The Correspondence of Curtis Lemay By: Rhiannon Roberts While stationed at Offutt AFB, Nebraska; Lt. Gen. Curtis Lemay coordinated the Korean War effort through diligent command of the SAC or Strategic Air Command; the founding of this particular organization was to support bomber aircraft with nuclear capabilities. The following correspondence is from Lt. Gen. Lemay [...]

By: Rhiannon Roberts The Korean War officially ended on July 27, 1953 with an armistice agreement signed by Lt. Gen. William Harrison Jr., Representative of the United Nations; and Gen. Nam II, Representative for the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. While the world had waited with bated breath for some reprieve from the [...]

by Ms Sarah Anderson The photo was found tucked away in a folder describing the U.S. Army-Marine Corps Steering Group requirements for hostile mortar locating equipment for use in South Vietnam.   Miss Hostile Mortar According to the report, during World War II and Korea “hostile mortars caused a greater percentage of casualties that any other [...]

Thank you Ms. Anderson for finding this great document this morning. This declassified document needs no introduction.  The document can be found in Record Group 43 within the Council of Foreign Minsters: General Records, ca. 1945-1955, box 290.  The Record Entry 617693 and ARC ID 1488684. NATO Notice D7-D.N/8, September 16, 1951

By Michael Rhodes Last year, the National Declassification Center released, scanned, and posted several pages from declassified U.S. Air Force reports. Digital copies of those same documents are now available, in full, on the National Archives Archival Research Catalog (ARC) [http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/] Project 1794 Final Development Summary Report, 06/1956 [ARC ID 6920770] Program Planning Report, Project [...]

This post is from NDC Archives Specialist John Ritz. While working on a FOIA request for Department of State records, I came across a document which immediately caught my attention.  I showed it to several coworkers who encouraged me to share it with a broader audience. The document is a Memorandum of Conversation between President Roosevelt and [...]

Today, the Public Interest Declassification Board released online its recommendations to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System.  The full Report can be found at http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb/recommendations/transforming-classification.html.  The report centers on the need for new policies for classifying information, new processes for declassifying information, and the imperative for using and integrating technology into these processes.  [...]

The Public Interest Declassification Board will host an open meeting on Thursday, December 6, 2012 to discuss its recommendations to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System.  The full Report to the President will be published online on December 6th at http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb.  The meeting will focus on the Board’s fourteen recommendations.  The recommendations center [...]

Continuing to answer questions posed at the August 29, 2012 Open Forum. How many agencies now have file series exemptions and approximately how many pages are covered by each? For this question, I consulted with my colleagues at the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).  Here is their answer:  The following agencies have approved file series [...]

Last week’s open forum was well attended with a lively discussion.  Once again, we had some questions that did not get answered.  Over the next few days, I will be posting and answering these questions. The first question is:  Do any of the records the NDC is processing contain codeword material (e.g. sensitive compartmented information [...]