Best of Crest

(October 7, 2011)

The CIA Declassification Center (CDC) is pleased to announce the addition of the Best of CREST to the existing CREST Finding Aid. In addition to CREST document metadata, CDC will include the images of specific collections of CREST documents for searching and viewing. The first installment includes over 250,000 pages of the following collections:

Office of the DCI Collection (ODCI): This collection consists of 28,550 documents/129,000 pages and contains the records of the first five Directors of Central Intelligence: Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, General Walter "Bedell" Smith, Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Richard Helms. These records run from the beginning of CIA in 1947 through the late 1960s and include a wide variety of memos, letters, minutes of meetings, chronologies and related files from the Office of the DCI (ODCI) that document the high level workings of the CIA during its early years.

Directorate of Intelligence (DI) Central Intelligence Bulletins: This collection consists of 8,800 documents/123,000 pages and contains a collection of daily Central Intelligence Bulletins (CIB), National Intelligence Bulletins (NIB) and National Intelligence Dailies (NID) running from 1951 through 1979. The CIBs/NIBs were published six days a week (Monday through Saturday) and were all source compilations of articles and consisting initially of short Daily Briefs and longer Significant Intelligence Reports and Estimates on key events and tops of the day. The CIBs/ NIBs were circulated to high level policy-makers in the US Government.