|
In the news
"U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret
Review"
By Scott Shane
New York
Times
February 21, 2006
US 'reclassifying' public
files
BBC
News
February 21, 2006
Related postings
Dubious
Secrets
Declassified documents show excessive
secrecy, arbitrary and subjective classification decisions
About the author
A native of New
York City, Matthew M. Aid has served as a senior executive with a
number of large international financial research and investigative
companies over the past 20 years. Mr. Aid was the co-editor with Dr.
Cees Wiebes of Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold
War and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001), and is currently
completing a multi-volume history of the National Security Agency
and its predecessor organizations covering the period 1945 to the
present. Mr. Aid is also the author of a number of articles on
intelligence and security issues, focusing primarily on issues
relating to Signals Intelligence (SIGINT).
|
Washington, D.C., February 21, 2006 - The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified
over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to a
report published today on the World Wide Web by the
National Security Archive at George Washington University. Matthew
Aid, author of the report and a visiting fellow at the Archive,
discovered this secret program through his wide-ranging research in
intelligence, military, and diplomatic records at NARA and found
that the CIA and military agencies have reviewed millions of pages
at an unknown cost to taxpayers in order to sequester documents from
collections that had been open for years.
The briefing book that the Archive published today includes 50
year old documents that CIA had impounded at NARA but which have
already been published in the State Department's historical series,
Foreign Relations of the United States, or have been
declassified elsewhere. These documents concern such innocuous
matters as the State Department's map and foreign periodicals
procurement programs on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community or
the State Department's open source intelligence research efforts
during 1948.
Other documents have apparently been sequestered because they
were embarrassing, such as a complaint from the Director of Central
Intelligence about the bad publicity the CIA was receiving from its
failure to predict anti-American riots in Bogota, Colombia in 1948
or a report that the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence
community badly botched their estimates as to whether or not
Communist China would intervene in the Korean War in the fall of
1950. It is difficult to imagine how the documents cited by Aid
could cause any harm to U.S. national security.
To justify their reclassification program, officials at CIA and
military agencies have argued that during the implementation of
Executive Order 12958, President Clinton's program for bulk
declassification of historical federal records, many sensitive
intelligence-related documents that remained classified were
inadvertently released at NARA, especially in State Department
files. Even though researchers had been combing through and copying
documents from those collections for years, CIA and other agencies
compelled NARA to grant them access to the open files so they could
reclassify documents. While this reclassification activity began
late in the 1990s, its scope widened during the Bush administration,
and it is scheduled to continue until 2007. The CIA has ignored
arguments from NARA officials that some of the impounded documents
have already been published.
"Every blue ribbon panel that has studied the performance of the
U.S. defense establishment and intelligence community since
September 11, 2001 has emphasized the need for less secrecy and
greater transparency," said Aid. "This episode reveals an enduring
culture of secrecy in the U.S. government and highlights the need to
establish measures prohibiting future secret reclassification
programs."
On Friday, February 17, Aid and representatives of the National
Security Archive, the National History Coalition, Public Citizen
Litigation Group, and the Society for the Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR), wrote to J. William Leonard, director of
the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO)
asking ISOO to audit the reclassified documents, to return documents
to the files, and develop better guidelines for the review of
historical records.
Declassification in
Reverse
The Pentagon and
the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document
Reclassification Program
By Matthew M.
Aid
Beginning in the fall of 1999, and continuing unabated for the
past seven years, at least six government agencies, including the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA), the Defense Department, the military services, and the
Department of Justice, have been secretly engaged in a wide-ranging
historical document reclassification program at the principal
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) research
facility at College Park, Maryland, as well as at the Presidential
Libraries run by NARA.
Since the reclassification program began, some 9,500 formerly
declassified and publicly-available documents totaling more than
55,500 pages have been withdrawn from the open shelves at College
Park and reclassified because, according to the U.S. government
agencies, they had been improperly and/or inadvertently
released.
