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...