CIA Declassifed

The CIA has released millions of pages of operational and intelligence documents on its website for your browsing pleasure, dating from 1940 to 1990. If you're a history buff and spy thriller guy like I am, this is the mother lode of cool information. There's all kinds of stuff, but some of the most fascinating reading are the presidential daily briefings. It's really interesting to see what information they had available to make their decisions. Here, for example, is the presidential daily briefing for the day I was born.

While there are some redactions, the documents are quite readable and you can infer much of what's redacted based upon your knowledge of history, excepting cases where an entire section was removed. That's just an intriguing hole, such as the entire section on Czechoslovakia being redacted in that briefing above.

Compare that one with Nixon's first presidential daily briefing, which is both more extensive and more informative. Clearly they were hoping to impress Nixon with the scope of information they could provide, while LBJ was notorious for bulling ahead with his plans regardless of what anyone tried to tell him. I'd guess that by '68, the CIA had pretty much given up trying to explain things to LBJ and were just giving him what he wanted, which apparently wasn't much.