The Genesis of the Document Reclassification
Program
The beginnings of this classified multi-agency historical
document reclassification program can be traced back almost eleven
years to April 17, 1995, when President Bill Clinton signed
Executive Order 12958 Classified National Security
Information. The central provision of E.O. 12958 was the
requirement that U.S. government agencies declassify all of their
historical records that were 25 years old or older by the end of
1999, except for those documents that fell within certain specified
exempt categories of records, such as documents relating to
intelligence sources and methods, cryptology, or war plans still in
effect. (Note
1)
 |
|
This declassified intelligence estimate, written only 12
days before Chinese forces crossed into North Korea,
said that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was
"not probable in 1950." The document was reclassified in
October 2001 despite the fact that the intelligence
failure is well known and has been written about
extensively.
| |
Some U.S. Government agencies moved rapidly to comply with the
terms of E.O. 12958. The State Department and Department of Energy
(DOE) were notable in this regard, moving quickly to begin
declassifying many of their older historical records. In 1997, the
Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy specifically commended the
State Department for aggressively declassifying historical documents
on U.S. foreign policy and making them available to the public as
part of its acclaimed Foreign Relations of the United
States (FRUS) series of publications. Energy Secretary Hazel
O'Leary declassified historical nuclear weapons stockpile figures
and other formerly classified information, such as 1.6 million pages
of historical records on human radiation experiments. This was an
enormous advance in transparency, especially because Secretary
O'Leary worked closely with the Russian government in prompting
their release of information on the entire series of nuclear tests
undertaken by the Soviet Union under strict secrecy during the Cold
War. Secretary O'Leary's 'Openness Initiative' was strenuously
resisted by the Defense Department. Both State and DOE also
aggressively moved to dramatically reduce their backlogs of FOIA
requests. (Note
2)
But by 1999, however, there had been a sea-change within the
Clinton administration concerning security classification issues. A
controversy over Chinese nuclear espionage, epitomized by the
1998-1999 Wen Ho Lee spy scandal, led to a number of investigations
into DOE security practices, and Hazel O'Leary's successor as Energy
Secretary, Bill Richardson, tightened the agency's security and
halted the Department's document declassification program. (Note 3)
Moreover, security officials at DOE had become concerned that the
implementation of EO 12958 had led to the inadvertent release in
State Department and other agency records at NARA of "unmarked"
restricted and formerly restricted data on nuclear weapons. In the
fall of 1998, Congress formally authorized the Department of Energy
to remove from public document repositories any and all sensitive
nuclear weapons design-related information pursuant to Section 3161
of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999,
entitled "Protection Against Inadvertent Release of Restricted Data
and Formerly Restricted Data." This legal provision is better known
as the Kyl-Lott Amendment, named after its two principal sponsors,
which was signed into law on October 17, 1998 by President Bill
Clinton. (Note 4)
(For a skeptical look at the Kyl-Lott process see "DOE Puts Declassification Into Reverse," by
George Lardner Jr., The Washington Post, 19 May 2001.)
According to press reports from this time period, the Defense
Department and the U.S. intelligence community were also strenuously
resisting implementing the provisions of E.O. 12958, with Defense
Department and CIA officials making no secret of the fact that they
were pressing for a general rollback of the mandatory
declassification provisions of E.O. 12958. These agencies used a
range of tactics, including delay. For example, at the request of
the Department of Defense, E.O. 12958 was amended in November 1999
to extend the automatic declassification deadline another 18 months
until the end of October 2001.
