The Latest Developments in the Odyssey of the Conflict Records Research Center

When Steve Coll and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed suit in 2021 to force the Department of Defense to release digital copies of Iraqi records captured by the US military during the Iraq War and later deposited with the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), the Pentagon initially denied most of the lawsuit’s allegations, claimed insufficient knowledge to address them in any detail, and asserted that the requested records were exempted from both the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the court’s jurisdiction.

There was, however, one interesting detail contained in the Pentagon’s initial denial of the lawsuit: the Department of Defense claimed that the CRRC archive had fallen into disrepair. “[The] Defendant admits that back-up tapes of the archive, which required forensic reconstruction, were turned over to the Department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans and Capabilities.”[1]

In 2024, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) provided more details about the “forensic reconstruction” necessary to preserve the CRRC materials. In response to a FOIA request submitted by Iraqi scholar and former diplomat Alharith Baban, the OSD FOIA Division explained that:

“Regrettably after the CRRC’s closure, the tape format used to store the archive deteriorated; and the Department has worked to recover as much of the archive as possible, securing it in a modern digital format. The recovered data contains approximately thirty gigabytes of PDF scans of original foreign languages documents, English-language translations, and video and audio files with English-language transcriptions and translations.”[2]

In summer 2022, after Coll and the Pentagon had settled their lawsuit on favorable terms outside of the courtroom, the Pentagon began sharing with Coll records that had been recovered from the CRRC archive. Coll used these materials for his book, The Achilles Trap, and shared copies of them with the Wilson Center. In recent months, the Center’s History and Public Policy Program has been publishing these documents on the Wilson Center Digital Archive, after carefully screening for PII and adding redactions as necessary. I have also been analyzing their contents in a series of blog posts for Sources & Methods. 

In reviewing the records, it has been difficult for me to parse a thematic logic with respect to what the Pentagon provided Coll, beyond the relatively large percentage of the trove that consists of audio tapes of Saddam’s meetings. Considering that we know now that the CRRC materials required “forensic reconstruction,” and given the presence of partial, corrupted, and missing records in the trove, data recovery now seems likely as at least one of the organizing principles underlying what the Pentagon gave to Coll.

Whether additional records originally held at the CRRC were recovered by the Department of Defense is still unknown – but this should become clear in the coming months, thanks to a recent agreement concluded by the Pentagon to make at least some of the Iraqi documents accessible once again.

In the spring of 2022, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University under Director Eric Wakin, renewed its efforts to obtain the entire CRRC archive, which were previously halted by Pentagon lawyers in 2015. After the early 2022 outreach, talks between the Pentagon and Hoover continued over the next year, with the final agreement coming  shortly after a two-day Iraqi history conference hosted by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives on August 17 and 18, 2023. According to the subsequent Request for Disposition Authority at the National Archives and Records Administration, the transfer of recovered CRRC records to Hoover was accepted on September 29, 2023, with the final approval taking place on March 5, 2024.[3]

While public details of the decision to transfer the CRRC archive to Hoover are still sparse, the Office of Secretary of Defense did provide a partial explanation in its 2024 response letter to Alharith Baban’s FOIA request. “After careful consideration, the Department has determined that Hoover Institute has the most appropriate academic expertise to handle this important collection, making it as widely accessible as possible.” Moreover, the Hoover Institution had safeguards in place to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the records. 

Among the terms negotiated with Hoover were that a searchable index be made available on its website, so that members of the public can register online and complete a user agreement on the handling of the documents. According to the FOIA response, registered researchers will be able to access the records on a closed computer system at Hoover’s California and Washington, D.C. locations. The letter concludes, “the Department made this transfer recently and envisages the collection to be available as described within the next few months once Hoover has in-processed the collection.”  Administratively closing Alharith Baban’s FOIA request, the Pentagon stated it would provide a notification when the records became available at Hoover.[4]

We still do not know exactly what the Pentagon is providing to the Hoover Institution. Is it an identical set of records that were relinquished to Steve Coll? Is it a larger body of documents than what Coll received, but still not the complete CRRC collection, thanks to lost or corrupted files acknowledged by the Department of Defense? Or was the Department of Defense successful at forensically reconstructing the entire archive of CRRC materials?

Fortunately for the Pentagon and interested researchers, the entirety of the CRRC archive and much more is actually preserved elsewhere: the Harmony Database.

The Harmony Database is maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and is accessible only through the Pentagon’s secure networks, such as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), Stone Ghost, and the Establishment of Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems (BICES). The Harmony Database was the centralized repository of captured adversary records, especially from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which made them available to US government agencies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.[5]

When the CRRC closed its doors, it contained roughly 143,000 pages of documents and two hundred hours of audio tapes, a small fraction of the 100-200 million pages and several thousand hours of audio tapes in the Harmony Database.[6] Early published studies based on the records, prior to the existence of the CRRC, cited their Harmony numbers.[7] Every record processed from Harmony to the CRRC was given a new index number, which was in turn reported to the database’s DIA administrators. 

In other words, outside of a decision being made to delete Harmony records following the repatriation of the physical archives to Iraq in May 2013, there is no obvious reason why the CRRC could not and should not be restored in its entirety, drawing on the Harmony Database as needed. 

Given the geopolitical concerns of the present, it seems unlikely that the Department of Defense or the intelligence community will prioritize the screening, translation, and release of additional Iraqi records captured more than 20 years ago and still available in the Harmony Database.  The best path forward, irrespective of bureaucratic hurdles, would be to draw on the resources of the Hoover Institution, Wilson Center, and other academic institutions, along with the combined interest, knowledge, and expertise of Iraqi, American, and international scholars who have the ability to responsibly handle records and the motivation to make them available to all who are interested. 

Since the CRRC archive was open between 2010 and 2015, the Wilson Center has been at the forefront of efforts to make Iraqi records accessible to the widest possible audience on its Digital Archive, available to anyone anywhere in the world with internet access. This year’s partnership with Steve Coll has demonstrated it is possible to do this on an even larger scale while screening for PII, which is generally less of a concern with CRRC records than with the Baʿth Party records at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. 

With respect to the potential release of additional Iraqi records from the Harmony Database that go beyond the original CRRC collections, it is my opinion that the Wilson Center, as a public-private institution that is strictly non-partisan, is the ideal partner for the Department of Defense. Either in coordination with the Pentagon or in hiring its own contractor linguists with security clearances who could screen and translate Harmony records for public release, the Wilson Center has a commitment to transparency and the experience and vision to make this possibility a reality. 

[1] “Answer” in Civil Action No. 21-2777 (RC), p. 3.

[2] Stephanie L. Carr, “Final Answer” to FOIA Case Number 21-F-2021, June 21, 2024, p. 1.

[3] “Request for Disposition Authority,” Records Schedule Number: DAA-0330-2023-0001, Status: Approved, Date Approved: March 5, 2024, pp. 1-7.

[4] Carr, “Final Answer” to FOIA Case Number 21-F-2021, pp. 1-2.

[5] Mike McConnell, “Document and Media Exploitation,” Intelligence Community Directive Number 302, July 6, 2007, pp. 4-6.

[6] “Background Information Concerning Captured Iraqi Documents,” pp. 1-4.

[7] In The Achilles Trap, Coll often cites original records even when drawing on the secondary scholarship, providing the Harmony numbers where relevant. For example, see endnote number 8 on p. 180, along with the corresponding entry on p. 506. This record was released and added to the Digital Archive with the first batch of records on February 27, 2024. Its Harmony index number is ISGQ-2003-0004487 and its CRRC index number is SH-MISC-D-000-652.