Hamburg, ECER 2019

1. The CIA Archives
and the History of
Education
Lajos Somogyvári PhD
University of Pannonia Teacher Training Center
Veszprém, Hungary
somogyvari.lajos@mftk.uni-pannon.hu
www.uni-pannon.hu Educational Research in the Digital Era
ECER 2019, Hamburg

2. Overview
• Introducing the database
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/
• Legal and historical background
• Special nature of the sources
• What do we know?
Formal issues
• Looking closer:
reading a document
• Conclusions
• References

3. Introducing the database
• A good opportunity to think about digital humanities (scope and limits)
• More questions than answers

4. Legal and historical background I.
• The releasing process
Freedom of Information Act, 1966
Privacy Act, 1974
Executive Order 13526, 1995
• CREST: 25-Year Program
2006 as the first deadline
• Classification and declassification
• The Electronic Reading Room – period between releasing and creating
CIA-RDP87B01034R000200070055-7
CIA-RDP82-00457R002500520006-5

5. Legal and historical background II.
CIA and the History of Education
• The historiography of this topic
Dominant approach:
- Secret covert actions: intervention into students’ life and
organisations in the higher education
- Political intentions in the Cold War: expanding the American
influence (e. g. Prados 2006, Zwerling 2011, Paget 2015; Sheridan, 2016)
- Revisionist and post-revisionist view: A dark history, and unveiling
tendency
My proposal:
- Focusing on the corpus: what can we learn from these reports?
- Texts and interpretations for the History of Education
- Geopolitical and strategical analyses → educational issues.
New dimensions to the comparative studies

6. Special nature of the sources I.
• Anonymity
Who speaks? Who made, comment and evaluate these reports?
Origins of the information
Questions about the political dimension and privacy
• Importance and relevance
Every information included, without hierarchy
Priority and fragmentation, reflexivity
Questions about the selection process – from different perspectives
• Using the sources
Individual interpretations, related to the data collecting
Individual choices and ways to discover
Questions about reliability

7. Special nature of the sources II.
Different connections, patterns, orders and an always growing network
– Internet Epistemology (Choo, 2016)
• One way direction: direction of the data making is orientated and
controlled by the Agency
• Limitations and exemptions
Organized Chaos (Raymond & Smith, 2014)
• Governing the Internet and the common good of accessing (public
interest)
• Actors and functions (e.g. state, policy-makers)

8. What do we know?
The headline: absences, codes and warnings
CIA-RDP82-00457R002500520006-5

9. Looking closer: reading a document
The main text
CIA-RDP82-00457R002500520006-5
The main questions:
Which features of East German-education were worth to
record and register in the viewpoint of the CIA? Why?
How this information could be used in the Cold War?

10. Conclusions
So far, the sources of state securities, secret services and intelligence
have been utilized mainly in political - diplomatic dimension,
interpreted them in the context of the Cold War, ignoring the
educational aspects of the records.
An unknown field in the History of Education, waiting to explore
New aspects and elements from a different viewpoint
Limitations:
- Who?
- Why?
- From which sources?
- How?

11. References
Primary sources:
CIA-RDP87B01034R000200070055-7. Classification Guide.
CIA-RDP82-00457R002500520006-5. Soviet Control of Education in Land Saxony.
CREST:25-Year Program Archive. Retrieved: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-
archive
Declassification Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved: https://www.justice.gov/open/declassification/declassification-
faq
Information Security Oversight Office (2012/2). Retrieved: https://www.archives.gov/files/isoo/notices/notice-2012-02.pdf
User’s Manual for the CIA Records Search Tool (2003). Retrieved: https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/user-2003.pdf
What is the Electronic Reading Room. Retrieved: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/what-electronic-reading-room
Secondary sources:
Choo, Chun Wei (2016). The Inquiring Organization: How Organizations Acquire Knowledge and Seek Information.
Oxford: Oxford Scholarship.
Paget, Karen M. (2015). Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in
the Crusade Against Communism. New Haven – London: Yale University Press.
Prados, John (2006). Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Raymond, Mark & Smith, Gordon (2014). Organized Chaos: Reimagining the Internet. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press.
Sheridan, Vera (2016): Support and Surveillance: 1956 Hungarian Refugee Students in Transit to the Joyce Kilmer
Reception Centre and to Higher Education Scholarships in the USA. History of Education. 2016/6. szám. 775-793.
Zwerling, Philip (2011). The CIA on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State. Jefferson –
London: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers.

12. Thank you for the
attention!
tabilajos@gmail.com