By the fall of 1999, the CIA and the rest of the U.S.
intelligence community had become increasingly intransigent in terms
of their willingness to declassify documents concerning past covert
action operations needed for inclusion in the State Department's
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. In
April 1998, a State Department advisory committee comprised of
outside historians and chaired by Dr. Warren F. Kimball wrote a
letter to then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright warning that
the official record of U.S. foreign policy was in danger of becoming
"an official lie" because of the CIA's continuing refusal to
declassify documents for the FRUS series. (Note 5)
More than a year later, the relationship between the State
Department and the CIA had further deteriorated. According to
comments made before in September 1999 by the then-head of the State
Department's History Office, William Z. Slany: "What has become
apparent and obvious is the Agency's unwillingness to acknowledge
amounts of money, liaison relationships, and relationships with
organizations, information that any 'reasonable person' would
believe should be declassified. The process has revealed the bare
bones of the CIA's intransigence." (Note
6)
The battle between the State Department and the U.S. intelligence
community over the declassification of historical records came to a
head in the fall of 1999, when shortly after the Kyl-Lott Amendment
took effect, six U.S. government agencies, including the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Defense, all three of
the military services, and the Department of Justice, wrote a letter
to NARA stating that it was the shared belief of all of the agencies
signing the letter that a number of State Department documents at
the National Archives had been inadvertently declassified when they
had been released by the State Department, in some cases ten years
before. According to NARA officials, the agencies stated that four
specific groups of State Department intelligence records, or Lot
Files, totaling 55 records boxes had been improperly declassified in
that the initial declassification review did not take into account
their "equity" in the classified information contained in the
documents. (Note
7)
In 1999, NARA officials withdrew from the public shelves at the
National Archive's main College Park, Maryland archival facility all
55 boxes comprising the four "INR Lot Files." According to
information provided by NARA, all 55 boxes were once again reviewed
by security teams belonging to 13 government agencies between 1999
and 2000, resulting in approximately 1,400 documents totaling 9,750
pages being reclassified and withdrawn from public circulation. The
55 boxes of State Department records were not, however, returned to
the open shelves at College Park. Instead, they were retained in the
classified storage area on the sixth floor of the College Park
facility. The fact that these 55 boxes of State Department records
had been withdrawn from the public shelves was not discovered until
the author submitted a request to review these records in November
and December 2005.
Outside historians who were members of the State Department's
Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation vehemently
objected to the reclassification of historical documents long
residing on the public shelves at NARA, but to no avail. According
to the transcript of a December 17, 2001 meeting of the Advisory
Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, committee chair
Dr. Warren F. Kimball: "... strongly and repeatedly expressed his
concern over the reclassification of material that was already in
the public domain." (Note
8)
Trying to Put the Toothpaste Back in the
Tube:
Expanding the Document Reclassification Program in
2001
Apparently, at some point after the Bush administration took
office in 2001, the expanded group of U.S. government agencies
engaged in the security review of the State Department INR records,
now demanded the right to go through all other records held at
NARA's College Park facility. The central contention of the
multi-agency group was that the same widespread inadvertent
declassification of documents that they had discovered in the four
State Department Lot Files in 1999-2000 almost certainly had
occurred in virtually every other declassified record group at the
National Archives containing defense, foreign affairs, and/or
intelligence-related documentary materials. At the heart of their
argument was the claim that because of a lack of "equity
recognition" by the original declassification review teams, in some
cases going as far back as the 1970s and 1980s, many additional
cases of inadvertent release of classified information had occurred.
As a result, the government agencies in question told NARA that they
intended to re-review all national security document holdings then
sitting on the open shelves of the National Archives in order to
find and remove any other documents containing classified
information that might also have been inadvertently disclosed.
NARA, which has no classification authority, and as such, no
control whatsoever over the records it is a custodian of, had no
choice but to comply with the demand of the government agencies.
According to NARA officials, a classified interagency Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU) lays out the underlying nature and purpose of
the historical document reclassification program, and governs the
conduct of the reclassification effort at the National Archives.
Presumably, NARA is a party and/or signatory to this classified MOU.
NARA officials have refused to provide any details concerning the
contents of the MOU, citing the fact that it is secret. The National
Security Archive has a pending FOIA request for the MOU.
