Hidden in the Archives · Drawer 01
Library of Congress
CIA records, intelligence history, and a few things you probably didn’t know were sitting there.
Most people probably do not think of the Library of Congress when they think about CIA records. They should. The Library holds personal papers belonging to intelligence officers, records from investigations of the CIA, declassified intelligence documents, maps, government reports, and archived versions of the CIA’s own website. Some of the most interesting material is not sitting beneath a giant heading marked CIA. It is buried in manuscript collections built around the people who did the work, the commissions that investigated it, and the government collections that absorbed intelligence records years later.
Start Here
If you only have 30 minutes
Start with the Rockefeller Commission records, then look through the CIA material available online from the Vietnam era, and finish by going backward through the Library’s archived CIA website. Those three stops show three very different ways intelligence history survives.
If you have an afternoon
Pick one person or event and build a trail. Write down every useful name, organization, date, location, and document number you encounter, then search those. If you are researching a person, search the people around them. If you are researching an event, search the agencies and officials who would have touched it.
Worth Pulling From the Shelf
The Rockefeller Commission Records
President Gerald Ford created the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States in 1975 amid allegations concerning improper CIA domestic activities. The Library holds the commission’s underlying records, including testimony, interviews, investigative files, classified reference material, and records concerning proposed or considered assassinations of foreign leaders. Final reports tell you what investigators decided to publish. Working files help show what they were examining while they reached those conclusions.
Pull the file → Rockefeller Commission Records
The Intelligence Officers’ Papers
The Library preserves personal papers from people whose careers intersected directly with American intelligence, including Ray S. Cline, David Atlee Phillips, Archibald Roosevelt Jr., Wallace Rankin Deuel, and Cord Meyer. These collections can preserve the ecosystem around the official record: correspondence, drafts, notes, professional relationships, arguments, recollections, and material showing how someone understood events while they were unfolding or after they were over.
Pull the files → CIA-related manuscript collections
The Declassified Drawer
Some CIA records at the Library can be opened from home. One collection contains 342 pages concerning interrogations of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army defectors and captured personnel from the 1960s. Another contains 152 pages of miscellaneous CIA material released through a Freedom of Information Act request involving American POW/MIA issues in Southeast Asia. These records are a useful reminder of how intelligence enters the system.
Pull the file → Vietnam interrogation records Pull the file → Miscellaneous CIA records
The Map Drawer
The Library’s Geography and Map Division preserves CIA-produced maps of Afghanistan across different periods, including a 1971 map showing population, ethnolinguistic groups, land use, and economic activity and a detailed 2012 country profile with provincial and district information as well as maps depicting ethnolinguistic groups, population density, rainfall, and poppy cultivation.
Pull the map → Afghanistan 1971 Pull the map → Afghanistan country profile 2012
The CIA’s Lost Internet
The Library of Congress Web Archive preserved versions of the CIA website across the early public internet era. Government webpages change, documents move, biographies are rewritten, sections disappear, and language evolves. An old webpage may not look particularly interesting until you realize the current version no longer says the same thing. When an old government reference leads to a page that has disappeared, ask a simple question: What did the page used to say?
From the Research Desk
Search the problem, not just the agency.
The biggest mistake would be typing CIA into the Library of Congress search bar and assuming the results represent everything the Library has on CIA. Search the person’s full name and alternate spellings, the operation, country, city, organization and year, congressional investigations, and officials who worked the same issue. Once you find a useful document, harvest it for names, dates, organizations, locations, document numbers, and references to earlier or later reporting. One document should give you the next search.