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CIA Declassifies 12 Million Pages | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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The lobby of the CIA Headquarters Building in McLean, Virginia, August 14, 2008. REUTERS/Larry Downing


Washington- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified about 930,000 documents, totaling some 12 million pages, unlike what has been rumored that 13 million declassified documents were released.

Previously, the database was only accessible at the National Archives Records Administration located 20 minutes from Washington, DC
​, however​
​access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography — now the American public can access these documents online.

​T​he completion of expanding CIA documents electronic archive after uploading the files ​ was scheduled at the end of 2017. The date, however, has been preponed to coincide with the last working day of U.S. President Barack Obama so that the credit of increasing transparency goes not to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, whose tense relations with CIA are no secret.

As for Obama, his relations with CIA witnessed no tension. As a matter of fact, he was among the most presidents abiding by the intelligence agencies recommendations. In his first presidential day, Obama endorsed transparency as long as it does not contradict with these agencies.

Among the approximate one million classified documents in the CIA electronic archive, there are 2,500 sealed as very confidential and have special importance because they are daily intelligence reports submitted to the U.S. president, briefing the world occurrences.

The CIA refrained from publishing any documents that contain official information on the number of its agents and its headquarters around the world not even clear statements of the nature of their missions.

However, the topics mentioned in the documents revealed that the number of secret agents totals thousands while that of the public and administrative ones reaches tens of thousands.

Activities of CIA include three major fields: accumulating information on foreign governments, companies and individuals, analyzing the information in cooperation with other U.S. intelligence agencies and supervising secret activities and some tactical operations of its staff or of the U.S. army.