Yale University Library Research Guides: National Security, Espionage, and Intelligence in American History: 20th Century Primary Sources

Information on Microform Collections

CIA Research Reports were issued under broad geographical categories in order to brief the President, National Security Council, and other agencies. They included foreign intelligence memos and biographies, as well as other information.

Online guides for the microfilm are available for Africa, Asia, and Europe.

CIA Research Reports Analog Microform List

The following reports were produced by the Office of the Coordinator of Information, then by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and, after disbanding of the latter, by various branches of the State Department, during and following World War II.

OSS/State Department Intelligence Reports Analog Microform List

These final microforms are from a variety of sources and still relevant to understanding this topic:

Other Analog Microform List

Databases

Best Bets

Digital National Security Archive
U.S. Declassified Documents Online.
Formerly known as Declassified Documents Reference System
ProQuest Congressional
Foreign Relations of the U.S.
Accessible via Hein Online
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Accessible via ProQuest News and Newspapers

Links and databases that cover certain time frames

U.S. intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009.
U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995
This collection of over 4,000 formerly classified U.S. government documents provides a comprehensive survey of the U.S. intelligence community’s activities in Europe, including Eastern Europe, Turkey and Cyprus, covering the time period from the end of World War II to the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond.
Cold War Intelligence
Contains over 2,300 formerly classified documents relating to US intelligence activities against the USSR from 1945-1991.
Conditions and politics in occupied Western Europe, (1940-1945)
Documents from the National Archives of the UK concerning political life in Occupied Western Europe. The collection includes detailed information indexed by year and section, from the occupied states of Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and the Vatican, and the neutral countries—Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
National Security and the FBI Surveillance of Enemy Aliens, 1940-1955
Click on the "Online archive" link in the Orbis record.
FBI Surveillance of James Forman and SNCC
Click on the "Online book" link in the Orbis record (it's really a database, not a book).
Foreign Broadcast Information Services (FBIS), Daily Reports, 1974-1996
Intelligence Reports from the National Security Council's Vietnam Information Group, 1967-1975
Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984
Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s
American Cryptology During The Cold War
NSA Press Room

Web Sites of Interest

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room
CIA Publications
Cold War International History Project
FOIA Machine
Web site is still in progress, but it will allow you automate the FOIA process and keep track of your requests online.
Cryptome
Georgetown Law State Secrets Archive
Homeland Security Digital Library
National Security Archive
Unclassified Version of the Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction
The National Security Agency: Declassified Documents
Federation of American Scientists
Intelligence and National Security Alliance
Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies
TV news clips pertaining to 2013 revelations about the NSA and its oversight.
Currently only works with Safari and Chrome browsers, this collection from the Internet Archive has more than 700 chronologically ordered television citations.
Ernie Lazar FOIA Archive Ernie Lazar, an independent scholar of U.S. right wing movements and anti-communism. Over the past decades he has obtained numerous FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This collection currently consists of websites and five CDs that contain files of various individual FBI informants or government employees involved in domestic intelligence work gathering information on both left- and right-wing movements and organizations. In addition to agent reports and FBI monographs, there is biographical and career and personnel information on the individual informants and government employees.Index to archive
The Cold War and Internal Security Collection (CWIS) at East Carolina University The CWIS Collection includes over 2,200 volumes of congressional hearings, committee prints, committee reports, and other publications, from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), its successor the House Committee on Internal Security (HCIS), the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and other congressional and executive bodies, all covering the years 1918-1977. The contents of the collection cover congressional investigations of organizations deemed “subversive” or “un-American”, primarily the Communist Party USA and its allies. Other subjects of investigation include the New Left, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, 1930s and 40s pro-Nazi organizations, and even the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. These items serve as valuable primary sources on topics such as American political culture during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War; the history of American Communism and the other investigated movements; the fate of civil liberties during a period of perceived external threat; and the evolution of attitudes towards political movements deemed extreme or “un-American”. The CWIS Collection is housed in the basement of ECU's Joyner Library and is intended as an archival resource. The collection, however, is open stack and can be used in the building by any interested patrons. Documents from the CWIS Collection cannot be checked out, but secondary copies of many of these volumes are available in the regular Documents Stacks and can be checked out. Much more information about the collection and its contents can be found at the CWIS blog.
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Please contact David Durant, Federal Documents & Social Sciences Collection, for any questions about the CWIS Collection and how to use it: durantd@ecu.edu
FOIArchive A joint project of History Lab and Columbia University Libraries, FOIArchive is an aggregated open access database and platform consisting of over 4.6 million declassified documents. In addition to this current web search interface, FOIArchive is also accessible through the “U.S. Government Information” portal of Columbia University Libraries’ online catalog and through an open API.

National Security, Espionage, and Intelligence in American History: 20th Century Primary Sources

Information on Microform Collections

Databases

Web Sites of Interest

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