hosted by U.S. Archivist David Ferriero at the National Archives, U.S. officials completed the turnover of some 7500 CIA, FBI, DOD, NSC and State Department records—47,000 pages in total—to Argentina’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights, German Garavano. Garavano graciously thanked the Trump administration for fulfilling a formal request for the records by the Argentine government, made on the fortieth anniversary of the military coup during a state visit to Argentina by then-President Barack Obama.

Declassification

Declassification Diplomacy: Trump Administration to Turn Over Trove of Declassified Records to Argentina on Human Rights Violations Committed During Military Dictatorship

On the 43rd anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the Argentine government of Mauricio Macri has announced that the Trump Administration will provide “the largest delivery of declassified documents, in size and file quality, to another nation”—formerly secret U.S. records relating to human rights abuses committed during under the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The official transfer of the records is planned for mid-April during a visit by Argentina’s minister of justice, Germán Garavano, to Washington D.C.

The turnover of formerly secret U.S. intelligence records—the collection will include CIA, FBI, NSC, and Defense Intelligence Agency documents—will culminate a special U.S. government declassification project authorized three years ago today by then-President Barack Obama during a visit to Buenos Aires, and implemented by the Trump administration.

Declassification

US Intel Agency’s Docs Reveal Warp Drive, Invisibility Cloak, Stargate Projects

Was this an attempt to really see into the distant future of technology, or a blatant attempt at government money laundering?

The US Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars on research projects, including invisibility cloaks, high-energy laser weapons, "traversable wormholes" and "stargates," a batch of documents obtained through Freedom of information Act has revealed.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has obtained a list of nearly 40 research titles that were funded by Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) between 2007 and 2012.

While some names may sound more or less futuristic but still plausible — such as "High Energy Laser Weapons" or "Pulsed High-Power Microwave Technology" — others sound like they come directly from conspiracy theories and science fiction TV series. Some of the wildest entries include "Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum," "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy" and even "Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."

Declassification

Understanding the CIA: How Covert (and Overt) Operations Were Proposed and Approved during the Cold War

The covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency are one element of the forward edge of power in U.S. foreign policy. But the CIA is not a lone ranger, shooting up saloons on its own account. A senior interagency group within the United States government acts as the high command of the secret war. Today, the National Security Archive is posting a collection of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and extended archival research that illustrates some of the breadth of the group’s activity as it evolved during the Cold War.

Today’s selection is a tiny fragment of an extensive new compilation, CIA Covert Operations III: From Kennedy to Nixon, 1961-1974, published recently as part of the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) through the scholarly publisher ProQuest and available by subscription and at many major libraries. This is the third part of a National Security Archive series on the CIA's clandestine side, curated by Pulitzer-nominated author and historian John Prados. 

This edition takes the story from the epic disaster of the Bay of Pigs through a series of little-known or under-explored covert activities including the Mongoose operation against Cuba, actions in British Guiana, Bolivia, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Iraq (the Kurds), and more. The set provides unprecedented, in-depth coverage of the CIA’ s high command, ranging from minutes of the "Special Group" that approved covert operations, to CIA directors' daily staff meetings, to the notes of meetings with presidents Kennedy and Johnson made by CIA Director John  A. McCone.

Declassification

Inside the CIA’s Secret Cold War Program to Spy on a Soviet Embassy

There are espionage targets and then there are espionage targets. Getting a source inside the Soviet Embassy in a divided Germany in the early years of the Cold War is the latter — the World Cup of spy games.

So the CIA wouldn’t go into that game without a game plan. And thanks to some declassified documents, we know exactly what that was.

Dubbed the CATOPHAT Project, the documents from 1967 describe the CIA’s use of human and technical sources to steal information from Moscow’s people in Bonn, Germany. CATOPHAT was the cryptonym assigned to the embassy there.

