When one of the world's most secretive and far-reaching organizations offers to share how it sees the world, it's worth taking a peek.
That's the thought I had when I dove into the CIA World Factbook for the first time as a young editor at CNN International in the early 2000s. If journalists aim to write the first draft of history, I figured, then the Factbook, culling data from Cabinet agencies and other official outlets, could be a reliable primary source.
The CIA World Factbook started out as a classified Cold War document, but it later emerged as an internet stalwart. In classrooms and public and private research spaces, people relied on it for presenting essential facts about countries and governments.
But without warning, the CIA said this week that it will no longer produce the publication that it previously touted as "indispensable."
A 'perennial bestseller' full of essential facts
For a sense of how indispensable it could be, consider visiting Bulgaria without reading this Factbook "Travel Facts" tip: "Unlike in most other countries, a vertical shaking of the head indicates 'no' in Bulgaria while a sideways shaking indicates 'yes.'"
Librarians at CNN and NPR were the first people I heard singing the Factbook's praises, treating it as the gold standard for making important distinctions such as whether a country is majority Shiite or Sunni, and what kind of government it has.
But they're part of a large choir: Since the Government Publishing Office started publishing the World Factbook in 1975, it has been a "perennial best seller," the GPO says.
"The CIA World Factbook has been for 30 years an invaluable goldmine of reliable information used by students, scholars, reporters and the general public," says CIA historian Tim Weiner, referring to the decades the Factbook has been online; its history goes back even further (more on that below).
The Factbook was an immediate hit after it went online in 1997 — offering an orderly view of the world, one year before Google's 1998 debut. The CIA says it has "garnered millions of views each year."
All of that came to an abrupt end on Feb. 4, when the CIA closed the book on the Factbook. The resource's former web address now redirects to a brief one-page message stating that it "has sunset," and is bidding it farewell. The CIA gave no reason for the move, so I called the agency's media office, which declined to comment on the record.
Its demise comes one year into the tenure of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who has promised to bring "strict adherence to the CIA's mission" of intelligence gathering and analysis.
The Factbook's website might have been wiped from the internet, but thousands of copies of the site have been saved to the Internet Archive, including dozens from recent weeks and nearly 29,000 since January 2017. And you can find physical copies of the book in many public and university libraries.
From the practical to the fanciful
For academics, the Factbook offered hard reliable data that was updated each year. For international travelers, it offered a promise of predictability. Its Travel Facts section listed everything from voltage requirements and cultural norms to what kind of food and souvenirs visitors would find.
"In 1988, I was going to Afghanistan, then under Soviet domination," says Weiner, author of the book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. "And one of the first things I did was to go to the CIA World Factbook for information about Afghanistan, which was hard to find" in the pre-internet era.
"It's like you wouldn't go off on a trip as a reporter without a map, and you wouldn't go off to a strange country without consulting the CIA World Factbook," he adds. "It was a compass to discover the world."
When I was covering the 2016 Olympics in Brazil and the 2018 Games in South Korea for NPR, the Factbook was clutch, decoding flags and national anthems and laying out where countries stack up in the pecking orders of GDP, land mass and population. I came to rely on it for everything from locator maps to a quick guide to a country's political, religious and ethnic dynamics.
The Factbook also supplied superlatives that trivia buffs could count on, issuing Daily Facts of historical and geographical significance. It listed, for instance, the only two "doubly landlocked" countries — which means they're surrounded by other landlocked countries — in the world: Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein.
It also included photos of local scenes, from tourist sites to fields of livestock. And as the spy agency noted this week, "only CIA insiders would know that officers donated some of their personal travel photos" among the Factbook's more than 5,000 photographs. (As for how many people have worked on the book itself, the agency says that's classified!)
The Factbook's roots extend to World War II
The World Factbook's origin story is interwoven with that of the CIA itself. The agency is a descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS, as many crossword solvers might know), which was created during World War II to gather reliable intelligence.
The OSS worked with the Army and Navy to create authoritative appraisals of basic intelligence, emphasizing fundamental facts. A CIA history of the Factbook notes that as the U.S. emerged from the war as a global power, it recognized a need to continue giving leaders a reliable, 360-degree view of the world.
The agency quotes an idea put forth by the writer George S. Pettee, that "the conduct of peace involves all countries, all human activities — not just the enemy and his war production."
After the CIA's creation in 1947, it dubbed the enterprise the National Intelligence Survey. In 1962, the CIA began publishing the classified National Basic Intelligence Factbook, according to the agency.
The CIA issued the first unclassified version of the publication in 1971; it was renamed The World Factbook in 1981.
The Factbook's demise drew immediate concern from people who frequently rely on it for their work, as Reddit groups for teachers, librarians and travel agents mourned its passing.
And I mourn with them, while I look for another free and reliable online resource that offers to sort countries by metrics such as median age, inflation rate, net migration, and spending on education – details that can give news stories important context.
But we'll give the last word about the Factbook to the CIA. Here's how the agency described it in 2020, during the final months of President Trump's first term:
"It has been a resource used by presidents, by warfighters, and by the world's greatest scholars. It is used in times of crisis, in times of uncertainly [sic], in times of peace, and in times of war. It is an authoritative source of basic intelligence that has and will continue to be an essential part of CIA's legacy."
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