When analysts cite the U.S. government declassified documents, when a writer reconstructs the historical facts of the Cold War or the South American dictatorships and when some journalist investigates the facts of Iran-Contra Gate, the documents are always based on the National Security Archive work.

The NSA has occupied the front pages of The New York Times, Noam Chomsky uses NSA documents to reinforce his thesis and many journalists spend their time in the archive researching pieces of history. Tina Rosenberg, who won the Pulitzer prize with her book on the fall of communism in the Eastern Europe, based her book on the documents regarding the Eastern Europe declassified by NSA.

The National Security Archive is an NGO that primarily pressures the U.S. government to make public documents concerning foreign policy and national security policy, such as the period of the cold war, or more generally, all issues concerning the internal policies of the twentieth century. This is possible thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, a law that guarantees freedom of expression in the U.S. and the Mandatory Declassification Review, that allows any citizen to request documents from the state.

I was lucky to meet Michael Evans, the director of Colombian Project. Michael looks younger than he is. He appears serious, orderly and meticulous. The meeting in Washington was in his office at NSA, in the prestigious Georgetown University, a few hundred meters from the places that represent the center of world power: The White House, the dome of the Senate, and the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

Behind Michael stand cardboard boxes with inscriptions in pencil, one is often repeated: “CIA behavior control experiments”, just next to a stack of documents about the “Plan Condor”. I understand that in this apparent disorder, there is a secret plan.

Michael explained to me the mysteries and the secrets of the NSA, as well as its origins. Here are his words for Mooks report readers.

It was created in 1985 with projects mainly focused on Latin America. Two of the first projects they worked on focused on the revolution in Nicaragua and Iran. After the report, the Iran-Contras gate scandal exploded. Officials of the Reagan administration had organized an illegal weapons trade with Iran, with the proceeds of which went to financing the Contras illegal opposition to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, as well as their terrorist acts. The two projects became one and turned into a massive book called The Chronology, published by the NSA itself. The text was simply a collection of all documents on the two countries since the early 60’s to the mid 80’s.

Basically our job is to build a puzzle, without knowing if the pieces exist, nor where to look for them.

When we start a new project, the first thing to do is read. We start with the books, all those written on the subject, then magazines (etc). We compile a chronology of events such as official visits and historical facts. Based on these events, we start to demand documents a bit randomly, for example briefings of official visits; If the Secretary of State has visited Colombia on a certain date, then the State Department presumably will have prepared documents to summarize the key points of the country situation and given it to the Secretary as basic talking points.

If we want to explore the issue of human rights, knowing the date on which there has been a very serious massacre in Colombia, we begin to ask for all of the cables and faxes the embassy in Bogota has sent to Washington in those days. One thing that helps us very much is that all the telegrams of all the embassies have been digitized since the 70’s. Once we have the first documents in our hands, they often refer to other documents and this begins to unravel the web of documents which we ask to be declassified.

The work is painstaking, many of the documents that we disclose are annoying and useless, but others are very valuable and enlightening. It’s complicated because we neither know the existence of some of the US agencies. I’ll make an example: We know of the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls the satellites and some types of aerial platforms, just because a member of the Government with a certain level of access, in the 70’s named it inadvertently in a public event. Today we know enough of the service structure of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. I am sure that today there are a lot of agencies we do not know anything about.

With my work, I was able to reconstruct and prove that the US knew about Human Rights violations in Colombia for decades and didn’t do anything.
I have a document from 1979 where there emerges issues of human rights. As reported in this cable from the embassy in Bogota, the Colombian military intelligence, by order of General Jorge Robledo Pulido, has created a unit called the anti-communist American alliance. Colombian media reported this group had appeared from nowhere, now, thanks to this document, we know that these terrorists were born inside the Colombian Army in order to frighten the Colombian Communist Party. They were in fact responsible, among other things, for a bomb attack against the headquarters of the party on December 12, 1978.

I have another document where they discuss the phenomenon of civilian killing. It’s dated 1990, again a cable from the embassy which is entitled “Human Rights in Colombia – allegations of widespread abuses by the army.” The paper analyzes several cases of abuses, examines the accusations against the army and the answers given by the military themselves. On page 4 we read: “June 7: Accident of extra-judicial executions. The military reported to the press that, on that date, it killed 9 guerrillas in combat in el ramal, Santander department. The investigation by instruccion criminal, however, strongly suggest that the 9 were executed by the army and then dressed in military fatigues.”

Another cable from 1994 explains clearly why they kill civilians, “Body Count mentalities persist, especially among Colombian army officers. Field commanders who cannot show track records of aggressive anti-guerrilla activity(where the majority of the military’s human rights abuses occur) disadvantage themselves at promotion time”.

There is a lot of evidence and documents that clearly demonstrate that Washington was aware, they knew that these types of crimes were happening, they knew of the connections with the paramilitary groups, and still, despite everything, the American military aid continued to flow.



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