The Archive of US-Greek Relations currently consists of over 6,500 documents, making it the largest online resource for studying occupied Greece and the immediate post-war period. The 20,000 pages of intelligence derive mainly from the main US intelligence agencies: the Office Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department, and its successor agency, the Office of Strategic Services (and the Strategic Services Unit, SSU, which followed the OSS and preceded the CIA), the State Department, and a smaller collection of highly classified intercepts of Greek and other diplomats from the Army Security Agency (which became the National Security Agency). The documents have been renamed, intermingled, and uniformly dated, so a single search request queries the entire collection.
All are available at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, save for a few documents available from the Central Intelligence Agency’s online database. The documents are identified to present the original file markings and to identify the source collection in the National Archives. For example, approximately 65% of these documents are from the Office of Strategic Services files; the alpha-numeric at the end of file name identifies that the document originated with the OSS.
The agencies collected information from a variety of sources, including State Department cables, agent reports, refugee interviews, diplomatic intercepts, and British intelligence. Important documents were shared between agencies. For example, if a Thessaloniki merchant escaped to Istanbul in1943, the US consul would write a report that would be shared with the OSS and military intelligence, and also with the British. Similarly, if the Naval Attache in Cairo received information on support for EAM within the Greek Navy, he would send it to the OSS and to the military intelligence service. From 1942-1943 many of the OSS documents are based on British intelligence; by 1944, when OSS missions were reporting from throughout Greece, a larger proportion of the intelligence was based on OSS sources. For 1945 and 1946, US intelligence officials not only continued to rely on British intelligence sources, but the Greek police and military intelligence shared their intelligence with US officials.
All the documents have been “read” by an OCR program, but many of the documents are barely readable by either computers or humans, yielding few searchable words. Or the computer “misreads” words, scanning “Papan4reou” for Papandreou, or “Greeca” for Greece. A second problem is inconsistency in spellings, e.g., some documents use “Sophoulis,” others Sofoulis; and there are also variations on spellings of Greek towns and villages making exclusive reliance on a full-text computer search difficult.
To address this problem, each document has been manually indexed and the terms are part of the document title, along with the date and National Archives record group. The document: “1944 4-2144 Aetolia-Acarnania, Thessaly, Kalambaka, Agrinio, Tryfos, EAM-ELAS, Security Battalions, ELAS-German Fighting,” can be searched under each of those terms and phrases, regardless of whether the search engine can read the text of the document.