Hello, readers! In today’s 15th challenge from Sofia Santos, we’ll dive into a declassified document from the CIA. This is a glimpse into history that led me straight to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). From telescopes to observatories, this exercise was a fascinating journey into how publicly accessible government records can uncover secrets once reserved for intelligence agents.
Tag along to find out what a former restricted document was all about.
Let’s get started!
Exercise #015
Tasks:
- A photo that matches the description on the caption report.
- The exact location of where the telescope was placed once completed.
The image below is a screenshot taken from a CIA declassified document. It depicts a caption report of an undisclosed photo taken by an agent. The text mentions a telescope “being assembled at factory“.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
It feels like we are in a movie when we are looking at documents from one of the big three letter agencies. Turns out the Freedom of Information Act provides us with “the right to request access to records from any federal agency”.
The FOIA is not intended for declassification of documents but can lead to it and seems to be the case in today’s challenge.
Let’s think about this a little more thoroughly. In OSINT, we depend on what we can find after digging through social media, satellite images, or public records online. FOIA opens doors that are beyond the open web and lead straight into U.S government agencies.
This is not intended to replace OSINT but to supplement it. Used together they can uncover data that would not have been possible to find if used by themselves.
With that in mind, I wondered where we could find those documents so I did a quick Google search for “CIA declassified documents” which led me to “Historical Collections | CIA FOIA“. Here we can search for documents using keywords.
Analyzing our image from the challenge I noticed that it seems to be a scanned document but it has a block of text at the top and bottom that seems to be added digitally. I decided to use that number “CIA-RDP78-05867A000100170017-3” to search on their archive as it was likely to be what they used at time of declassification. This search gave us two results.
I clicked on the first result and opened the PDF file. It was very similar to our image so I kept scrolling until I found a match on page 37.
Thanks to the scanned document, we know that the telescope was built at the Askania Factory. Searching for these provided us some leads to follow. We ignore the other write-ups highlighted in red and focus on the one in green since it matches our date of 1953.
Visiting the source site we find a description that matches what was written in the scanned image of the challenge.
This means we now know what the telescope looks like and that it was built for the University of Bonn. Searching for “Berlin factory of Askania University of Bonn” took my research to Observatorium Hoher List (OHL).
Here we learned that the first major instrument acquired was a Schmidt type photographic telescope. I returned to the previous page with all the results and opened up UNESCO Portal to the Heritage of Astronomy and found the image below which matches with our Google Earth view of the observatory.
Solutions
- A photo that matches the description on the caption report.
- The exact location of where the telescope was placed once completed.
Solution: 50.16182489727579, 6.848319144486622
And that wraps up today’s challenge! From a single scanned CIA document to tracing the telescope’s exact location, this exercise shows how FOIA can supercharge OSINT research. It’s amazing how much information is publicly accessible if you know where to look. I hope you enjoyed today’s exercise as much as I did.
Did this spark your inner detective? Share your thoughts in the comments, and stay tuned for the next challenge. You never know what hidden history we’ll uncover!
Resources
- https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-016/
- https://www.foia.gov/about.html
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/historical-collections
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-05867A000100170017-3.pdf
- https://www.imago-images.com/st/0061895213
- https://www.hoher-list.de/en/historie/
- https://web.astronomicalheritage.net/show-entity?identity=114&idsubentity=1
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