The CIA History Program: Inventory 1995
Seventy-three pages listing the histories the CIA has written about itself, each with its author, date, classification and volume count. The list runs from a ten-volume account of the agency up to 1950, through Sherman Kent's two papers on showing the Cuban missile photographs to allied governments, to a three-volume official history of the Bay of Pigs finished in 1979 and marked Top Secret. What was released is the catalog, not the histories.
This is the catalogue of the histories the CIA has written about itself, as it stood in 1995. Each entry carries an author, a date, a classification and a volume count. The series names read like a filing system that grew for forty years without anyone stopping to prune it: Early Histories, Miscellaneous Series, The Directors of Central Intelligence, the Office of Basic and Geographic Intelligence, the Information Requirements Staff, Foreign Broadcast Information Services.
An inventory is not the history. It establishes scale and subject while giving away almost none of the contents: what the agency thought deserved an official account, how long each one ran, and who was assigned to write it. Reading it is like being handed the spine labels of a library nobody can enter.
The CIA approved the inventory for release in July 2023.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://www.governmentattic.org/62docs/CIAcshp1995.pdf
- Collected
- This copy
- 843 KB · 73 pages · archived here
- Rights
- Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
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