Today's posting is the first in a new series based on the multi-year multi-national "Carter-Brezhnev Project." It includes documents and previously unpublished transcripts from two unusual gatherings of former policy-makers from the U.S. and USSR that took place in the early 1990s, organized by James Blight and janet Lang, then of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, in cooperation with the National Security Archive, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and others.

Among the participants at these extraordinary sessions were most of Carter's top foreign policy advisers – ex-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, ex-CIA Director Stansfield Turner, and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski – as well as several senior Soviet officials, including ex-Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, former Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Kornienko, and long-time Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin.

Future postings in the Carter-Brezhnev series will cover the remaining Project conferences – on U.S.-USSR competition in the Third World generally, and the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. They will also feature collections of more recently declassified records on the period of extraordinary research value, notably materials on President Carter's policies toward Soviet dissidents, and private communications to the president from his two most influential foreign policy advisers – Vance and Brzezinski.

Just as the Carter-Brezhnev Project participants sought to learn lessons from that history for policymaking in the post-Cold War era, one also finds echoes of that time in today's relations between the U.S. and Russia. Optimism for a "reset" of relations, agreement on major nuclear arms reductions, and cooperation against nuclear proliferation – face severe disagreements over regional issues (U.S.-led intervention in Libya, the crisis in Syria), human rights (the Magnitsky bill in the U.S., the Russian law requiring "foreign agent" registration for NGOs receiving international funding), and missile defense – and Cold War phrases keep finding their way into the discourse on both sides.

To visit the Carter-Brezhnev home page, click here.

AEC contractor Union Carbide found that even a relatively underdeveloped country could covertly develop a centrifuge plant for a nuclear weapons program, although to do so in a shorter time frame it would need assistance from other countries with more experience in the technology. This is what later happened with Pakistan, which used Dutch-German-British technology stolen by A.Q. Khan, and with Iran, whose Pakistan-assisted centrifuge program remained largely secret until 2002.

Some of the highlights of today's publication:

• An early CIA report [document 1] on the Soviet gas centrifuge project based on an interview with a returned German prisoner-of-war.
  
  
• An AEC study [document 6] which found that the gas centrifuge method posed a somewhat greater proliferation risk compared to the "plutonium reactor route" because it was a "slightly more attractive" method of producing fissile materials. According to the study, while reactors had a "proven" track record as a source of fissionable material, they required more specialized equipment, more labor power, were difficult to hide, and required more uranium, among other considerations.
  
  
• According to the Union Carbide study [document 4] "Class X" highly industrial countries with up-to-date educational systems, such as Germany or Sweden, would need about 5 years to get to the point where they could produce HEU with a gas centrifuge. Class "Y" intermediate countries with "limited internal industrial activity," such as Israel or Brazil, would require about 6.5 years to reach the point where they could produce nuclear weapons with the help of gas centrifuges. "Class Z" non-industrial countries with low technological levels, such as Cuba or Egypt, would take about 8 years. They would, however, need the assistance of a "Class X" country and would have difficulty building a completely clandestine plant."
  
  
• AEC experts found that West Germany had the "most extensive and most complete gas centrifuge program in the world at this time" and as long as their work proceeded on an unclassified basis it could aggravate the "Nth power" problem. For example, the AEC's director of classification worried that an "unfriendly" country like China might someday acquire the gas centrifuge on the open market [see documents 2 and 6].
  
  
• To prevent the diversion of gas centrifuge technology into weapons programs, in 1960 the AEC staff recommended safeguards and classification of technology. Because classification could only limit dissemination of the latest centrifuge advances, safeguards on the export of centrifuges and controls over uranium trade would be important elements of an international system [see document 6].
  
  
• AEC and Union Carbide studies recognized that an important technical problem to be solved was how to operate a "cascade" of gas centrifuges so that they could produce HEU in large quantities. The 1960 Union Carbide study argued that an important element of the time required to develop a gas centrifuge plant was to "solve the problems encountered when one attempts to connect large numbers of centrifuges together and run them in the series-parallel arrangement which constitutes the separation cascade."
  
  
• Union Carbide revised its estimate of the time frame for building a centrifuge plant in 1964, finding that class "X" countries would require 8 years, but 5 years if they had some "technical knowledge" of U.S. developments. Class "Y' countries would need about 9 years, but about 7 years if they had knowledge of U.S. developments. They would have to import some hardware and equipment. Class "Z" countries could not develop centrifuges on their own, but with technical advisers, knowledge of U.S. developments, and imported equipment, they could do it in about 9 years [see document 9].

Today's posting includes declassified U.S. documents from the Carter Presidential Library on Soviet dissident movements of the 1970s including the Moscow Helsinki Group, and KGB and Soviet Communist Party Central Committee documents on the surveillance and repression of the Group.

