ABSTRACT
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1950 prior to the BND’s official formation, the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz was founded as a domestic intelligence agency and in 1951, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation and the Federal Border Police were established under the police force. The BND requested if Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files about the preceding BND organization could be reviewed by an external research institution before being made public. In 2002, the CIA honored their file sharing law and released the records of their connections to the BND predecessor. Leading up to the BND’s fiftieth anniversary in 2006, considerations for the project were made public and the idea of a historical research project became more concrete. Refusal of releasing foreign documents would be considered as a breach of trust by the intelligence service in question and would affect future cooperation with the BND.
