After decades of stiff resistance, the CIA on Wednesday pulled back the curtain — to an extent — on one of the most vaunted rituals in the intelligence world: the daily briefing delivered to American presidents on world events and global threats.

At a conference in Austin, Texas, the spy agency released about 2,500 President’s Daily Briefs and similar reports delivered to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during a nearly-eight-year span during the 1960s. The briefings detail the evolution of the war in Vietnam and responses to events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.


The move to release documents that are nore than 40 years old may seem far from radical, but it represents a reversal of long-standing CIA claims that disclosing PDBs — even years after the fact — would endanger national security by exposing the manner in which presidents receive and digest intelligence.

If victory has 1,000 fathers, so, too, does transparency, it seems. CIA Director John Brennan flew out to the Johnson Presidential Library for the unveiling, which was also attended by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Brennan’s prominence as the event's keynote speaker and the CIA’s promotion of it as “the biggest release of declassified President’s Daily Briefs ever” has many CIA watchers puzzling about how the spy agency went from insisting that the PDB be sacrosanct to trumpeting their publication.

At a rare news conference at CIA headquarters last year prompted by release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on brutal interrogations of prisoners in the war on terror, Brennan did not sound like a man eager to bring more sunshine to the CIA’s work.

“I think there’s more than enough transparency that has happened over the last couple days. I think it’s over the top,” Brennan quipped then.

Speaking in Austin on Wednesday, the CIA director struck a markedly different tone.

"The PDB is among the most sensitive and classified documents in all of our government,” Brennan said. “The release of these documents affirms that the world’s greatest democracy doesn’t keep secrets merely for secrecy’s sake.”

The CIA director also announced that the new release was just a first step. He said 2,000 more PDBs from the Nixon and Ford administrations will be published next year, with PDBs more than 40 years old subject to declassification and release.

For its part, the White House says the first-ever release of a trove of presidential intelligence briefings stemmed from pro-transparency policies put in place by President Barack Obama.

Obama also sent a message to the Austin conference, which drew intelligence agency officials, spy service veterans and academics, as well as some sharp critics of the CIA.

"Our national security depends on protecting the intelligence that saves lives and our democracy depends on transparency for its citizens to make informed judgments,” Obama wrote in a letter read aloud by Brennan. “I hope these declassified documents will offer our fellow citizens and people around the world a window into your extraordinary service and indispensable contributions to global security and peace.”

In explaining the decision to disclose the PDBs, Brennan pointed to a new executive order on classification and declassification Obama signed in December 2009 making it more difficult to withhold classified information indefinitely. The CIA director did not mention his agency's long, categorical opposition to public disclosure of PDBs.

The White House also noted that in 2011 Obama overruled the CIA's long-standing appeal of an interagency panel's decision to declassify parts of a 1968 PDB about the Soviet space program. That decision by Obama appears to have set in motion the release of a smattering of other PDBs and similar records from the Kennedy-era called the President's Intelligence Checklist, or PICL (pronounced "pickle").

"In light of this approach to declassification and release, CIA information management experts worked with counterparts at the National Security Council and the Office of Director of National Intelligence to start the review of the declassification of PDBs that were more than 40 years old," Price said.

Historians and former officials paint a more complex picture of the deliberations, with the CIA's hard-line position against disclosure crumbling as a result of a key court decision and pressure from academics close to the spy agency. Some also see former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures contributing to a reappraisal of the role of secrecy in the intelligence world.

Clapper seemed to confirm Wednesday that the Snowden affair played a role in a reassessment of secrecy in the U.S. intelligence community.

"One of my major takeaways from the controversies of the past few years has been that, yes, we have to protect our secrets, our sources and methods, our tradecraft, but we have to be more transparent about the things that we can talk about,” Clapper told the conference. “Now, the American public expects us to talk about how we’re using the power of U.S. intelligence responsibly. That’s a lesson I personally believe we didn’t learn quickly enough and that 'we' by the way certainly includes me.”

Clapper also said U.S. intelligence agencies need to be more open, even if there are some downsides to doing so. "We believe transparency is worth the cost," he said.

Obama's first CIA director, Leon Panetta, said he supported the decision to open up the historical PDBs. "My view was, particularly for the period they were reviewing, going back that long, it made a lot of sense to do the review and try to release these PDBs," Panetta told POLITICO on Wednesday. "I think it is important for the American people to be able to see what the PDBs are about and what kind of information is presented to the president and to key leaders in any administration."

The head of CIA's historical advisory panel said his group has been leaning on CIA for years to release older PDBs and raising doubts about claims that doing so would undermine future presidential briefings.

"I really felt their rationale as stated doesn't pass the giggle test," said Columbia University political science professor Robert Jervis. "It's preposterous on its face. I think the CIA felt strongly because this was their direct pipeline to the president."