With the generous cooperation of the Memorial Society's invaluable Archive of the History of Dissent, the posting also features examples of Alexeyeva's own letters to officials (on behalf of other dissidents) and to friends, her Congressional testimony and reports, scripts she produced for Radio Liberty, and numerous photographs. Also highlighted in today's publication are multiple media articles by and about Alexeyeva including her analysis of the current attack on human righters in Russia.

As Alexeyeva's colleagues, friends, and admirers gather today in Moscow to celebrate her 85^th birthday, the illustrious history documented in today's posting will gain a new chapter. The party-goers will not only toast Lyudmila Alexeyeva, but also debate the appropriate responses to the new Putin-inspired requirement that any civil society group receiving any international support should register as a "foreign agent" and undergo frequent "audits." No doubt Alexeyeva will have something to say worth listening to. She has seen worse.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been one of the best known and most scrutinized components of the U.S. government for well over seventy years. As a result it has been the subject of non-fiction books, novels, a multitude of articles, films and television shows, and congressional hearings. In addition to its criminal investigative effort and pursuit of bank-robbers that propelled it into the news, the Bureau has also been heavily involved in counterintelligence, counterterrorism, foreign intelligence, and counter-subversion work. FBI successes, failures, and abuses have helped produce attention and controversy for the Bureau.

Today's National Security Archive posting of 38 documents - drawn from a variety of sources - provides a window into the Bureau's activities in those areas since, with one exception, 1970. The collection's aim is to present a foundation for understanding the scope and history of the organization, and in some instances to offer correctives to popular accounts. Freedom of Information Act requests yielded a number of the documents included in the briefing book, which are being posted here for the first time. Included are two intelligence assessments of the domestic terrorist threat - The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland: An FBI Assessment (2004) and A Threat Assessment for Domestic Terrorism, 2005-2006 (2007)- which examine the threat from al-Qaeda and its supporters as well as from assorted home-grown terrorist groups.

The latter assessments offer a broader and more detailed view of the terrorist issue, including on al-Qaeda, than the key judgments of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate released by the Director of National Intelligence. The 2004 assessment stated that FBI investigations revealed "extensive support for terrorist causes in the US," although they also found little evidence of sympathizers being actively engaged in planning or carrying out terrorist attacks.

Additional details on some of the domestic threats mentioned in the 2004 and 2007 estimates can be found in other newly released assessments - such as those on white supremacist groups. Those assessments discuss the threats from 'stealth' fascists, white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, and the possibility of white supremacists employing suicide terrorism to further their cause.

Also, included are detailed inspector general reports concerning the FBI's performance in the case of Robert Hanssen, the FBI official who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia, its handling of information related to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and its employment of national security letters. Finally, included are a number of Congressional Research Service studies on the Bureau's history and current activities, including its terrorism investigations.

These and related issues are the focus of the new book edited by National Security Archive Senior Fellow Robert A. Wampler, Trilateralism and Beyond: Great Power Politics and the Korean Security Dilemma During and After the Cold War (Kent State University Press), which will be the subject of a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on July 10, 2012.

The entwined political and security issues confronting Washington and its allies are also underscored in new documents, obtained by the Archive's Korea Project and posted today. These documents include records of high-level meetings between President George H.W. Bush and Chinese and South Korean leaders, Department of Defense memoranda from the Carter years regarding the contentious issue of North Korea's military capabilities, and a cable reporting on Secretary of Defense William Perry's meeting with the South Korean Defense Minister during the 1994 nuclear crisis with North Korea.

The "Tribunal Oral Federal N° 6" handed down the verdict after a review of documentation that included a memorandum of conversation, written by former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams, that proved the clandestine program to steal the babies of political prisoners was known at the highest levels of the regime. In his memo, dated December 3, 1982, Abrams recounted a meeting with the military's ambassador to Washington: "I raised with the Ambassador the question of children… born to prisoners or children taken from their families during the dirty war… The Ambassador agreed completely and had already made this point to his [Argentine] foreign minister and president…"

The trial, pursued by the Association of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, was based on the cases of 35 children, now adults, who have been identified through DNA testing as sons and daughters of disappeared victims of the dirty war. The Grandmothers estimate that more than 500 children were captured along with their parents or born in captivity; after their parents were executed, many were raised by security officers families who hid their true identities. More than 100 of the children have been identified.

This is not the first time that Videla and Bignone have been put on trial for crimes committed during the dictatorship. Both are currently serving life sentences for human rights abuses. Argentina's National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) originally documented 9,089 cases of people disappeared by the regime. Subsequent research using reports from the secret police battalion 601 raises the total of the dead and disappeared to about 22,000. Human rights organizations estimate that this number is closer to 30,000.

