The Kissinger Cables (PlusD)

The Kissinger Cables were launched on 8 April 2013 as part of our Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), a searchable database that also incorporated the Cablegate cables I published in 2010–11. The set comprises more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records dated from 1 January 1973 to 31 December 1976 — cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence — of which we counted 205,901 relating to Henry A. Kissinger, then US Secretary of State.

According to us, the set includes more than 320,000 originally classified records, more than 12,000 documents with the 'NODIS' (no distribution) handling restriction and more than 9,000 marked 'Eyes Only'. Not every record has full text: for many paper records only index data is available, and records that remained classified appear only as 'withdrawal cards' with limited metadata.

I said our media partners would report on US relations with authoritarian governments of the period, including in Latin America, Franco's Spain and Greece under the Colonels. Al Jazeera reported cables suggesting that Rajiv Gandhi, later India's prime minister, may have been the 'main negotiator' in a 1970s arms deal involving a Swedish company.

The Kissinger Cables were not leaked. They are State Department records that passed through the department's systematic 25-year declassification review and a further review by the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which held them as about 1.7 million individual PDFs in its Central Foreign Policy Files. I obtained the PDFs, extracted and standardised their metadata and made the collection full-text searchable.

I noted gaps in the underlying archive: Top Secret records are not available online, records carrying only 'temporary' subject tags were destroyed during review, and, according to the State Department, the content of documents from several periods in 1975–76 was lost through data corruption. Media organisations given advance access included the Associated Press, the Press Association, Fairfax Media, The Hindu, La Repubblica and L'Espresso, among others.