Hidden in the Archives · Drawer 02
National Archives
Intelligence files, spies, cables, investigations, and millions of pages waiting for someone to ask the right question.
If the Library of Congress feels a little like wandering through someone’s bookshelves, the National Archives feels different. This is where the government puts its files. Or, more accurately, some of them. Intelligence records can remain with originating agencies for years because of classification and other restrictions, and the record you need may be in a State Department file, a military record, a White House collection, a congressional investigation, or the papers of a commission created years after the event.
Start Here
If you only have 30 minutes
Open three things: Record Group 263, the records of the Central Intelligence Agency; Record Group 226, the records of the Office of Strategic Services; and the 9/11 Commission records. Together they give you CIA, its World War II predecessor, and one of the most consequential investigations of the modern American intelligence community.
If you have an afternoon
Pick one intelligence problem and follow it across agencies. What did intelligence know? What did State know? What did the military know? What reached the White House? Did Congress investigate it later? Now you are reconstructing the information environment.
CIA & OSS
Record Group 263 | Central Intelligence Agency
The National Archives’ CIA holdings are organized principally under Record Group 263. The record group contains intelligence studies, historical records, Foreign Broadcast Information Service material, foreign-document records, textual records, maps, motion pictures, and sound recordings. NARA has digitized useful CIA collections including early Intelligence Publication Files, Team A/Team B records, articles from Studies in Intelligence, National Intelligence Estimates and related correspondence, and a historical study of Allen Dulles’s tenure as Director of Central Intelligence.
Pull the files → CIA records at NARA
Record Group 226 | Office of Strategic Services
Before CIA there was OSS, and NARA’s Record Group 226 is enormous. The holdings encompass intelligence reports, cables, Secret Intelligence material, Special Operations records, Research and Analysis files, records associated with Director William Donovan, administrative material, and personnel records. Researchers can use them not simply to study particular operations but to examine how an American intelligence organization collected, analyzed, communicated, and acted on information during World War II.
Pull the files → OSS Record Group 226
The Files They Didn’t Release the First Time
CIA withheld a large body of OSS and Strategic Services Unit records under sources-and-methods protections. In 1997, the Agency transferred approximately 617 cubic feet of this previously withheld material to NARA in eleven archival series. Whenever a collection was released in stages, ask what came out first, what remained withheld, why it was withheld, and when the additional records became available.
Pull the files → OSS Sources & Methods
9/11 & the Terrorism Drawer
Go Behind the Commission Report
Do not stop with the 9/11 Commission Report. The National Archives holds the Commission’s underlying records, including a large body of material that was originally national-security classified. Commission staff conducted more than 1,200 fact-finding interviews, and summaries of many of those interviews, known as Memoranda for the Record, can be searched through NARA. The MFR index lets researchers work person by person and see affiliation, interview date, page count, and release status.
Pull the collection → 9/11 Commission records Search the interviews → MFRs
Cables, the White House & Congress
Follow the Information Across Government
If you are researching foreign affairs and looking only at intelligence records, you are leaving part of the picture behind. State Department records include diplomatic correspondence, central files, country and policy material, geographic-bureau records, and cables. Presidential records and Presidential Libraries can help answer a different question: not simply what the Intelligence Community assessed, but what reached senior policymakers and what they did with it. Records of Congress add another angle through committee investigations, hearings, correspondence, staff work, and material supplied by executive agencies.
Explore foreign-policy records → Explore presidential records →
The Map Drawer
Never forget the maps. NARA holds extensive cartographic material across federal record groups, including military, operational, boundary, and intelligence-related maps as well as aerial and geographic records. If you are researching an operation, attack, movement network, or military campaign, pull a contemporary map before deciding you understand the reporting.
From the Research Desk
The Catalog is not the archive.
Some documents have been digitized. Millions have not. Sometimes a successful search ends with a description telling you that the records you want occupy several boxes in College Park. That is not failure. You found the haystack. Learn the record groups, then work downward from record group to series, file unit, and individual document when available. Keep the National Archives Identifier, series, box, and folder information in your research notes.