Unlike the Department of Energy, whose document security review
program is covered by 1998 Kyl-Lott Amendment and enjoys its own
congressionally-approved line-item funding, the post-2001
multi-agency document reclassification program does not enjoy
either. According to information currently available, the current
multi-agency document reclassification program has not been
authorized or approved by Congress, nor has any money been
specifically appropriated for this program by either the House or
Senate Intelligence Committees.
Lacking Congressional approval for the program, the government
agencies involved in the reclassification effort initially resorted
to subterfuge to hide their efforts. Beginning in October 2001, each
record box designated by NARA staff members for security review was
given a label that stated that the records needed to be security
reviewed pursuant to the 2001 NARA directive on "Records of
Concern."
The CIA's leading role in this effort was made clear at the June
4, 2003 closed session of the State Department's Advisory Committee
on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, where the CIA representative
(identified in the Committee's minutes only as "Sue K.") stated
unequivocally that: "Agreement still needs to be reached on
documents produced by other agencies with CIA equity, where the
documents have been declassified without CIA coordination. If a CIA
document was mistakenly declassified by the CIA, the Agency will
stand by that decision. (Note 9)
But if another agency declassified a document with CIA equity
that the CIA never had a chance to review, the Agency would like a
chance to review that document and consider re-classification."
The chairman of the Committee asked the CIA representative where
these documents were physically located, and if they had been
published. The CIA representative stated that: "... some were in
Foreign Relations, some were in NARA, and some were in [the
forthcoming State Department History Office FRUS] Germany manuscript
which were recently declassified by State. The CIA made the
point that formal reclassification might draw attention to these
documents considered sensitive by the CIA. A simple redaction
might work." (Note
10)
Raiding the Presidential Libraries
It is now evident that the multi-agency historical document
reclassification program was expanded in or about 2003 to include
the NARA-run Presidential Libraries, especially a review of
previously declassified documents housed at the Kennedy and Johnson
Libraries. The following excerpts from a September 15, 2003 meeting
of the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical
Diplomatic Documentation dramatize the troubling issues as well as
some of the absurdities raised by the secret reclassification
program: (Note
11)
"Nancy Smith, of [NARA's Office of Presidential Libraries,
noted that DOE and AF [Air Force] reviewers were going to
presidential libraries to review information from the open stacks
for quality control. Smith said that a problem has arisen
occasionally when the Presidential Libraries have documents that
were previously published in Foreign Relations and the
same document may no longer be able to remain declassified. NARA
cites FRUS as a declassification authority, if the DOE or AF
reviewers have a concern. So far the Kennedy and Johnson libraries
have not alerted Smith to any problems."
"Kimball asked how many documents were affected, and whether
the HAC should be concerned. Smith said that she would check into
this. Schauble said that there were some 2,000 documents in
Department of State records and that some had been published in
Foreign Relations."
…
"Schulzinger noted that there were two types of documents at
issue: the first are documents published in Foreign
Relations, which the AF would like to remove from the
presidential library shelves on principle. The second are
documents not published in Foreign Relations, which
contain the same type of information found in Foreign Relations
documents, but which are in fact different documents. Schulzinger
said that he could see the sense in wanting to classify the
latter."
"Schulzinger then asked whether documents published in
Foreign Relations had been taken off of presidential
library open shelves. Smith confirmed that NARA had been
instructed, by Ken Stein of the DOE, to reclassify some
Foreign Relations published documents.
…. NARA has
told the AF that it would be self-defeating to withdraw documents
from NARA that are so readily and widely available at non-NARA
venues. The AF reviewers working at NARA say that the real goal of
their review is damage assessment; i.e. trying to figure out how
much information there was that should not have been released.
However, the AF is taking a harder line. Schauble did not know
what the AF would ultimately decide on this issue."
