Previous conferences

Need to Know is an annual conference on intelligence history. Organizing Committee includes Thomas Wegener Friis from Southern Denmark University (SDU), Wladyslaw Bulhak and Przemyslaw Gasztold from IPN, Michael Goodman from King's College London, Karl Lorentz Kleve from Norwegian National Aviation Museum (NL), Sylwia Szyc from IPN, and Anna Piekarska from Museum of Polish History.

The first conference took place in Brussels in 2011, organized by IPN and SDU alongside the Polish and Danish European Union presidencies. The conference focused on intelligence and intelligence operations, using declassified archival material that had recently become available to scholars in former communist countries. Its main goal was to bring together scholars from Eastern and Central Europe who regularly analyzed such material, along with researchers from Western Europe and North America, in order to create a European Platform for Intelligence Studies. The conference was successful, and the decision was made to try and organize it annually with different local hosts. 

The conference has grown steadily since 2011, attracting intelligence researchers from Europe, North America, and the Middle East. It has been held at various locations including Odense, Visby, Leuven, Greifswald, Karlskrona, Budapest, Bodø, Tallinn, London, and Langelands Fort. The 2020 conference was postponed due to Covid.