'Top secret' CIA briefing: Vikings defeated in 1974 Super Bowl

This 1974 document was classified until 2010, and only made available online in January.

March 14, 2017 at 3:45PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Dejected spectators at the 1974 Super Bowl (Star Tribune photo by John Croft)

In January, the CIA announced that it had put its largest collection of declassified documents online. Now the public can search through 12 million pages of the spy agency's former secrets in the CREST archive (short for CIA Records Search Tool). The records are at least 25 years old and date back to the 1940s. Many were already declassified, but people who wanted to see them had to travel to the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md.

The CIA was hardly eager to take this step. It only happened after the agency was sued in 2014 by a nonprofit pro-transparency group, MuckRock.

Some unusual stuff has begun to emerge. U.S. intelligence agencies trained and deployed psychics to see inside the U.S. Embassy in Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.

I'm just starting to poke around these archives. I did come across a "top secret briefing" for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, dated Jan. 14, 1972. It included three items, all of them apparently culled from the news. Kuwait was turning over five hijackers to the Palestinians. Israel had rejected a POW exchange with the Syrians. And then this, for a Secretary who perhaps had been too preoccupied to keep up with the Super Bowl: "Dolphins sink Vikings," and a capsule description of that sorry spectacle, ending with "The Vikings were shut out until the fourth quarter before Tarkenton ran in for the score."

The briefing was an official federal secret until 2010. Now everyone can read it online. Here it is:

about the writer

about the writer

James Eli Shiffer

Topic Team Leader

James Eli Shiffer is the topics team leader for the Star Tribune, supervising coverage of climate and the environment as well as human services. Previously he was the cities team leader, watchdog and data editor and wrote the Full Disclosure and Whistleblower columns. 

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