The Damage Done
The results of the multi-agency reclassification effort since it
began have dramatic and disturbing. According to figures released by
NARA, since 2001 security personnel from the agencies involved have
"surveyed" 43.4 million pages of documents held by NARA (i.e. NARA
records boxes were sampled to determine if a page-by-page security
review of these records was required); 6.1 million pages of NARA
documents have been reviewed on a page-by-page basis (the NARA term
of art for this process is "audited"); and that as a result of these
reviews, since 2001 9,500 documents totaling 55,500 pages have been
reclassified and withdrawn from public circulation (see Document
1). Most of the documents removed to date contained either
military or intelligence-related information, in some cases dating
back to World War II. (Note
12)
Worst hit by the re-classification program have been the records
of the U.S. State Department. According to figures released by the
NARA, as of January 2006 a total of 7,711 formerly declassified
State Department documents comprising 29,479 pages had been
reclassified and removed from the public shelves of the National
Archives. (Note
13) After the State Department, worst hit by the security
reviewers have been the records of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, from which 478 documents totaling 13,689 pages have been
re-classified and removed from the public shelves at the National
Archives since 2001. (Note
14) The third group of formerly declassified records that
military and intelligence community screeners have intensively
reviewed arethe records of the Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force,
from which a total of 282 documents aggregating 5,552 pages have
been re-classified and removed from public access at the National
Archives. (Note
15)
Many of the documents that have been withdrawn by the screeners
since October 2001 fall somewhere between mundane and banal on the
security classification sensitivity scale. See for example Document
No. 5 concerning the State Department's map and foreign
periodicals procurement programs on behalf of the U.S. intelligence
community; or Document
No. 8, which pertains to the State Department's open source
intelligence research efforts abroad in 1948. (Note
16)
Moreover, many of the recently withdrawn documents contain
information which could easily be construed as embarrassing to the
U.S. intelligence community. "Embarrassment", however, is not
a subject matter covered under the various exemptions to E.O. 12958.
Perhaps the reclassifiers need to be reminded that Section 1.7 (a)
(2) of Executive Order 12958, even in the version revised by
President Bush, stipulates that "no … information shall be
classified in order to …. prevent embarrassment to a person,
organization, or agency." For example, Document
No. 6 contains a complaint from the Director of Central
Intelligence to the State Department about the bad publicity the CIA
was receiving after its failure to predict anti-American riots in
Bogota, Colombia in 1948. Document
No. 7 deals with an early unsanctioned CIA psychological warfare
program to drop propaganda leaflets into Eastern Europe by hot air
balloon that did not go particularly well and was cancelled after
the State Department objected to the program. Document
No. 9 reveals that as of the spring of 1949, the U.S.
intelligence community's knowledge of Soviet nuclear weapons
research and development activities was poor, at best. As a result,
the American and British intelligence communities were completely
surprised when the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb six
months later in September 1949. Document
No. 10 paints a portrait of the state of affairs inside the CIA
which is not particularly flattering. Document
No. 13 reveals that the CIA and the rest of the U.S.
intelligence community badly botched their estimates as to whether
or not Communist China would intervene in the Korean War in the fall
of 1950. Please note from the withdrawal sheet attached to Document
No. 13 that the CIA and DIA security screeners virtually gutted the
entire 1951 MacArthur Dismissal file from the Lot 58D776 INR
Subjects File 1945-1956, despite the fact that the intelligence
failures during the Korean War have been extensively written about
over the past 50 years.
Some of the reclassification decisions by the multi-agency
security screeners border on the ludicrous. The intelligence
community security personnel have reclassified and removed from the
NARA open shelves documents that have been published elsewhere, or
are publicly available via electronic media from other U.S.
government agencies. Of the 15 examples of reclassified documents
contained below in the "Documents" section of his briefing, eight
have either been published in full as part of the State Department's
Foreign Relations of the United States series or in the
microfiche supplements to these publications, or are available on
the CIA's CREST computer database system of declassified documents.
The security screeners have also reclassified and withdrawn
documents that had previously been sanitized to remove sensitive
classified information [See Documents 6 and
10],
or had been declassified pursuant to FOIA requests by outside
researchers [See for example Document
9].
Worse still, the multi-agency reclassification is far from over.
