Thomas S. Blanton is Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive won U.S. journalism’s George Polk Award in April 2000 for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all.” The Los Angeles Times (16 January 2001) described the Archive as “the world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents.” Blanton served as the Archive’s first Director of Planning & Research beginning in 1986, became Deputy Director in 1989, and Executive Director in 1992. He filed his first Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 as a weekly newspaper reporter in Minnesota; and among many hundreds subsequently, he filed the FOIA request and subsequent lawsuit (with Public Citizen Litigation Group) that forced the release of Oliver North’s Iran-contra diaries in 1990.
