Thomas S. Blanton

Thomas S. Blantonhas beendirector since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).  He won the 2004 Emmy Award for individual achievement in news and documentary research, and on behalf of the Archive received the George Polk Award in 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy.” 

His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association’s James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors.  The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.”

His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive’s online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 70,000 Freedom of Information Act requests.

He filed his first FOIA request in 1976 as a weekly newspaper reporter in Minnesota. Since then, he has filed hundreds more, including the FOIA request — and subsequent lawsuit (with Public Citizen) — that forced the release of Oliver North’s Iran-contra diaries in 1990.

Blanton is a founding editorial board member of freedominfo.org, the virtual network of international freedom of information advocates, and the co-chair of OpenTheGovernment.org, among many other professional activities.

(Updated April 2025)