According to information provided by NARA, the multi-agency
historical documentation reclassification effort is not scheduled to
be completed until at least March 31, 2007.
The remarkable scale of this historical document reclassification
effort highlights the diversion of resources that could be used to
review of "Records of Concern" that currently reside on the open
shelves at NARA. Included in this group of documentary records are
items such as sabotage manuals dating back to World War II,
instruction manuals on how to manufacture high explosives from
common garden-variety materials, and technical documents relating to
Cold War chemical and biological weapons programs that no one would
wish to fall into the wrong hands.
To try to correct the reclassification abuses described above,
the editor of this compilation is working with historians and the
public interest community. The first step was a meeting at the
National Archives on January 27, 2006 where NARA officials provided
a detailed briefing summarized in document 1. This meeting also
allowed the editor and representatives from the National Security
Archive, the National Coalition for History, and Public Citizen to
voice their concerns. The most recent step is a letter,
dated February 17, 2006, sent to J. William Leonard, the
director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which
plays a key role in monitoring and encouraging more rational
classification and declassification practices. The letter, signed by
Matthew M. Aid, the National Coalition for History, the National
Security Archive, Public Citizen, and Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations, describes the problem and asks that Mr.
Leonard initiate an audit of the documents reclassified at NARA as
well as work with the CIA and other agencies in developing more
reasonable guidelines for the declassification review of historical
documents. The letter also asked Mr. Leonard to issue a public
record on the results of the audit and to initiate the return of
documents to the files, with excisions only in instances where
legitimate secrets need protection. Updates on the latest
developments will be posted on the National Security Archive Web
site.
Documents
Note: The
following documents are in PDF format.
You will need to download
and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
Document 1: National Archives and Records
Administration, Briefing Paper for Matthew Aid, January 27, 2006.
Unclassified
Source: National Archives and
Records Administration
This document, written in PowerPoint presentation
format, was given to Matthew Aid and other attendees at a January
27, 2006 meeting with senior NARA officials at College Park,
Maryland.
Document 2: Agency Document Withdrawal List Broken
Down by National Archives Record Group as of January 13, 2006.
Unclassified
Source: National Archives and
Records Administration
Document 3: Letter from Matthew Aid et al. to J.
William Leonard, ISOO, dated February 17, 2006
Documents 4a and 4b: Letter, Acting Secretary of
State to Hoyt S. Vandenberg, October 10, 1946, and Memorandum,
Vandenberg to Acting Secretary of State, October 7, 1946. Both Top
Secret
Source: Prior to being reclassified,
both documents were located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR
Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 2, File: State-CIA Relations [portion
of title withdrawn EO 12958 25X1], Document No. 149. NOTE: These two
declassified documents can currently be found in RG-59, Entry 1491
Lot 79D137 Bureau of Administration Intelligence Files, Box 2, File:
Cover 1945-48
Document 5: Note, McCluney to Hulten, January 26,
1948, with attached memorandum, The Foreign Service Program in
Support of Research and Intelligence. Secret
Source: Before being reclassified, this document was located
in RG-59, Entry 1499, Lot 53D28 General Subject Files of the
Assistant Secretary for Administration, 1944-1955, Box 19, File:
Special Assistant for Research and Intelligence. NOTE: This document
was printed in full in microfiche supplement to Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of
the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1996). Researchers can also access it online at http://www.foia.state.gov/
Document 6: Note, Humelsine to Jack, with attached
Memorandum of Conversation, Publicity on Bogota Intelligence
Reports, April 16, 1948. Secret
Source:
Prior to being reclassified, this document was located in RG-59,
Entry 1499, Lot 53D28 General Subject Files of the Assistant
Secretary for Administration, 1944-1955, Box 19, File: Special
Assistant for Research and Intelligence. NOTE: This document was
printed in full in microfiche supplement to Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of
the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1996). Researchers can also access it online at http://www.foia.state.gov/
Document 7: Memorandum, Cassady to Williams,
Project Ultimate, Critical Delay In, July 23, 1948.
