User Guide

The Browse page displays all published documents as a grid of thumbnail cards spanning 1939–2007. Each card shows the document ID, date, title, type, and classification level.

At the top of the Browse page, a row of Featured Documents highlights items of particular research interest — documents selected for their historical significance across the archive's major collections. These are a useful starting point for new visitors.

The sidebar on the left (desktop) or the Scopes toggle (mobile) organises the archive into three focus areas, each collapsible:

• CIA Albania Operations — covert operations in Albania from the late 1940s through the 1990s, including the Enver Hoxha scope.
• OSS to Early CIA — OSS wartime records and the institutional transition through SSU and CIG to the founding of the CIA in 1947.
• U.S. Intelligence & Former Nazi Personnel — CIA recruitment of former Nazi and SS personnel, U.S.–BND relations, and German intelligence activities in WWII.

Click a focus area header to select or deselect all scopes within that group at once. Expand the group with the chevron to toggle individual scopes. Document counts are shown on each scope tile.

Click Filters to open the filter panel. You can narrow results by document type, operation scope, classification level, and date range. The date pickers open a calendar bounded to the archive period — no value means no filter is applied.

A green Downloaded badge appears on any document you have already downloaded, so you never pay twice for the same file. Results are paginated in sets of 24; use the Previous / Next controls to navigate.

Advanced Search runs a ranked full-text search across every document in the archive, covering the complete intelligence layer extracted from each record — not just the scanned page text.

What the search field covers: OCR-transcribed document text, titles, descriptions, synopsis, cryptonyms, key entities, dominant themes, collective terms, acronyms, and keywords. A single search term is matched against all of these simultaneously.

Relevance ranking: results are ordered by how strongly and how frequently your term appears across the matched fields — documents where the term appears in the title or cryptonyms rank above those where it appears once in 80 pages of OCR text.

Stemming: the search engine normalises word forms automatically. Searching "operation" also returns documents containing "operations" and "operative" — you do not need to search multiple variants.

Entity filters let you search by Person, Organisation, or Location — useful for tracing individuals or operations across multiple documents.

Active filter chips appear below the search form whenever a filter is set. Click the × on any chip to remove that filter and immediately re-run the search.

Once you have results you want to return to, click Save to name and store the search in your workspace. Researcher-tier accounts can store up to 10 saved searches, shown as a counter (e.g., 3/10) in the search form. The current URL also encodes all active filters — you can copy and share it with a colleague and they will see the same results.

Per-Document Analysis

Every document detail page has an AI Assistant tab. Ask any question about the document and the assistant will answer using the document's transcribed text, always providing the passage it drew from so you can verify the source.

Query quotas are enforced per account:

Your remaining quota is shown as AI queries remaining this month on the document page. Quotas reset on the first of each month.

Cross-Document Folder Analysis

Every research folder has an AI Analysis tab. Open a folder from My Workspace, click the AI Analysis tab, and ask the AI to analyse all documents in that folder simultaneously. The AI identifies patterns and connections across people, organisations, locations, cryptonyms, and recurring themes — surfacing relationships that would take hours to find manually.

Example: create a folder called Albania Coup Planning, add 4–6 documents covering the same operation, then ask 'What cryptonyms appear most frequently across these documents, and what do they refer to?' or 'Which individuals appear in multiple documents and in what roles?'

Folder AI Analysis queries draw from the same monthly quota as per-document queries. Folders that share a common operation, time period, or subject produce the most coherent analysis — random collections yield less useful results.

Every document in the archive has been automatically processed to extract structured intelligence beyond basic metadata. These fields appear on the Document Detail page and directly power the entity filters in Advanced Search.

Free tier — you can view a watermarked PDF preview of every document. The preview is limited to the first 5 pages. The watermark contains your name and the download date for attribution purposes.

Researcher and Scholar tiers — you can download the full, unmarked PDF. Downloads are debited in page credits: a 12-page document costs 12 credits.

Re-downloads are free. Once you have downloaded a document, you can download it again at any time without spending credits. The green Downloaded badge on browse and search cards marks documents you own.

Page credit packs — if you exhaust your monthly subscription credits you can purchase additional packs of 100 pages for $10. Packs never expire and are consumed after your monthly subscription credits are exhausted.

AI Query Packs — if you exhaust your monthly AI query quota, you can purchase additional packs of 100 queries for $10. Query packs never expire and are consumed after your monthly subscription queries are exhausted.

Folders let you organise documents into named collections for ongoing research projects — similar to a physical document binder.

Create a folder from the Folders page in My Workspace. Add documents using the folder icon on any browse card, search result card, or document detail page. You can add up to 10 documents at a time using the multi-select checkboxes on Browse or Search.

The folder counter — shown as 1/10 for Researcher-tier users — updates in real time as you create or delete folders, confirming your usage against your plan limit.

Each folder includes an AI Analysis tab that enables cross-document analysis across all documents in that folder simultaneously. See the AI Research Assistant section for full documentation of this feature.

After running a search, click the Save button in the search form to give the search a name and store it in your workspace. Saved searches remember all active filters — full-text query, entities, date range, classification, type, and scope.

Access your saved searches from My Workspace → Saved Searches. Click any saved search to re-run it instantly with the current archive data.

The Cite & Export button on every Document Detail page generates a formatted citation or exports a document reference directly from the archive.

Available citation formats:

To cite a document: open the Document Detail page → click Cite & Export → select your format → copy the citation or download it as a text file.

Export Chat to Word — Researcher and Scholar users can export an AI chat session from the Document Detail AI Assistant tab to a Word-compatible document. Open the AI Assistant tab on any document, complete your research session, then click Export Chat to Word.

Intelligence Archive offers three tiers. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time from Account & Billing in My Workspace.

Add-on purchases — available to all paid tiers from Account & Billing:

Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period — you keep access to your tier until then. Page credit packs and AI Query Packs are non-refundable and never expire.

For group or volume licensing, contact us at hello@intelarchive.com.