Wednesday, February 2, 2011

NSA Releases Special Research History and Related Indexes

In response to a FOIA request that I had submitted, the National Security Agency recently declassified and released two indexes listing over four hundred different NSA or related agencies histories on a variety of historical topics ranging from Japanese-Burma to instructions how to handle Ultra intelligence. Among the more interesting titles are:

SRH-019 Blockade-Running Between Europe and the Far East by Submarines, 1942-1944
SRH-026 Marshall Letter to Eisenhower on the Use of  "Ultra" intelligence, March 15, 1944
SRH-087 Mongolian Independence. 3 August 1945
SRH-162 History of Security Monitoring. WWI to 1955

The first aid contains not only a more complete list of Special Research histories ( 415 listed in total) but ; however these lists are not complete. The index also has a page count for each document thus allowing an astute requester to avoid fees and acquire dozens of NSA histories. There are a number of other report collections available to the curious. SRMA which are labeled as being "Discrete Records of Historical Cryptologic Import: U.S. Army." SRMD- "Discrete Records of Historical Cryptologic Import: Joint Server and/or U.S. Government Cryptologic Agencies." Other available include series which is for SRMN "Discrete Records of Historical Cryptologic Import: U.S. Navy," and SRNS which stands for "Summaries: Japanese Naval Radio Intelligence." This lists are not complete either but for the records that are listed, they do include a title for and page count of the relevant record.

New NSA SRH index                                                            

The second, older index only contains a partial list of Special Research Histories. However, it has annotated notes from what I suspect is someone who has processed a prior FOIA request for information contained within the histories. The notes reveal that certain SRHs are related to other SRHs. Fuller titles of some of the SRHs are also presented here.

OLD NSA SRH Idex