25 Year Program Archive Search
The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 13256 (formerly EO 12958, as amended) require the declassification of nonexempt historically - valuable records 25 years or older. The EO was originally issued in April 1995 and via amendment established 31 December 2006 as the first major deadline for automatic declassification under the "25-year program".
By 31 December 2006 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. The requirement to automatically declassify records 25 years or older "rolls" forward one year at a time, so, for example 31 December 2011, permanent records through 31 December 1986 will be automatically declassified unless reviewed and appropriately exempted under the guidelines of the EO.
CIA has maintained a program operating out of the CIA Declassification Center to review records under the purview of EO 13526 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 publically-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 over a million pages. To use CREST, a researcher must physically be presented 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 use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded on CREST through 2010. In certain cases, as described below, document images will also be available. As indicated in the "25-Year Released Documents Search" page below, researchers can search CREST metadata by 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 maybe 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, location, etc.
Document Date: For a single document, the creation date on the first page of the document is the date to be searched. Ina 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. For selected documents ("Best of CREST"), document images will also be available in PDF format (see below).
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 unknowns or unmarked. The release decisions of the document is either RIF (released in full) or RIP (released in part - - - i.e., redacted).
In the future, CIA will continue to release through CREST documents that are 25-years old or older in confirmations with the EO and include metadata for the new document son this site.
CIA has now also begun to include documents images in addition to the metadata for a select group of documents referred to as the "Best of CREST: (BOC). BOC documents images will be in PDF format (readable through the free Adobe Reader TM software). The BOC collection will be added to periodically. The availability of BOC document image will be clearly indicated in search results by the presence of a PDF icon (on the far right of the page). BOC is an effort to make CREST documents even more accessible to the public.
Please keep in mind that when you submit a FOIA request for CREST documents, you will automatically be charged reproduction costs for documents at ten cents per page beyond the first 100 pages, which are free. Please do not send money in advance, as online page counts are not always accurate. Any reproduction costs applicable will be included at the time documents are sent.
You may e-mail comments on the CREST Finding Aid and Best of CREST capability to the feedback section of this site.
(Revised: 08/03/2011)