25-Year Program Archive Search
The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. The EO was originally issued in April 1995 and amended in 2003, when it established 31 December 2006 as the first major deadline for automatic declassification under the "25-year program."
By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as "permanent" by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.
CIA has maintained a program operating out of the CIA Declassification Center to review records under the purview of EO 12958, as amended, before they reach their automatic declassification deadline. CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. The CREST system is the publicly-accessible repository of the subset of CIA records reviewed under the 25-year program in electronic format (manually reviewed and released records are accessioned directly into the National Archives in their original format). Over 10 million pages have been released in electronic format and reside on the CREST database, from which researchers have printed almost a million pages. To use CREST, a researcher must physically be present at the National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Recognizing this presents an obstacle to many researchers, we have been investigating ways to improve researcher knowledge of and access to CREST documents.
On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2008. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.
As indicated in the "25-Year Released Documents Search" page below, researchers can search by the title and date, or date span, of documents.
Title: The title listed will be the formal title of a report or the stated subject of a memorandum. However, the title may be the best attempt by Agency indexers to identify documents without clear formal titles such as cables, letters, written notes, and other forms of communication and correspondence. In such cases, the title may include reference to the type of document, originator, recipient, or location.
Document Date: For a single document, the creation date on the first page of the document is the date to be searched. In a package of several documents or in a pairing of a document with a covering transmittal/addressee sheet the date will again be that of the first page. The year 1900 is the default date used by Agency indexers for undated documents.
Following a successful search, the resulting document metadata will appear on a separate page. In addition to the title and date, the metadata will include the "ESDN number" (see below), the number of pages, the original classification, document type, and the release decision.
The ESDN number is the internal Agency tracking number which should be used when submitting a FOIA request. The original classification is indicated by the letters T (Top Secret), S (Secret), C (Confidential), U (Unclassified), and K for unknown or unmarked. The release decision of the document is either RIF (released in full) or RIP (released in part).
In the future, in addition to populating the CREST Finding Aid with records from 2003 to the present, CIA will continue to release through CREST documents that are 25-years old or older in conformance with the EO . This yearly requirement is referred to as the "rolling period." You may e-mail comments on the CREST Finding Aid capability to the feedback section of this site.