The CIA World Factbook, a free reference tool long used by students and others to look up global facts, has disappeared from public access, according to the Central Intelligence Agency and a report by Associated Press correspondent Laurie Kellman.

Kellman said the Trump administration abruptly shuttered the Factbook on Feb. 4, ending a publicly available account of countries, maps, and other reference details. In the report, the CIA framed the move as part of “progress” for an agency whose core mission has changed.

For many people, the Factbook had functioned as a shared baseline of information. Kellman wrote that for decades—especially for those who encountered it in school—the Factbook’s maps and country listings offered a common starting point for learning about nations and their flags, customs, militaries, and borders.

The CIA did not leave users with an archive-friendly substitute in the moment of removal, and the response quickly spread beyond the United States. Kellman reported that the news was picked up by outlets abroad, and that the story circulated widely on social media as users directed one another toward archived copies.

Among those who relied on the Factbook for teaching materials, Kellman highlighted a comment from Isabel Altamirano, a chemistry librarian assistant professor at Auburn University. In an interview described by Kellman, Altamirano said the information still existed but that it “it’ll be harder to find,” adding that on Feb. 4, after she saw the news, she removed the Factbook from a list of resources for students in a business communications class.

Other reactions were more skeptical about what the Factbook could ever deliver. Kellman wrote that one analyst questioned whether a factbook assembled by a government agency could truly be unbiased, and quoted Binoy Kampmark, a professor of global, urban and social studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, saying mourning its loss would be “misplaced,” and adding that it might be better preserved as a historical record.

Kellman also traced the Factbook’s origin to a post-World War II shift in how U.S. intelligence approached basic information about other countries. She reported that the work grew out of early intelligence coordination after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, then described how the job of gathering basic intelligence on other countries was assigned to the newly minted CIA in 1947.

According to Kellman, by 1971 the Factbook was being built as an unclassified resource, and it went public in 1975 with stated aims that the agency said were rooted in sharing facts with the people of all nations. She linked that broader context to the period in which U.S. lawmakers and oversight bodies were revealing abuses and controversies involving multiple intelligence agencies, including the CIA, citing the work of Sen. Frank Church and his panel’s reporting.

Kellman wrote that the Factbook later became useful to students and also had geopolitical influence, including providing a window into American intelligence capabilities. She said the CIA renamed the publication in 1981, and later moved it online in 1997, describing the effort as the product of analytic work.

As the Factbook’s public access ended, Kellman pointed to one specific example of what that meant in practice: in an archived version, the last publication dated Feb. 4 listed Iran’s head of government as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—even though, as Kellman reported, Khamenei had been reported killed March 1 in U.S. and Israeli strikes.

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