Primary source analysis, document spotlights, and research from the Intelligence Archive.
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
Inside the CIA's Secret Psychological Autopsy of Adolf Hitler Two years after Hitler's death, American intelligence wasn't finished studying him. A newly declassified 1947 report reveals how the United States systematically debriefed Hitler's inner circle — his doctors, adjutants, ministers, an...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Blueprint for America's Cold War Mind War: The Classified 1953 Jackson Report Six months into his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower received a 133-page Top Secret blueprint for winning the global battle of ideas against the Soviet Union — a document so consequential it reshaped how America proj...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
When the CIA Dropped Agents Into Albania: The Secret THUNDERCLAP Airdrop of 1951 In the summer of 1951, the CIA parachuted a covert team into communist Albania — and an 11-page classified cable captured nearly everything that went wrong. Declassified decades later, the THUNDERCLAP Airdrop Opera...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
Behind Enemy Lines in the Alps: The Declassified OSS File on "Steve" Hall's Wartime Mission Into German-Occupied Italy A newly surfaced 34-page OSS intelligence report pulls back the curtain on one of the most harrowing clandestine missions of the Italian campaign — a parachute insertion into G...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
Inside the CIA's Secret Psychological Autopsy of Adolf Hitler Two years after Hitler's death, American intelligence wasn't finished studying him. A newly declassified 1947 report reveals how the United States systematically debriefed Hitler's inner circle — his doctors, adjutants, ministers, an...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Blueprint for America's Cold War Mind War: The Classified 1953 Jackson Report Six months into his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower received a 133-page Top Secret blueprint for winning the global battle of ideas against the Soviet Union — a document so consequential it reshaped how America proj...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
When the CIA Dropped Agents Into Albania: The Secret THUNDERCLAP Airdrop of 1951 In the summer of 1951, the CIA parachuted a covert team into communist Albania — and an 11-page classified cable captured nearly everything that went wrong. Declassified decades later, the THUNDERCLAP Airdrop Opera...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
Behind Enemy Lines in the Alps: The Declassified OSS File on "Steve" Hall's Wartime Mission Into German-Occupied Italy A newly surfaced 34-page OSS intelligence report pulls back the curtain on one of the most harrowing clandestine missions of the Italian campaign — a parachute insertion into G...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Letter That Killed the OSS — And Planted the Seeds of the CIA On September 20, 1945, President Harry S. Truman signed a letter that dissolved America's first modern spy agency with six weeks' notice. What followed was a bureaucratic scramble that would shape U.S. intelligence for the next e...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
When Spies Became Bureaucrats: The 1984 Report That Exposed the OSS's Paper War Within a Real War Declassified documents tend to reveal secrets about enemies. This one reveals something more uncomfortable — the secrets an intelligence agency kept about itself. A 1984 report from The Washington...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
When the Mission Went Wrong: The CIA's 1951 THUNDERCLAP Parachute Disaster in Albania A classified 10-page operations report from November 1951 pulls back the curtain on one of the early Cold War's most punishing covert failures — a CIA-directed parachute infiltration into Communist Albania tha...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Kill Order That Shocked Nuremberg: How OSS Lawyers Dismantled Hitler's Commando Order A newly accessible OSS legal brief reveals the meticulous intelligence work behind one of history's most consequential war crimes prosecutions — and shows how American spies became lawyers when the war end...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Architect Speaks: Vandenberg's 1946 Blueprint for American Intelligence Revealed In December 1946, the man responsible for building America's peacetime spy apparatus stood before an audience at Maxwell Field, Alabama, and explained — with remarkable candor — exactly what he was trying to cr...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
Inside OSS X-2: How American Spymasters Turned a Senior SS Officer Against Nazi Germany In the final months of World War II, American counterintelligence officers quietly achieved one of their most significant penetrations of Nazi intelligence — not through battlefield force, but through carefu...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
When Wall Street Became a Spy Network: The 1946 Blueprint for Using American Business as a CIA Intelligence Source Before the CIA had overseas stations, safe houses, or a global network of assets, its predecessor agency looked to corporate America for intelligence. A newly spotlighted document...
Field Notes
Intelligence Archive
The Blueprint for the CIA: How a 1945 War Department Committee Designed America's Intelligence Future Three months after Japan's surrender ended World War II, a small committee of generals, colonels, and intelligence veterans quietly drafted the architectural plans for what would become America...