CIA Releases Documents…20 Years After Requested
Thursday, November 05, 2009

The end result was not worth the wait for the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Twenty years ago, archive officials filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA to learn more about a shady Iranian character named Manucher Ghorbanifar who was involved in the arms-for-hostages scheme that the Reagan administration cooked up that eventually expanded into the Iran-Contra scandal. When the archive finally got something in the mail from the CIA, the package included four documents containing public information that had been published in the newspapers, and a memo that had been made available to Congress back in 1987—except the 2009 copy was even more censored than the earlier version.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
CIA Finally Answers a 20-Year-Old FOIA Request: The FOIA Coordinator’s View (National Security Archives)
CIA Finally Answers a 20-Year-Old FOIA Request: The Analyst’s View (National Security Archives)
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