History Forum / General / British History / February 2006

National Security Archive Update, February 21, 2006

CIA REMOVES 50 YEAR OLD DOCUMENTS FROM OPEN STACKS AT NATIONAL ARCHIVES

For more information:
Matthew Aid, William Burr, Meredith Fuchs
202/994-7000

http://www.nsarchive.org

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.

http://www.nsarchive.org