Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room
Welcome to the Central Intelligence Agency's Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room.
Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you? You can find information about all of these topics and more in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room.
What is the Electronic Reading Room?
(Updated March 9, 2015)
The CIA FOIA Annual Report is now available in PDF, and in machine-readable XML formats.
What's New on the Electronic Reading Room?
The President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) are “eyes only” publications written specifically for the president and are the standard for exchange of comments between the president and the intelligence producers of these daily products. The PDB as it exists today was initiated under the Kennedy administration with the production of the President’s Intelligence Checklist (PICL) in June 1961, which was replaced by the PDB during the Johnson administration. The CIA’s goal was to draft a daily document that flowed, was comprehensive and concise, and carried the updates on an intelligence thread from beginning to end. With each presidential administration, the PDB was routinely adjusted to focus on issues that mattered to that president, and reformatted in ways that held his attention on issues the CIA believed were vitally important. These documents have had limited distribution – generally the president’s executive staff members, including most often the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the national security advisor, and any other government officials the president identified to be recipients. The PDB remains the most tightly held intelligence product and arguably the most influential on a daily basis because the content is derived from the most up-to-the-minute inputs based on highly sensitive sources.