A TOP SECRET briefing, its details preserved in an archival description, shows how the White House ignored its own covert goals to justify a military strike on Cuba in 1962
By Roy Castellano ·
Forrestal knew what the State Department did not: the White House had already decided the South Vietnamese president had less than a year to live.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Kept secret for decades, a 1962 record describes a President asking for a mobilization schedule for Berlin only to find his generals had no ready answer.
By Vera Kessler ·
Kept secret as a State Department file, a 1962 letter shows the White House had already abandoned East Berlin to Soviet control months before the world nearly ended.
By Vera Kessler ·
Marked Top Secret, this record captures the moment US officials decided Ngo Dinh Diem was a liability, weighing the evacuation of thousands of civilians against a betrayal of a longtime ally.
By Harlan Pryce ·
Kept Top Secret until its release in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, this 1961 memo weighs the psychological cost to Berliners if a high-stakes summit with Nikita Khrushchev failed.
By Vera Kessler ·
Top Secret orders from 1961 show a president bracing for riots and rebellion on the Berlin border, a scenario kept hidden for decades from the people who would have fought it.
By Roy Castellano ·
Soviet duplicity drove Dean Rusk to plan a gamble at the UN, threatening to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests out loud to force a treaty with strict inspection controls.
By Eleanor Voss ·
Dominican underground leaders operated at considerable risk while the U.S. blacked out financial aid and lost all military planning task force records.
By Harlan Pryce ·
World leaders teetered on the edge of nuclear exchange as Kennedy maintained strategic vagueness over a naval quarantine and sought foreign crews to monitor Soviet missile sites.
By Miriam Adler ·
CIA officials pushed John F. Kennedy to authorize the murder of Fidel Castro, leaving the President to view his own security apparatus as "a problem in government."
By Desmond Okafor ·