"These freedom of information stories show the paradox of FOIA," remarked Tom Blanton, director of the Archive, which has made tens of thousands of successful FOIA requests since its founding in 1985. "We requesters always complain about the constant delays, the bureaucratic obstacles, the processing fee harassment, and the excessive government secrecy; yet the FOIA actually produces front-page results every year that make a real difference to citizens and to better government."

"Agencies are still dragging their heels on fulfilling President Obama's transparency promises," said Nate Jones, the Archive's Freedom of Information Coordinator, citing the Archive's government-wide audits of FOIA performance. "But persistence and focus and pressure pay off, as these headlines show; and the core principle of FOIA - that government information belongs to the people - is worth fighting for."

The Archive's detailed 122-page guide, "Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone," is available online at the Archive's FOIA page, here.

The Archive's previous postings of documentation from the Johnson, Nixon and Ford presidential libraries show that President Johnson grudgingly signed the FOIA into law 46 years ago today, at the last possible minute, only after pressure from newspaper editors and his own press secretary Bill Moyers, who later said LBJ was "dragged kicking and screaming" into signing the bill. Moyers credited the persistence of longtime California congressman John Moss, lead author of the FOIA bill, for making the law happen.

Japan and the United States is the Archive’s third, fully-indexed anthology on the subject, and is available through the academic publisher ProQuest. Marking its publication, the Archive is today posting a selection of presidential and Cabinet-level records from the set that reflect the key strategic, defense and economic aspects of the relationship. The Archive obtained the documents in the collection through the Freedom of Information Act and original archival research. Among the highlights of the posting:

• Memoranda of conversation between Bush and Kaifu during the opening months of the first Gulf War crisis, as Bush pressed the Japanese leader to consider not just financial support, but an eventual role for Japan’s military. As Bush warned Kaifu, “In Congress there are always people trying to blame Japan, Germany or somebody else. They see us spending large amounts of money and sending fine young people to the Middle East, where they might be in harm’s way.” While he understood this feeling, Bush also stressed that he didn’t “want any scapegoats,” and would make it clear to the American people that “Japan is trying very hard to do its part.” (Documents 3,4,5 and 6)
• New documents on wide-ranging secret bilateral security talks at the end of the Carter and Clinton administrations, as the two powers met on a regular basis to trade viewpoints on the full spectrum of common security concerns and the management of the defense alliance, as well as the political situation in both countries. For example, in 1979, Nicholas Platt, the Asia expert on Carter’s National Security Council, candidly observed to his Japanese counterparts (likely with an eye to reassuring them) that he had seen a marked change in the President’s attitude: “He has been through a period of intense introspection. He is much more forceful. In contrasting him to just after he left Seoul, he is more positive, rested, etc.” (Documents 1, 2, 12 and 13)
• Briefing memoranda for Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin on the U.S. strategy and goals for tackling the Japanese and Asian economic crisis in the 1990s. These documents detail the ongoing efforts the Clinton administration made to press Japan to adopt the necessary policies to head off what one document called a worst-case “black hole” scenario that could lead to a recession or years of no economic growth in Japan, weaken the world economy, harm U.S. trade interests, increase protectionist pressures and roil financial markets. (Documents 7,8,9 and 10)

The collection includes rarely released CIA emails, raw intelligence cables, analytical summaries, high-level briefing materials, and comprehensive counterterrorism reports that are usually withheld from the public because of their sensitivity.  Today's posting covers a variety of topics of major public interest, including background to al-Qaeda's planning for the attacks; the origins of the Predator program now in heavy use over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; al-Qaeda's relationship with Pakistan; CIA attempts to warn about the impending threat; and the impact of budget constraints on the U.S. government's hunt for bin Laden.

Today's posting is the result of a series of FOIA requests by National Security Archive staff based on a painstaking review of references in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Today's posting consists of over 60 documents related to MIGHTY DERRINGER, an exercise that focused on Indianapolis in December 1986. The materials provide background on the creation, in 1974-1975, of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), a group assigned to respond to plausible threats of nuclear terrorism or extortion. Today, NEST (now the Nuclear Emergency Support Team) and conducts exercises to assess its capability to respond to the possible presence of a terrorist device and test the ability of NEST and critical cooperating organizations (including military units)to work together.

While the MIGHTY DERRINGER exercise and resulting documents are over two decades old, the institutions participating in the exercise retain their roles today, and the issues confronting them in 1986 are similar to the ones that they would face in responding to a nuclear threat in 2012 (and beyond).

This posting is notable for being the first publication of documents that provide in-depth exposure into all aspects of such an exercise - including the state-of-play at key points and the array of issues involved in disabling terrorist devices. Of particular interest are references to the participation of the Joint Special Operations Command and Delta Force - mirroring the role they would have in a real-world incident. In addition, after-action reports reveal the assorted problems that can arise in coordinating the response to a nuclear terrorist threat among a large number of organizations.