CIA Reading Room

What the reading room is

The CIA’s Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room is where the agency publishes records it has declassified.^[11] Its largest collection is CREST, the CIA Records Search Tool. In January 2017 about 930,000 documents, more than 12 million pages, were put online there with full-text search.^[1]

CREST holds records released through automatic review: an executive order requires agencies to review permanent records for declassification once they are 25 years old.^[1] For a researcher of Soviet secrecy, that makes it a rare mirror. The Soviet state hid places and events from its citizens; the CIA was trying to see them from outside.

Four computers in Maryland

From 2000, CREST could be searched only at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, on four computers, during limited business hours.^[3] Researchers who wanted the records had to travel there.^[2]

The news site MuckRock sued for access, and the researcher Emma Best (then publishing as Michael Best) began printing and scanning the documents at the Archives to put them online independently.^[3][12] During the lawsuit the CIA estimated it would take 28 years to process the files, later cut to six.^[3][4] The agency then gave in and published the whole database in January 2017.^[1][3]

From the files

A few records that touch the subjects on this site. The code on each card is the document’s number in the reading room, which you can paste into its search box.

• CIA/RR-ER-8 How the Soviets made maps

  A June 1954 study of the Soviet civilian mapping agency. It admits that intelligence on Soviet mapping was extremely thin, so it was built almost entirely from published Soviet sources.^[5][6]

• CIA-RDP78-01617A002600050001-7 Suspecting the maps

  An early appraisal of official Soviet maps notes a known policy of leaving information off them, and a German prisoner-of-war report claiming they had been falsified. The analysts could not yet confirm it.^[7]

• CIA-RDP02T06408R000800010080-4 Watching Kyshtym from above

  The reading room holds 1960s photographic interpretation reports on the Kyshtym atomic complex, the site of the 1957 disaster the USSR denied until 1989.^[8]

• CIA-RDP05T00644R000100060008-0 Keeping Kyshtym quiet

  In October 1978 CIA staff advised the Director against releasing an unclassified account of the Kyshtym accident, even though its own advisers had suggested it to correct exaggerated press stories.^[9]

Two governments, one secret

The Kyshtym files show that secrecy was not only a Soviet habit. According to one environmental history, the CIA had a clear picture of the disaster by 1960 through informants and aerial photographs, yet the information was kept from the public for years, partly to avoid alarming people about the American nuclear industry.^[10] The October 1978 memo above is one piece of that story.^[9]

Searching it yourself

The search runs on text read from scanned typewritten pages, and that reading is often garbled. In the 1978 memo, for example, the machine-read subject line turns “Kyshtym” into nonsense.^[9] If a search comes up empty, try other spellings of Soviet place names, a shorter word, or the document number itself.

Start at the CIA reading room.^[11]

Sources

1. “CIA Posts More Than 12 Million Pages of CREST Records Online.” CIA, 17 January 2017. www.cia.gov
2. “Open Government Comes to CIA: Agency Posts Millions of Declassified Docs.” Project On Government Oversight, 18 January 2017. www.pogo.org
3. “13 Million Pages of Declassified CIA Documents Were Just Posted Online.” Vice. www.vice.com
4. McClanahan, Kel. “Our three-year saga to release 13 million pages of CIA secrets.” MuckRock, 19 January 2017. www.muckrock.com
5. CIA Office of Research and Reports. The Organization of Soviet Geodesy and Cartography (CIA/RR-ER-8). CIA Reading Room. cia.gov
6. “Requirement Support (Sanitized).” CIA Reading Room. www.cia.gov
7. CIA map appraisal of Soviet general maps. CIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP78-01617A002600050001-7. www.cia.gov
8. Reference list in “A Nuclear Generator of Clouds: Accidents and Radioactive Contamination Identified on Declassified Satellite Photographs in the Mayak Chemical Combine, Southern Urals.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. www.cambridge.org
9. “The Kyshtym Nuclear Accident.” CIA memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, 20 October 1978. CIA Reading Room, document CIA-RDP05T00644R000100060008-0. www.cia.gov
10. “The Nuclear Disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the Politics of the Cold War.” Arcadia, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. www.environmentandsociety.org
11. CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. www.cia.gov
12. “The CIA’s declassified database is now online.” MuckRock, 17 January 2017. www.muckrock.com