Matthew M. Aid, independent researcher who wrote a history of the NSA, dies at 60

Matthew M. Aid, a onetime intelligence analyst and researcher who drew on his “obsession” with the National Security Agency in writing a history of the secretive intelligence organization and also revealed that once-public documents at the National Archives were quietly being reclassified and taken off the shelves, died Aug. 20 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 60.

The cause was heart disease, said his brother, Jonathan Aid.

Matthew Aid began delving into military and intelligence matters in his early teens, then became a Russian-language expert in the Air Force before he was court-martialed in the 1980s for possessing classified information and impersonating an officer. He spent a year in a military jail and received a discharge for bad conduct — a fact revealed in 2006 and, in Aid’s words, “my worst nightmare.”

Close acquaintances said he worked for a time as an NSA analyst and spent at least 15 years as a researcher for global investigative organizations, including Investigative Group International and Kroll. Among other things, he examined records of companies involved in hostile takeovers and looked into emerging businesses in Russia.

Despite his court-martial, he was a researcher for the 9/11 Commission, investigating the origins of the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

By his own admission, however, Aid’s primary occupation was as an independent scholar who spent most of his time digging through documents at libraries and, especially, at the National Archives.

Aid was particularly interested in the NSA, the country’s largest intelligence organization, which is based at Fort Meade, Md. He spent years working on a history of the agency, filing hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests, before publishing his study, “The Secret Sentry,” in 2009.