There were three main objectives:

“To develop controlled assets and operational situations leading to direct staff officer contact with target Soviet Embassy personnel for assessment, elicitation and possible recruitment or defection.”
“To acquire counter-intelligence information on the Soviet Embassy and its personnel in order to monitor and, wherever possible, to neutralize Soviet clandestine activity in West Germany.”
“To conduct operations against the Soviet presence in West Germany in order to collect political, economic, military, scientific, and technical information on the Soviet Union and particularly regarding its objectives, relations, and activities toward, with, and in West Germany.”

Declassification

Jerry Kroth: Two US Soldiers overheard JFK Assassination Plans

July 11, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -In November, 2017 President Trump released 35,000 documents the Kennedy assassination that were withheld for half a century. He wanted to release more, but the CIA requested more time. He gave them six months more months, and, on April 26 of this year another 18,000 documents came forth.

The media hardly covered the April release, and, overall, the reporting was cursory at best and pathetic a worst. These documents consummately alter our understanding of the assassination, of Jack Ruby, of Marina Oswald, David Ferrie, Richard Helms, J. Edgar Hoover, and certainly Lyndon Johnson.

But let us take a smaller bite from this apple.

Introducing Eugene V. Dinkin. Two documents were released about this man in November which caught my attention, and one more appeared in the 2018 release.

Frankly, as an academic who wrote two books on JFK, I never heard of him. 

Since it took 54 years to lift the veil of censorship on this account, perhaps Eugene should not be ignored any more than he already has.

Declassification

'Astonishing' CIA memo shows Brazil's ex-dictator authorized torture and executions

Brazil’s former dictator Ernesto Geisel personally approved the summary execution of his regime’s perceived enemies, according to a newly unearthed CIAmemo that has reopened a bitter debate over one of the darkest chapters of contemporary Brazilian history. 

Matias Spektor, the São Paulo-based academic who discovered and distributedthe document on Thursday, called it “the most disturbing I have read in 20 years of research”. 

The memorandum, sent to then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, by the CIA director, William Colby, on 11 April 1974, details a meeting it said had taken place a few days earlier between Geisel and three Brazilian generals. 

One tells Geisel, who ruled Brazil from 1974 until 1979, the regime “cannot ignore the subversive and terrorist threat” it faces. “Extra-legal methods should continue to be employed against dangerous subversives,” Gen Milton Tavares de Souza is quoted as saying.

De Souza informs Geisel that 104 such “subversives” were summarily executed by military intelligence in the previous year – a policy a second general insists should continue.

Declassification

Declassified Docs Uncover West Germany's Plans to Acquire Chem Weapons in 1960s

The freshly disclosed US and German military files from 1963 attest that West Germany secretly planned to possess and even deploy chemical weapons while it was forbidden from using any.

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), in 1961, West Germany had plans to ask the United States to share chemical agents, with the inspector general of Germany’s military, Friedrich Foertsch, saying that they “couldn’t do without” such a deterrent.

‘US Would Be Setting a Precedent’

DW’s report is based on the newly released documents, indicating that in 1963 Defense Minister Kai-Uwe von Hasse requested that the US provide West Germany with chemical weapons, and the Pentagon initially sought to cooperate.

“The surprising part is that the United States military did not appreciate that it was a sensitive issue. They approached it as simply just another weapon system,” said Reid Kirby, an American military historian.

Declassification

How and Why the CIA Censored Marchetti's 'The Cult of Intelligence'

Newly-discovered CIA documents in the JFK files have provided fresh details on exactly what the Agency censored from ex-CIA officer Victor Marchetti’s book, and why.

The new documents reveal previously-unknown CIA operations involving nuclear-powered spy drones, political subsidies to foreign parties, surveillance of a US ambassador and the use of front companies, including sponsorship of media outlets for propaganda purposes. Many of these details were included in original drafts of The CIA and The Cult of Intelligence, but were removed by the Agency for political reasons.

In 1974 former special assistant to the deputy director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department officer John Marks published The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, one of the first inside accounts of the US spy community. When they submitted it to the CIA’s Publications Review Board the Agency demanded that they delete 399 passages, so Marks and Marchetti took them to court. Arguing paragraph-by-paragraph the court partly upheld their right to publish, though the CIA successfully argued against 168 passages. When the book was finally published the deleted passages were left in as blank spaces, while the other sections that the CIA tried to delete were in bold typeface.

