A year ago today, the Central Intelligence Agency’s CREST database - its public archive of over 13 million pages of declassified material - became public in more than name only when it was published online as a result of our three-year lawsuit. Since that time, we’ve written nearly 200 articles sourced from the archives, on everything from clandestine bowling leagues to the Agency’s private press pool. As we enter the second year of the project, we asking for your help in unearthing our hidden history.

As many researchers have learned over the years, government agencies in general and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular often apply exemptions very broadly, and at times, bordering on the ridiculous. Exemption codes, on the other hand, can still be useful to researchers, journalists, and curious citizens; by searching for these codes, clever researchers can find documents that discuss war plans, cryptography, WMDs, and diplomatically damaging information.

MuckRock published over twice as many articles in 2017 as we did last year, which necessitated breaking this year in review into two parts. Let’s pick up where we left off, just in time for FOIA’s 51st birthday.

This year saw our 10,000th completed FOIA request, a grant that allowed us to finally hire our founders full time, and the release of millions of pages of Central Intelligence Agency records as a result of our lawsuit. Here are the stories, big and small, you helped uncover this year.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the country set out on a trajectory that would bring it to drop an atomic weapon, become the global superpower, and firmly embed itself in the domestic affairs of foreign countries, often through the use of a new organization: the Central Intelligence Agency.

To accomplish its mission, the Central Intelligence Agency will undertake missions utilizing assets, agents, and officers under official and nonofficial covers. When these missions require the use of an organization, the Agency will resort to the use of proprietary companies and organizations as a means of maintaining cover or accomplishing goals that the U.S. Government isn’t able to openly support. Eventually, the Agency has to terminate these proprietaries. The story of how that happens is where things get interesting.

A formerly TOP SECRET bulletin from 1973 uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s archives shows the CIA concerned that their long-backed political party in Italy, the Christian Democrats, had placed themselves in a precarious position amid a country-wide pasta shortage.

Declassified documents in the Central Intelligence Agency’s archives show that while the CIA was looking to include the Freedom Of Information Act in its war on leaks, the National Security Agency was seriously considering using the Espionage Act to target Puzzle Palace author James Bamford for using FOIA.

A half a century after the death of longtime Central Intelligence Agency communist target Che Guevara, gaps in the Agency’s holdings remain restricted.

It’s clear that despite SIGNA Society’s charter reportedly asserting that it has “no relationship whatsoever with its former employer,” such a relationship was ongoing for many years. The Central Intelligence Agency could not only count on these retired security officers to be “on-call” and to aid with recruitment or participate in clandestine live drops, but to proselytize CIA’s word with corporations and the rest of the U.S. Government.