Secret
Source: Prior to being reclassified, this document was
located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files
1945-1956, Box 2, File: [title withdrawn EO 12958 deleted], Document
No. 164. NOTE: This document was printed in full in Department of
State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950:
Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 718 as Document 296
Document 8: Memorandum, Armstrong to Peurifoy,
Research and Intelligence Activities in the Foreign Service,
December 22, 1948. Secret
Source: Prior to
being reclassified, this document was located in RG-59, Entry 1499,
Lot 53D28 General Subject Files of the Assistant Secretary for
Administration, 1944-1955, Box 19, File: Special Assistant for
Research and Intelligence. NOTE: This document was printed in full
in microfiche supplement to Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1945-1950: Emergence of the
Intelligence Establishment (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1996). Researchers can also access it online at http://www.foia.state.gov/
Document 9: Memorandum, Hillenkoetter to Executive
Secretary, NSC, Atomic Energy Program of the USSR, April 20, 1949.
Top Secret
Source: Prior to being
reclassified, this document was located in RG-330, Entry 199 Decimal
Files of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Box 61, File: CD
11-1-2. NOTE: This document was originally declassified pursuant to
FOIA on September 26, 1989 before being withdrawn in July 2005. A
copy is currently in author's personal files, which was photocopied
at NARA in May 1996
Document 10: Memorandum, Souers to National
Security Council, The Central Intelligence Agency and National
Organization for Intelligence, December 28, 1949. Top
Secret
Source: Formerly located in RG-59,
Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 2, File:
State-CIA Relationship, 1949-1956, Documents No. 263-264. NOTE:
These documents were printed in full in the microfiche supplement to
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996). Researchers
can also access them online at http://www.foia.state.gov/
Document 11: Memorandum for Record, drafted by
Howe, January 19, 1950. Confidential
Source: Formerly located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR
Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 2, File: State-CIA Relationship,
1949-1956, Document No. 262. NOTE: This document was printed in full
in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), pp. 1058-1059
as Document 411
Document 12: Letter, Johnson to Lay, May 10, 1950.
Secret
Source: Formerly located in RG-59,
Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 2, File:
State-CIA Relationship, 1949-1956, Document No. 269. NOTE: This
document was printed in full in the microfiche supplement to
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996). Researchers
can also access it online at http://www.foia.state.gov/
Document 13: Memorandum, OIR to Fisher,
Intelligence Estimates on Chinese Communist Intentions to Intervene
in Korea, April 27, 1951. Top Secret
Source: Formerly located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR
Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 4, File: MacArthur Dismissal, Document
No. 349. NOTE: Photocopied by author at NARA in May 1996
Document 14: Letter, Webb to Smith, May 2, 1951.
Secret
Source: Formerly located in RG-59,
Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 2, File:
State-CIA Relationship, 1949-1956, Document No. 277. NOTE: This
declassified document is currently available in full on the CIA's
CREST database in the NARA II Library. The document retrieval number
is CIA-RDP80R01731R001300270052-6
Document 15: Memorandum, Howe to Polyzoides, June
8, 1951. No classification
Source: Formerly
located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files
1945-1956, Box 4, File: MacArthur Dismissal, Document No. 351. NOTE:
Withdrawn in 2001. Photocopied by author at NARA in May 1996
Document 16: Untitled document, June 9, 1951. No
classification
Source: Formerly located in
RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 4,
File: MacArthur Dismissal, Document No. 352. NOTE: Withdrawn in
2001. Photocopied by author at NARA in May 1996
Document 17: Memorandum, FH to Armstrong, October
9, 1952. No classification
Source: Formerly
located in RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files
1945-1956, Box 27, File: NSA, Retrieval No. 40819 00027 0001 1.
NOTE: Withdrawn December 2005. Photocopied by author at NARA in
March 1996
Document 18: Memorandum, FH to
Armstrong/Polyzoides, Erskine Letter on NSCID 9, January 19, 1956.
