As a prolific FOIA requester, the National Security Archive has obtained a host of seminal government documents, including: the documents behind the most requested still image photograph at the U.S. National Archives – a December 21, 1970 picture of President Richard Nixon's meeting with Elvis Presley;[3] the CIA's "Family Jewels" list that documents decades of the agency's illegal activities;[4] the National Security Agency's (NSA) description of its watch list of 1,600 Americans that included notable Americans such as civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., boxer Muhammad Ali, and politicians Frank Church and Howard Baker;[5] the first official CIA confirmation of Area 51;[6] U.S. plans for a "full nuclear response"[7] in the event the President was ever attacked or disappeared; FBI transcripts of 25 interviews with Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003;[8] the Osama bin Laden File,[9] and the most comprehensive document collections available on the Cold War, including the nuclear flashpoints occurring during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 "Able Archer" War Scare.

[10] In 1998, the National Security Archive shared the George Foster Peabody Award for the outstanding broadcast series, CNN's Cold War.

In 1999, the National Security Archive won the George Polk Award,[11] for, in the words of the citation, "facilitating thousands of searches for journalists and scholars.

The archive, funded by foundations as well as income from its own publications, has become a one-stop institution for declassifying and retrieving important documents, suing to preserve such government data as presidential e-mail messages, pressing for appropriate reclassification of files, and sponsoring research that has unearthed major revelations."

In 2021, journalist Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post wrote, "The National Security Archive provides an irreplaceable public service by prying loose records from federal agencies that prefer to operate in the dark.

[1] Incorporated as an independent Washington, D.C. non-profit organization, the National Security Archive is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a tax-exempt public charity.

The National Security Archive publishes its document collections in a variety of ways, including on its website, its blog Unredacted, documentary films, formal truth commission and court proceedings, and through the Digital National Security Archive, which contains over 61 digitized collections of more than 1,000,000 meticulously indexed documents, including the newly-available 'Targeting Iraq, Part II: War and Occupation, 2002-2011' and 'The Afghanistan War and the United States, 1998-2017,' published through ProQuest.

The suits have forced the declassification of documents ranging from the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters during the Cuban Missile Crisis[17] to the previously censored photographs of homecoming ceremonies [18] with flag-draped caskets for U.S. casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An Archive Freedom of Information lawsuit compelled the Pentagon to release the 15,000 Donald Rumsfeld "snowflake" memos covering his years as Secretary of Defense (2001-2006), providing essential evidence for the George Polk Award-winning series, "The Afghanistan Papers," written by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post.

"[25] In December 2020, the Archive together with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, and the public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) brought a new lawsuit naming the White House and the National Archives as defendants and asking federal court for a temporary restraining order against any destruction of documents during the Trump-Biden transition.

[26] Justice Department lawyers assured then-District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that a litigation hold as a result of the lawsuit covered all White House records so that a TRO was unnecessary; and after the Biden transition, the government informed Judge Jackson and the plaintiffs that all presidential records had been secured, including the WhatsApp messages generated by senior White House staff.

For the Havana conference, which took place during the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban president Fidel Castro and former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara discussed newly declassified documents showing that US president John F. Kennedy, in meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law Adzhubei in January 1962, compared the US failure at the Bay of Pigs to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

The Budapest conference of 1996, carried out by the Archive's "Openness in Russia and East Europe Project" in collaboration with Cold War International History Project and Russian and Eastern European partners, focused on the 1956 uprising was a featured subject at an international conference which the Archive, CWIHP, and the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung organized in Potsdam on "The Crisis Year 1953 and the Cold War in Europe."