New online collection of declassified documents chronicles America’s “year of intelligence”

By Loren Blinde June 18, 2015

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As Americans once again scrutinize elements of the Patriot Act, the National Security Archive and its publishing partner, Ann Arbor, MI-based ProQuest, are providing new avenues for research on government spying, ProQuest announced June 18. The Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) has expanded to include CIA Covert Operations II: The Year of Intelligence, 1975, a collection of 1,000 declassified documents that reveal the inner-workings of America’s spy agencies during a season of intense public inquiry. With this collection, DNSA becomes available on the ProQuest platform, enabling all DNSA documents to be cross-searched with the diverse content that students and faculty require to fully explore their area of research, such as newspaper archives, working papers, journal articles, ebooks, and other unique primary sources.

CIA Covert Operations II: The Year of Intelligence, 1975, captures the first full year of the Ford administration, when a wave of media revelations of official abuses and wrongdoing by America’s spy agencies prompted wide investigations. The groundbreaking Church, Pike, and Rockefeller Commission reports are included, as well as previously unavailable supporting documentation of the inner workings of the three investigations. The scope of the collection is sweeping, touching on every aspect of intelligence work, including:

Covert operations
Assassinations
Spying on domestic political dissenters
Intrusive NSA eavesdropping
Organization and functions of U.S. intelligence
Crisis response
Intelligence analysis
Other types of agency activity

“It is impossible to understand the full significance of the political and legal debates over the array of post-9/11 intelligence scandals without access to this groundbreaking chapter in our nation’s history,” said University of Georgia professor Loch K. Johnson, member of the Church Committee staff and a widely acknowledged intelligence expert. “Both the substance of the revelations and the policy, political, and legal questions they raised almost four decades ago make the uniquely wide-ranging ‘Year of Intelligence’ collection indispensable for students of the U.S. intelligence community, national security affairs, presidential decision-making in foreign policy, and the role of Congress and the media in government oversight.”

When coupled with DNSA’s CIA Covert Operations: From Carter to Obama, 1977-2010, researchers have access to more than 3,000 declassified documents that provide an unparalleled view into the operational and diplomatic history of U.S. covert operations.

DNSA is a creation of the National Security Archive with its associated experts and top scholars, and presented exclusively by ProQuest. Now totaling 45 collections that cover the most critical world events, countries, and U.S. policy decisions from post-World War II through the 21st century, DNSA provides unmatched multi-source access to the defining international strategies of our time through: