"Those documents allow you to be a fly on the wall," he says, "as the decisions that change the world are made."

Wall of Shame

The office decor at the National Security Archive consists mainly of cardboard boxes stuffed with government documents, so it's not surprising to find that the decorations on the office walls consist mainly of government documents, enlarged and framed.

"We just sort of went around and said, 'What's your favorite document?' " Byrne explains.

He's giving an impromptu tour of this gallery of greatest hits. There's a page from Oliver North's notebook from his Iran-contra days. And a copy of Richard Clarke's now-famous January 2001 memo warning Condoleezza Rice of the threat from al-Qaeda. And the notes from a 1987 White House meeting in which Reagan's defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, urges his colleagues to give more support to Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran: "We should not only be supportive of Iraq, but should be seen to be supportive."

And there's a Defense Department memo, written at the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, rejecting a suggestion that American planes jam the broadcasts of the radio stations that were inciting the mobs of machete-wielding murderers. The flights would cost too much, a Defense official wrote: "approximately $8500 per flight hour."

Byrne reaches up and grabs one of his favorite documents off the wall. It's an enlarged copy of an order that's handwritten in Russian, the order for Soviet troops to invade Afghanistan in 1979.

"This is the invasion order," he says. "It came out of the Soviet archives when Yeltsin put the Communist Party on trial. . . . This is a good example of how our view of history has changed now that we have access to the other side's documents."

American documents reveal, Byrne says, that the Carter administration believed the Soviets invaded Afghanistan as part of a long-range strategy to expand southward in pursuit of warm-water ports. But Soviet documents show that the Russians invaded because they feared that the new Afghan leader, who'd been educated in the United States, might be an American spy.

"This is something," Byrne says, "that you constantly see in these documents -- how little we or anybody else knows about our adversaries."