"Iran-contra is what made us," Armstrong recalls.

In January 1989, Armstrong learned that the Reagan administration planned to erase all White House e-mails before leaving office a few days later. Quickly, the archive filed a lawsuit to prevent the destruction of the e-mails. The case was called Armstrong et al. v. Reagan et al. To make a long story short, Armstrong beat Reagan, the e-mails were released and Blanton collected the best of them in a book titled "White House E-Mail," published in 1995.

By then, Armstrong had left the organization, Blanton was director and the archive had moved to its current box-filled warren of offices in GWU's Gelman Library.

Once perceived as a hotbed of radicals, the National Security Archive is now a major Washington institution with a staff of 35 and an annual budget of more than $3 million, most of it donated by foundations. The documents it has gathered have been quoted in countless newspapers, books and documentary films. The archive has won Emmy, Peabody and Polk awards, and in 2004, avant-garde artist Jenny Holzer projected 30 of its documents on the walls of tall buildings in Bregenz, Austria, in a work she called "Truth Before Power."

Among the world's document buffs -- a small but tenacious tribe of journalists, researchers and historians -- the archive is legendary for its prolific and skillful practice of the art of the FOIA request.

"They craft the best FOIA requests around," says Metcalfe, the archive's former adversary, who is now a law professor at American University. "If anybody does it better, I haven't seen it."

"They do it extremely well," says Steve Aftergood, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists, who is himself no slouch at the art of FOIA. "Within the government, it is known that they are persistent and they're willing to litigate if necessary and they're not going away. All of those things provide incentives for agencies to take their requests seriously."

Every year, the archive files roughly 2,000 FOIA requests and collects about 75,000 documents, many dealing with the most important events of the past 60 years -- the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the collapse of the Soviet empire, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. The documents are studied by staffers who specialize in each issue, collected into "electronic briefing books" and posted on the archive's Web site, and readers around the world download nearly a half-million pages a day.

Meanwhile, hundreds of researchers come to the archive every year to study the documents -- grad students, journalists, historians, even the occasional retired spy writing his memoirs.

In the winter of 2007, an Egyptian millionaire named Ashraf Marwan arrived at the archive to do some research. The son-in-law of Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and an adviser to Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, Marwan was widely reputed to be a spy for Israel. He was also widely reputed to be a clever Egyptian double-agent who fed disinformation to the Israelis. At the archive, he studied documents on the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and told archive analyst William Burr that he was doing research for his memoirs.

A few months later, in June 2007, Marwan jumped, fell or was pushed from the fourth floor balcony of his apartment in London and was found dead on the sidewalk.

"Police have been advised," the Times of London reported, "that the only known copy of Dr. Marwan's memoirs disappeared from his flat on the day of his death."