AP: Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: “The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual. The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions. First launched in 1962 as a printed, classified reference manual for intelligence officers, the Factbook offered a detailed, by-the-numbers picture of foreign nations, their economies, militaries, resources and societies. The Factbook proved so useful that other federal agencies began using it, and within a decade, an unclassified version was released to the public. After going online in 1997, the Factbook quickly became a popular reference site for journalists, trivia aficionados and the writers of college essays, racking up millions of visits per year. The White House has moved to cut staffing at the CIA and the National Security Agency early in Trump’s second term, forcing the agency to do more with less.
See also CIA World Factbook 1990 – 2025 Library Country Dictionary Browse by Year Search Fields Text Diff Data Export Factbook Quiz
36 years of geopolitical intelligence preserved and structured for analysis. Every country, every field, every edition — parsed from the original CIA publications into a searchable, queryable archive.
- The entire site is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/
- Downloading a site from Archive.org and then serving locally using Kiwix – “Access vital information anywhere. Use our apps for offline reading on the go or the Hotspot in every place you want to call home. Ideal for remote areas, emergencies, or independent knowledge access.”
- Simon Willison’s Blog – Up until 2020 the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site. Those are available (along with the rest of the Factbook) on the Internet Archive. I downloaded the 384MB
.zipfile for the year 2020 and extracted it into a new GitHub repository, simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020. I’ve enabled GitHub Pages for that repository so you can browse the archived copy at simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/.”
