Today’s post is written by Dr. Greg Bradsher. Seventy-years ago, on November 9, 1942, forty-nine year old Allen W. Dulles arrived in Bern, Switzerland to head up the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operations in Switzerland.  Dulles was lucky to be in Switzerland.  His train passed from Vichy France into Switzerland only minutes before the Germans [...]

In June 1954, Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown in a coup that was orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and carried out by the Guatemalan exile Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Arbenz was targeted in large part because of his land reform policies that affected U.S. companies, namely the United Fruit Company. There [...]

Today’s post is written by James Rush, a supervisory archivist in the textual processing unit at Archives II. On June 8, 2011, the National Security Agency announced that it had declassified and released to the National Archives and Records Administration over 50,000 pages of historic records relating to cryptology and the history of intelligence gathering. [...]