When the contents of archives are closed to the public and scholars for privacy and security concerns, the collection is labeled as being “dark.” The presentation addresses one such archive, the Kanan Makiya Papers currently housed, but closed in 2017, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The Kanan Makiya Papers contains the life’s work of Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi exile, close advisor to the Bush administration, and founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation. The documents contained in the Kanan Makiya Papers, which include contracts and communication with the Department of Defense, internal memoranda among the Iraqi opposition movement, and dialogues between Makiya and high ranking officials in the Bush administration, detail the capture of Ba’th Party archives in Iraq, their transfer to the United States, and their subsequent exploitation for scholarly and intelligence purposes. Importantly, the Kanan Makiya Papers also contains an array of documents detailing the formation of the Iraqi opposition movement after the 1991 Gulf War, their contacts with the American CIA and other government agencies, and their consequential role in the planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Kanan Makiya Papers is thus a “dark” archive of the Ba’th Party archives, which, at the same time, is a “dark” archive of the wars in Iraq. What we learn from the Kanan Makiya Papers is how knowledge production about Ba’thist Iraq is curated by the politics of going to war with Iraq. Being that we are the only two scholars to have examined and digitized this collection in detail—the first part of our presentation reviews the contents of the Makiya papers. The second second part of the presentation examines what it means for a man—Kanan Makiya—to collect and curate his life’s work, but also to collect archives, in other words: to collect collections. In specific we address an ethical contradiction: why was the Kanan Makiya Papers closed to protect his privacy when the Ba’th Party collections—which contain the names of thousands of living Iraqis and what had happened to them—remain open and available to scholars?