CIA Releases Documents…20 Years After Requested

Thursday, November 05, 2009
(photo: National Security Archive)

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
 

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