Declassification

CIA Debriefed Soviet H-Bomb Eye-Witness in 1957

During the Fall of 1955, a confidential source would later tell U.S. intelligence officials, he had been at work at a soda plant in Kazakhstan when he suddenly experienced a “significant change in pressure on his ear drums,” causing his hearing to go out briefly. According to a CIA report published for the first time by the National Security Archive, the source recalled that the ground began to shake and the workers were ordered out of the plant. Buildings in the area began to oscillate “as if they had been set in motion by the ground.” Moreover, the air was “crackling with pressure;” as if the “air was tearing up.” Then he turned around and saw “the upper third of a large fireball on the southwest horizon,” appearing in “color and intensity like a bright sun shining through a haze.” Realizing that he had witnessed a nuclear test, the source later heard that it had caused several deaths in the area. It is likely that the witness experienced the effects of the Soviet Union’s first test of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon (invented by Andrei Sakharov), air-dropped at Semipalatinsk on 22 November 1955, although he recalled the event as taking place on 8 December 1955. 

Declassification

Department of State’s Dissent Channel Revealed

A US Foreign Service officer warned that “blatantly illegal” Congressional requests, including the use of a diplomatic pouch to smuggle gemstones and utilizing embassy employees for the “soliciting of female companionship,” were harming “the personal integrity of employees of the Department of State,” according to a Dissent Channel cable newly released to the National Security Archive after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

This 1974 cable from the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, one of the earliest sent via the Dissent Channel, is one of dozens of messages, together with responses by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, posted today by the National Security Archive. Cables sent via the Dissent Channel are formal critiques of US policy by employees of the State Department. State responded to the Tegucigalpla dissent by stating that “current guidance...regarding Congressional travel is adequate.”

The topics covered in these formal cables vary widely, from moral concerns over embassies soliciting female companionship for US Congressmen, to calls for the US to act to stop “genocide,” to warnings of errors in intelligence reporting from the Vietnam War, to recommended changes in grand strategy towards the Soviet Union and China. Among the dissents and responses posted today by the Archive are:

• A dissent over the 1972 “attacks against fuel and other storage facilities in Haiphong [Harbor]” arguing that the renewed bombing was “a breach of the spirit if not the letter of our stated policy to disengage from the Indo-China conflict.” According to the authors, “military triumph, at this juncture, is well beyond the grasp of the United States..."

Declassification

Inside the CIA’s Plot to Kill Fidel Castro—With Mafia Help

The conspiracy, including the mobsters’ involvement in it and the CIA’s oversight of it, has been known about for years. But the documents—from the CIA, FBI and other agencies, which had kept the files secret in full or in part for decades—provide several new details about the gangsters, their plot and their friendship. Together, these sources paint the most comprehensive picture yet of America’s first confirmed attempt at state-sponsored assassination of a foreign leader.

The files reveal, for instance, the range of Giancana’s and Roselli’s world of co-conspirators, including CIA spies and handlers, a fellow Mafioso (and former cop) in Chicago, Castro’s double agents in Miami, beautiful Hollywood women, “Rat Pack” entertainers like Frank Sinatra, a snooping J. Edgar Hoover and zealously anti-communist White House officials. The documents also provide new details about the mobsters’ violent schemes to kill Castro, which included everything from explosions and gunfire during midnight boat raids to hidden poisons prepared by the agency’s lab. During the early 1960s, the CIA’s quest to kill Castro turned southern Florida into a secret war zone and became a wild whack-a-mole hunt inside Cuba—all without luck. The ever-elusive despot died of old age in 2016.

Declassification

How 1920s British spy agency files reveal a proto-Cold War rife with intrigue

Belfast native Timothy Phillips, author of Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (2008), has an Oxford doctorate in Russian Studies. Since his Beslan book—about the siege at the southern Russia school by Chechen terrorists—he has pored over newly declassified British files pertaining to the turbulent 1920s. In them Phillips found traces of a proto-Cold War that began decades before the real one, the foundations of Western-Russian relations for the coming century, and a treasure trove of very human details, all laid out in his new book, The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians and the Jazz Age.

