The External Relations service of the Cabinet of the Director-General was responsible for relations with member and non-member states. Files are organized by country and mostly contain correspondence. Other possible documents attached to the correspondence include: reports, meeting documents, and cooperation agreements. The original order of the series was maintained - the files are roughly in alphabetical order as each country was assigned a number such as, for example: C.1 Afghanistan, C.2 Albania, C.3 Algeria, etc. In seems that in most cases files dating from before 1982 are missing. This is most apparent for countries which had many exchanges with the IBI, such as Italy, France, Spain and the United States of America, for example. Files for those countries represent the bulk of the series.