Reports of Central Intelligence communications, 1919-1940

Edited by B.G.J. de Graaff
with assistance from D. Benschop, H.J.M. van Dapperen and M.T.A. Schouten

The archive of the Dutch Central Intelligence Service (CI) was destroyed when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. Founded in 1919, the CI was a forerunner of Dutch intelligence and national security bodies such as today’s Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheids Dienst (AIVD, formerly known as the BVD) and the Militaire Inlichtingen Dienst. Between the First and Second World Wars the CI relentlessly gathered material on (extreme) leftwing and rightwing groups and individuals and monitored their activities. The Huygens Institute for Netherlands History (Huygens ING) has traced as many communications issued by the CI as possible in an effort to create a reconstruction of CI reports in the government archives at the national level.

The documents have been scanned and can now be accessed by typing in names of individuals, organisations and locations (almost 50,000 in total). They have all been stored in a database system that consists of images linked to electronic data. The database is available on this website for research purposes. In the longer term, a book is anticipated that will discuss the history and methods used by the CI in more detail.

• Consult the database
• Read the foreword to the introduction
• Go to the list of contents in the introduction