INTERPOL Washington: Unpublished Histories of the US National Central Bureau (2004-2025)
INTERPOL Washington told a requester some years ago that it held no document summarizing its own history. A 2026 FOIA request produced 78 pages instead: a chronology of US relations with INTERPOL, an unfinished account of the 2003 memorandum with Homeland Security, and a finding aid for the papers of a former US representative.
American police agencies reach INTERPOL through the US National Central Bureau, an office that had no official account of itself. A staff member emails a colleague a chronology he wrote himself. Another circulates a draft carrying its own warning, "the rawest of drafts, as it contains direct quotes that I had not yet marked for attribution." A third contribution is a finding aid for the Arnold Sagalyn papers at American University, whose holdings include "a scrapbook of Christmas cards from Interpol heads and officers from around the world (1964-1967)."
The chronology records a thirty-year argument between Treasury and Justice over which of them owned the office. Hoover had withdrawn formal US participation, leaving Treasury agents to maintain what the document calls "side-door" relationships on narcotics and counterfeiting. The Bates numbering runs to 222 pages. Eighty-nine were withheld in full as law enforcement techniques, twenty-eight as deliberative, and two because a foreign bureau sent them.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://www.governmentattic.org/62docs/INTERPOLncbUnpubHist2004-2025.pdf
- Collected
- This copy
- 4.7 MB · 78 pages · archived here
- Rights
- Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
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