CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: “The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as “permanent” by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.

CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2002. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.

Search the CREST web database here. Note: it does not contain actual images of the documents as the regular Electronic Reading Room search does. Rather, it contains details on the files to speed FOIA requests.”