CIA CREST databases
The CIA's CREST (CREST = CIA Records Search Tool) database The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) maintains a large database on the third floor or the National Archives building at the College Park, Maryland facility. This database, commonly referred to as "CREST," contains over ten million pages of CIA records created between the mid-1940s and 1984. For the most part, the records contain a hodgepodge of scanned declassified analyses and summaries of events, histories and country studies and even administrative records. There are also many press-clipping that mention the Agency that are unavailable anywhere else. Most of the analytical writings were intended to be read in a timely fashion by the US Executive, including the President himself as well as the heads of certain agencies. With the exception of very few Congressional Records and press clippings, none of these documents were openly-available at the time of their creation. These records range from "UNCLASSIFIED" to "TOP SECRET" in sensitivity. Many of the records are still partially "redacted" - they contain excisions of words, sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that have been whited or blacked out. While some of these records refer to administrative matters of the CIA's notorious Directorate of Operations (DO), so far they do not appear to contain records of specific secret CIA DO operations. However, CREST digitized records do contain a very good picture of what CIA analysts were thinking regarding a particular situation at a particular time, and from the language in the reports one can determine if the Agency had sources within a given government. In short, if you factor in political prejudices of the time, these records provide a very clear historical picture absolutely essential to any serious research on the Cold War. There are two ways to start CREST searches. The easiest way for anyone with Internet access to get a rough idea of what is available is to query the CREST database on the CIA website for the file names of released documents. However, not all the contents of the CREST database can be accessed through the CIA website. The best method is to query both the CIA website and the CIA CREST database at the National Archives. There are also two ways to proceed after you have identified CREST records on the CIA website. You can order them using the Freedom of Information Act from the CIA - which will take several months to complete - or you can employ me to print them out from the CREST database. Again, even if the records you seek are not on the CIA website, they may still be available in the CREST system at the National Archives. The reason for this discrepancy has to do with some of the software that the CIA has used to "text-recognize" its records over the years. There is no such thing as infallible text-recognition software. It is also worth noting the extreme variability in the time it takes to complete queries. Given the size of the database and the relative slowness of the computers accessing it, queries can take up to 20 minutes to complete. But other queries yield instant results. Even though CIA CREST material is digitized, it must be printed out to be removed from the National Archives. For obvious reasons, thumb or other external hard drives drives are not permitted on the CREST computers. The CIA - and not the National Archives - provides the printer, paper and toner for the prints. After printing out responsive records, in order to "declassify" this material, a line must be penciled through each instance of "TOP SECRET", "SECRET" or "CONFIDENTIAL" - a process that can be quite time-consuming - especially when these words can occur more than once or twice on each page. I scan the resultant "declassified" documents at home with a rapid but automatic accurate Fujitsu fi-6130 sheet-fed scanner, label them, and usually post them as PDFs for the client the same evening. In the case of records that contain excisions (redactions) - missing words, sentences, paragraphs or pages - I recommend requesting the whole document to be re-evaluated and re-released by the CIA through a process called Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR). It is often released several months later in a less excised form. I recommend that if you are researching a subject that involves a Cold War subject and you cannot personally visit the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, USA - you contract me to undertake your CREST searches as an adjunct to your research. |