The National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions in one non governmental, non-profit institution. The Archive is simultaneously a research institute on international affairs, a library and archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, a public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information through the FOIA, and an indexer and publisher of the documents in books, microfiche, and electronic formats. The Archive's approximately $2.3 million yearly budget comes from publication revenues and from private philanthropists such as the Carnegie Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation.  As a matter of policy, the Archive receives no government funding.

The National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who had obtained documentation from the U.S. government under the Freedom of Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over the past decade, the Archive has become the world's largest non governmental library of declassified documents. Located on the seventh floor of the George Washington University's Gelman Library in Washington, D.C., the Archive is designed to apply the latest in computerized indexing technology to the massive amount of material already released by the U.S. government on international affairs, make them accessible to researchers and the public, and go beyond that base to build comprehensive collections of documents on specific topics of greatest interest to scholars and the public.

The Archive's holdings include more than two million pages of accessioned material in over 200 separate collections. Supporting some 30 terminals, the Archive's computer system hosts major databases of released documents (over 100,000 records), authority files of individuals and organizations in international affairs (over 30,000 records), and FOIA requests filed by Archive staff and outside requesters on international affairs (over 20,000 records). Despite the Archive's non-traditional role (since the originals remain inside the government -- hopefully), Archive staff have developed extensive expertise with all levels of archival recordkeeping, ranging from basic collection description to box- and file-level inventories to individual document cataloging.

The Archive reading room is open to the public without charge and has welcomed visitors from 32 foreign countries and across the United States--some of whom stay for weeks. The Archive fields more than 2,500 public service requests for documents and information every year. Archive staff are frequently called on to testify before Congress, lecture at universities, and appear on national broadcasts and in media interviews on the subject of the Freedom of Information Act and various topics in international affairs for which the Archive's collections provide documentation.

The Archive's financial affairs are administered by The National Security Archive Fund, Inc., a not-for-profit District of Columbia-based corporation established exclusively to promote research and public education on U.S. governmental and national security decisionmaking and to promote openness in government and government accountability through making government information more widely available to the public. Audited financial reports for the National Security Archive's activities prior to 1999 are included in the annual audits performed by the CPA firms of Keller Bruner & Company (1993-1998) and Deloitte & Touche (1985-1992) for the Fund for Peace, Inc., a New York-based tax-exempt corporation which served as the Archive's fiscal sponsor from 1985-1998. As an operating division of the National Security Archive Fund, Inc., the Archive receives tax-deductible funding from foundations, and approximately 10% of the Archive's annual budget from publication royalties.

The first major publication of the Archive was a 678-page mass market paperback published by Warner Books in 1987, The Chronology, on the Iran-contra affair. Time magazine called the book "must reading," and Ted Koppel of ABC News Nightline praised it for including "every known fact about the Iran-contra scandal."
 
 

The second Archive publication project has produced a series of large microform collections of documents on U.S. foreign policy as well as a CD-ROM index to the entire series co-published by the scholarly micropublisher Chadwyck-Healey, Inc. These collections include an average of 16,000 pages of documents released through the FOIA and other governmental processes, accompanied by finding aids which average over 1,700 pages for each collection--indices, catalogs, chronologies, glossaries, bibliographies and introductory essays. More than 400 copies of these microfiche collections have been purchased by universities and research libraries and in ten foreign countries. Microform Review stated, "The NSA series is unusual in public document publishing... it makes documents available from the twilight zone between currently released government information, and normal declassification after the elapse of the statutory period." Government Publications Review wrote that "NSA collections are almost universally praised for adding a new and invaluable research tool to national security studies." Other reviews in the library press have noted the collections' comprehensive coverage, user-friendly guides, state-of-the-art indexing and quality archival microfiche. Published collections include:

• El Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977-1984
• The Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal, 1983-1988
• Iran: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977-1980
• The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
• The U.S. Intelligence Community, 1947-1989
• The Philippines: U.S. Policy during the Marcos Years, 1965-1986
• Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973-1990
• Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978-1990
• South Africa: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1962-1989
• Military Uses of Space: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1945-1991
• Nuclear Non-Proliferation, 1945-1991
• The Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962
• Presidential Directives on National Security: From Truman to Clinton
• Iraqgate: Saddam Hussein, U.S. Policy and the Prelude to the Persian Gulf War (1980-1994)
• The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991
• El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980-1994
• U.S. Espionage and Intelligence, 1947-1996
• U.S. Nuclear History: Nuclear Arms and Politics in the Missile Age, 1955-1968
• China and the United States: From Hostility to Engagement, 1960-1998
• Japan and the United States: Diplomatic, Security, and Economic Relations, 1960-1976
• The National Security Archive Index on CD-ROM: The Making of U.S. Policy
• The Digital National Security Archive (Subscription product on the WWW)

 
The Archive publishes document readers for classroom and general public use. One of these series is published by The New Press and distributed by W.W. Norton & Company. The first volume, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (415 pp.), appeared in October 1992 (the 30th anniversary of the Crisis), with a foreword by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; the second reader, The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (412 pp.), appeared in May 1993 with a foreword by Theodore Draper. The Washington Post Book World recommended the Missile Crisis book to "the reader who wishes to gain a sense of involvement in the travails of the crisis managers;" and the Tampa Tribune described the Iran-contra reader as a "Rosetta Stone" for deciphering the scandal. The third volume, South Africa and the United States: The Declassified History, was published in March 1994. The fourth volume, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House tried to Destroy(254 pp.), reached bookstores in November 1995, and included a floppy disk containing 260 e-mail messages in addition to the 256-page paperback. The New York Times hailed the book as "a stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait." The most recent of the documents readers include Bay of Pigs Declassified and The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow. The second set of readers includes The Prague Spring 1968, published by the Central European University Press in Budapest.

In the process of developing its extensive collections, the Archive has become the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The Archive has inherited more than 2,000 requests from outside requesters who donated their documents and their pending requests to the Archive, and initiated more than 20,000 other FOIA requests over the past fifteen years. The Archive's work has set new precedents under the FOIA, including more efficient procedures for document processing at the State Department, less burden on requesters to qualify for waivers of processing fees, and the archival preservation of electronic information held by the government. Archive lawsuits under FOIA have forced the release of previously secret documents ranging from the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters during the Cuban Missile Crisis to the diaries of Oliver North during Iran-contra.  The Archive's expertise in the U.S. FOIA, as well as in archival and library practices, has brought delegations from South Africa, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and various Latin American countries to the Archive to learn from this innovative model of a non governmental institutional memory for formerly secret government documents and the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive is currently working with non governmental institutions in more than a dozen countries to expand open government laws and practices both here and abroad.