Jervis said he believes a White House decision about a year and a half ago set in motion the releases due out Wednesday. Brennan, who delivered the PDB to President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, appears to have evolved on the transparency issue since serving as a senior CIA official during the George W. Bush administration, the professor said.

"I know he defended this years ago, when he was deputy executive director and in charge of declassification," Jervis said. "I think he is [now] committed to more openness than many of his predecessors. I think he's changed his feeling on openness and now favors more if it."

Given the CIA's previous opposition to disclosure of PDBs, the new announcement took many experts by surprise.

"It's amazing if they're actually releasing that," said Sharon Fawcett, former director of the National Archives and Records Administration's presidential libraries branch. "We fought a lot over that. We had been trying for a number of years to get the CIA to open the daily brief."

Fawcett said the CIA's desire to keep the PDBs under wraps even triggered disputes about letting presidential libraries keep the sensitive intelligence summaries.

"For some administrations, the CIA took them back and we didn't even have them," she said. "There was quite a bit of disharmony between the archives and the CIA, which wanted to have possession and to have control over them."

In the latter years of the Bush Administration, the CIA fought a legal battle over the PDBs, arguing that they should be categorically exempt from disclosure because releasing any significant number of them would lead to many more releases.

Bush released a couple of PDB items relating to potential warnings about the Sept. 1, 2001,1 attacks. However, he did so with considerable resistance from within his own administration. Vice President Dick Cheney called the PDB "the family jewels" of the intelligence community.

Critics noted that portions of nearly three dozens briefs had been released over the years, sometimes accidentally. But in the legal showdown, the government appeared to take the position that the bulk of briefs should remain secret forever.

"The result would be the disclosure of a large mosaic of the most important intelligence available to the United States government that reasonably could be expected to reveal sensitive information about the intelligence process ... and therefore would cripple U.S. intelligence-gathering and analytic capabilities," Justice Department lawyers wrote in a 2005 court brief fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for several Kennedy-era briefs. "Compelled disclosure could also have a chilling effect on the quality of the PDB as a document used to advise the President and his most senior advisors on matters of national security and foreign policy, because it could lead those who produce the PDB to provide more qualified or less candid advice than if they were assured that their advice forever would be held in confidence."

A ruling from the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2007 delivered in a mixed result. The judges said the PDBs at issue could be withheld, but they rejected the idea that the PDBs themslves were an "intelligence source or method" which put them categorically off-limits.

"Historians have documented the PDB process in such great detail that even if that process could be deemed a ‘method,' that method has already been fully disclosed to the public," Judge Raymond Fisher wrote, rejecting the CIA's arguments as "boundless."

The requester in that case, political science professor Larry Berman, said he was stunned to hear last week that not only did the government plan to release the Vietnam-related PDBs he sought in his lawsuit but thousands more over a period of more than seven years.

"This caught me blindsided," said Berman, now a dean at Georgia State University. "I feel a great sense of joy but also a bit despondent it took eight years to release documents which in my opinion should have been released a long time ago."

Berman attributes the fight he faced a decade ago and the new stance now to the passage of time since the Sept. 11 attacks. "The argument that was made eight years ago about a mosaic theory pertaining to documents that are 30 to 40 years old was completely contrived and used to rationalize a political decision that people wanted to arrive at in a period where we were just a few years from 9/11," he said. "In my mind, the only thing that's changed is the political climate."

National Security Archive director Tom Blanton, whose group backed Berman's lawsuit, said he'll be looking in the new release for the specific PDBs the professor sought. That will show "how badly the CIA deceived the court," Blanton said.

After the passage of intelligence reform legislation in 2004, the CIA surrendered its lead role in delivering the PDB to the Director of National Intelligence. But former CIA officials say the agency retains a keen interest in the brief, which remains primarily a CIA product.

Some CIA-watchers suggested that another factor in this week's mass PDB release was Brennan's desire to patch up relations with lawmakers irritated by his actions during the fight last year over the Senate's so-called "torture report." However, congressional sources say release of the historical intelligence briefs has never been a priority of intelligence committee members.

Still, Brennan's decision to go to Austin and celebrate the records release sets a tone that could redound to his benefit with think tank experts, lawmakers and aides wary of his leadership and his acceptance of oversight in the wake of the "torture report" showdown.

"He's still got an oversight committee and he's got a president that does get into this stuff" regarding transparency, Blanton said. "I think Brennan is in a position of still needing to calibrate and he's still got to look for opportunities."

LBJ Presidential Library director Mark Updegrove declined to discuss the back-and-forth over the PDBs but said they provide unique insight into presidential decision making.

"Intelligence is the president’s vantage point on the nation and the world. The presidency is a relatively insular position. You have to rely on the intelligence apparatus to give you a view on the world," the librarian told POLITICO. "It's not just news the CIA delivers in these reports, importantly, it's analysis and context that give the president the intelligence he needs to make these very important decisions."