Q: How did the release of this material come about? This is not, to put it mildly, the usual practice of a spy agency.

A: Back in the 1990s, MI5 decided to declassify some of its historic material. Basically it started with First World War material and then moved on to the second war—the best stories for them to tell because we were the good guys and we were on the winning side. Starting 10 to 15 years ago came the stuff from the 1920s. Now we pretty much have it all—96, 97 per cent of what wasn’t destroyed over the years. All from MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence agency, that is. MI6, which spies abroad, has not been subjected to the same declassification exercise, although very occasionally in the MI5 archives I found an MI6 document that had been shared with its counterpart, and that was a very exciting moment. My book is the beneficiary of what I think is a unique project in the world—a major intelligence agency unilaterally deciding to open its files.

Declassification

The Archive's Peter Kornbluh Receives O'Higgins Prize

The National Security Archive's senior analyst, Peter Kornbluh, has been inducted into "the order of Bernardo O'Higgins." Chile's Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes presented the award, which the Chilean government gives to foreigners who have made a special contribution to Chilean society, during a Sunday ceremony at the Chilean Embassy.

In presenting the award, Ambassador Valdes recognized Kornbluh's leadership role in decades of efforts to obtain the declassification of secret documents on the coup and the Pinochet regime. In his acceptance speech Kornbluh noted that the documents were invaluable to "speaking truth to power" because there "was no better way to reveal the truth than to reveal the words those in power spoke and wrote."

Kornbluh directs the Archives's Chile Documentation Project, and is author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.  An Archive associate, John Dinges, author of the Condor Years, also received the O'Higgins award, as did Aviva Kempner a longtime activist and benefactor of the Chile solidarity movement.

Declassification

Chile: Secrets of State

Forty-four years after the U.S. supported military coup, the Santiago Museum of Memory and Human Rights has inaugurated a special exhibit of declassified CIA, FBI, Defense Department and White house records on the U.S. role in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship. The unusual exhibit, which officially opened to the public on September 5, is titled Secretos de Estado: La Historia Desclasificada de la Dictadura Chilena—Secrets of State: the Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship.

Curated by National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, the exhibit consists of 45 formerly classified documents dated between 1970 when Richard Nixon ordered to the CIA to instigate a coup in Chile, and October 1988 when General Augusto Pinochet sought to orchestrate a second coup after losing a plebiscite to stay in power.

Using creative presentations and lighting, the exhibit examines:

• the CIA’s covert operations between 1970 and 1973 to undermine the socialist government of Salvador Allende,
• the secret CIA payments to, and meetings with, Chilean media mogul Agustin Edwards and his newspaper, El Mercurio;
• intelligence reports on the military repression
• Operation Condor, the Southern Cone secret police collaboration led by the Pinochet regime to track down and eliminate opponents.
• Pinochet’s Machiavellian plot to foment violence and a second coup the night he lost the plebiscite in October 1988.

Declassification

Secret CIA Docs Reveal What Worried US Intel Most About Soviet Navy Capabilities

The Central Intelligence Agency has released some 2,000 pages of formerly classified materials on the Soviet Navy during the Cold War. Military observer Andrei Kotz takes a look at some of the most fascinating conclusions Western intelligence analysts reached about the Soviet Navy's presumed strengths and weaknesses.

The trove of documents, encompassing 82 reports spanning three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, includes everything from translations of materials from 'Military Thought', a Soviet military journal, to high-level US national intelligence estimates of Soviet naval power, to agency reports focused on subs, carriers, cruise missiles, and more.

The documents confirm that the US military leadership saw the Soviet Navy as a serious threat to US naval hegemony, and that they allocated generous funding to intelligence studies on the subject. The materials touched on practically all aspects of Soviet naval military thought, from the characteristics of its ship-based anti-aircraft missile systems, to the tactical configuration of submarine strike groups.