The Associated Press is digitizing and has begun to release a “treasure trove” of historical film footage from the 1960s and ’70s that had been sitting in Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s former World War II headquarters in London.

The archive includes color film recordings of a young Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi immediately after taking power, Richard Nixon with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro meeting Latin American and Eastern European leaders, as well as a young Saddam Hussein in Paris.

“The range and quality of what we’re finding in this lost archive is breathtaking and it’s incredibly exciting to be unearthing new history in this way,” said Alwyn Lindsey, AP’s director of international archives.

The footage had been sitting for decades in the Central London bunker, from which Eisenhower directed the D-Day landings.

Although the films have been well-preserved, the text that accompanied them has been scattered across the United States and the United Kingdom, the AP said. That text catalog was key to identifying the footage held in each of the 20,000 film cans.

AP’s footage business, AP Archive, brought in leading archival researchers to create a coherent online text database from the scattered paper records. The films are being cleaned, restored and transferred onto high-definition videotape for professional producers. They are also being digitized for viewing online.