Secret
Source: Formerly located in RG-59,
Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject Files 1945-1956, Box 27, File:
USCIB 1945-1959, Retrieval No. 40819 00027 0001 8. NOTE: Withdrawn
in December 2005. Photocopied by author at NARA in March
1996
Notes
1. A copy of the original April 17, 1995 Executive
Order 12958 signed by President Clinton can be found at http://www.fas.org/sgp/clinton/eo12958.html
2. Senate Document 105-2, Report of the Commission
on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, 1997, http://www.dss.mil/seclib/govsec/secrecy.htm
3. Associated Press, June 23, 1999.
4. A copy of Section 3161 of the National Defense
Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999, "Protection Against
Inadvertent Release of Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted
Data," can be found at http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/hr3616am.html
5. Letter, Kimball to Albright, March 6, 1998, http://fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac97.html. See
also Tim Weiner, "Panel Says CIA's Secrecy Threatens to Make History
a Lie," New York Times, April 9, 1998, p. A21.
6. Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation, September 13-14, 1999
Minutes, located at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/11696.htm
7. The State Department records in question were
INR Lot Files 58D776, 58D528, 59D27, and 60D403, all of which were
contained in NARA Record Group 59, which houses the bulk of the
State Department's historical records housed at College Park,
Maryland.
8. Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation, December 17-18, 2001
Minutes, located at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/11613.htm
9. It should be noted that the statement by the CIA
official cited above that: "If a CIA document was mistakenly
declassified by the CIA, the Agency will stand by that decision" is,
in fact, not true. Between 1997 and 1999, the CIA released
approximately 100 pages of formerly classified documents from three
of its archival records groups (the CIA refers to its record groups
as "Jobs") and placed them along with other declassified CIA records
on the CREST computer database of declassified CIA documents, which
researchers can view in the Library of the NARA research facility in
College Park, Maryland. After the author and other researchers
printed out materials from these three specific record groups, in
2003 the CIA hastily withdrew these three Jobs from the CREST
database. Repeated attempts by the author to get the CIA to release
the already declassified records from these three CIA records groups
through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have to date been
unsuccessful. The now missing three CIA records Jobs are: 78S03377A,
78S00977R, and 78S00763R
10. Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation, June 4-5, 2003
Minutes, located at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/21201.htm
11. Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation, September 15-16, 2003
Minutes, located at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/adcom/mtgnts/25125.htm
12. By comparison, since 1999 the DOE's Kyle-Lott
document review has only resulted in the removal of 5,508 pages of
documents determined to contain Restricted Data/Formerly Restricted
Data (RD/FRD) nuclear weapons design-related information.
13. The bulk of the State Department records on
file at the National Archives are contained in Record Group 59.
14. These records were taken from Record Group
330, which contains the records of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense.
15. These records were taken from Record Group
341, which contains the records of the Headquarters of the U.S. Air
Force.
16. Other examples abound. In December 2005, a
dozen documents (none classified higher than confidential) were
withdrawn from Box 22 of RG-59, Entry 1561, Lot 58D776 INR Subject
Files 1945-1956 (Folder: Exchange of Classified Information with
Foreign Governments Other Than U.K.) pertaining to the Guatemalan
agrarian reform program. From the same file, an unclassified
document was withdrawn concerning the "Feasibility of Participating
in Exchange Program with USSR to Study Highway Transportation in the
USSR." Also from INR Subject Files, Box 22 (Folder: Miscellaneous -
1958) an April 17, 1956 unclassified document was removed concerning
translations from the Soviet Encyclopedia. From Box 26 of the same
INR Subject Files a restricted document was withdrawn from the
folder entitled "INR-Travel/Public Appearances 1958-1959" entitled
"Foreign Travel in FY 1959. Also from Box 26, File: INR
Reorganization, a confidential document was removed concerning
"Travel Plans for FY
1959."
|
