Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Declassified documents

Here are some suggestions on finding declassified, or sometimes just administratively controlled, documents online, including a few tricks to make them more readable. A few places are mentioned, with caveats as appropriate, where there often are reliable leaks.

One general suggestion: when searching on Google, etc, the quality of a first search improves tremendously, and doesn't pick up tinfoil hat conspiracies or third-hand summaries, if you search on full titles of agencies, documents, etc. For example, search on "Central Intelligence Agency" for your first try, not CIA.

If you have something to share about how things work in your country in this context, kindly add them to the end of the page.

United States

If you find material excised/not declassified/redacted, etc, don't give up. The National Security Archive (below) is especially good at pointing out that something censored out of one document may be in another, which will have different deletions. They, the Federation of American Scientists, and other groups will often appeal deletions. If they lose the appeal, they may still have some very informed speculation on the page. In some cases, they have filed appeal after appeal, and won after a number of years, so if what you want was redacted, check back periodically.

Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)

These are official records, put out by the Historian of the Department of State: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. The earlier ones are in hard copy only, but the more recent ones are online and decently put into machine-readable text – possibly by hand, but if scanned, very well edited. A given document may have some sections not declassified. You are more likely to find a document with a general-purpose search engine than by using theirs.

It may seem that FRUS is mostly chronological by the US Presidential Administration, but that can be misleading. Periodically, they will put out a volume of long-classified material, such as the approval process for covert actions, that covers several administrations that is well over 25, or sometimes 50, years old.

One annoying part of their user interface is that you'll get a summary page and index of the documents, and then you have to jump to a section of it, all in PDF. When you hit "back" on your browser, it takes you to the top of the index page, and you have to scroll back down to get to the desired section. If you think you will keep going to that section, bookmark it.

George Washington University National Security Archive

There will be excellent summaries of the overall area being discussed, comments on documents, and, if there are various releases of the same document, with different declassifications, those documents will be grouped together. According to many, the biggest complaint is that they scan documents into PDF, but do not do Optical Character Recognition.

Federation of American Scientists

FAS is an excellent resource, but its focus has changed over the years. It used to carry detailed military information, but John Pike, who maintained that part, moved off and founded http://www.globalsecurity.org/. AFAIK, it was a friendly parting. Their search engine could be better; it's usually best to hunt around manually. ePrints and "hot documents" often are not available elsewhere.

Secrecy News and Steven Aftergood

Many suggest subscribing to Secrecy News, edited by Steven Aftergood, who has an excellent reputation in Washington for testimony on excessive secrecy. While Congressional Research Service reports are not classified, they are not yet routinely made available. Aftergood usually has relevant ones on his website a few days after release.

• The Secrecy News Blog is at: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to: http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/subscribe.html
• Secrecy News is archived at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html

Cryptome.org

Regard this as a leak site, expect to find quite a few conspiracy theories, but also a lot of solid content. It is available at http://www.cryptome.org

Central Intelligence Agency

There are several public areas, some easier to read than others.

Center for the Study of Intelligence

Great material at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/index.html, although, again, some of it is hard to retrieve unless you know where to look. It is a good area to read and sample, but if you want to find something in their in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, go to the operations index page for it: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/subjectII.htm.

FOIA Reading Room

This is driven by their search engine, and you need to have a good idea what you want to find. Code words help. For example, not everything declassified that came from Oleg Penkovsky will come up on a name search; you should also search under the code name for his materials, IRONBARK. Their reader interface was reported to be hard for usage. For some obscure reason, it doesn't show full pages, just half pages down which you must scroll, and then click to the next page. There is a feature to print entire documents, and also Microsoft Office's document imaging tool might be of some help.

National Security Agency

They have a section for declassified documents at https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/, which tends to long but detailed historical volumes, usually originally prepared for internal use at the TOP SECRET/CCO level, and then selectively declassified. Other volumes, especially the older histories, started out declassified. Other documents are available in hard copy only, but they will mail them if you call them or request them by email. Both the CIA and NSA history people are very nice if you phone them.

Canada

Canada seems to be the country that tries to classify as little as possible.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service

Publications index page: http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/en/publications/publications.asp. This is the English version; there is also a comparable set in French, sometimes available from the same page and sometimes, one needs to go back to the home page and select French.

United Kingdom

The National Archives/Public Record Office at Kew, regularly releases declassified documents about military and intelligence operations. Some such releases include the operations of MI5 during the Second World War and U.K's support to Indonesia to invade East Timor. A Google search may be of better help than their search. However, obviously we have to be careful about original research.

Australia

The Australian War Memorial has digitized most its holdings of Australian Army war diaries and made them available online on their website. While these are obviously primary sources and need to be used with care (especially as they're not always accurate) they're a great resource. Here are some links to the collections:

• Unit and Commander's War Diaries
• Australian Imperial Force unit war diaries, 1914–18 War
• Official Histories, Rolls & Unit Diaries

The National Archives of Australia's collection includes a large number of military-related documents including service, administrative, and cabinet records:

• Fact sheets on defence and war service records

India

The National Archives of India (http://nationalarchives.nic.in/) is the one of the best places to search for the declassified documents. However search techniques matter a lot to get to the right page. A unique search engine to dig through the archives is available at http://www.abhilekh-patal.in/jspui/. The department also maintains an exclusive section of declassified documents related to Subhas Chandra Bose, called "Netaji Papers" (http://www.netajipapers.gov.in/). The department also offers services for research and references purposes.