Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files

 After complaints from historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled.

Allen Weinstein, the nation's chief archivist, announced what he called a "moratorium" on reclassification of documents until an audit can be completed to determine which records should be secret.

A group of historians recently found that decades-old documents that they had photocopied years ago and that appeared to have little sensitivity had disappeared from the open files. They learned that in a program operated in secrecy since 1999, intelligence and security agencies had removed more than 55,000 pages that agency officials believed had been wrongly declassified.

Mr. Weinstein, who became archivist of the United States a year ago, said he knew "precious little" about the seven-year-old reclassification program before it was disclosed in The New York Times on Feb. 21.

He said he did not want to prejudge the results of the audit being conducted by the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees classification. But he said the archives' goal was to make sure that government records that could safely be released were available. The audit was ordered by J. William Leonard, head of the oversight office, after he met with historians on Jan. 27.

"The idea is to let people get on with their research and not reclassify documents unless it's absolutely necessary," said Mr. Weinstein, who in the mid-1970's successfully sued the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain records he used for his book about Alger Hiss, the State Department official found to be a Soviet spy.

The flap over reclassified records takes place at a time when record-setting numbers of documents are being classified, fewer historical records are being released and several criminal leak investigations are under way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03archives.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=8bdd1b110f66a244&ex=1141794000

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)

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.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB179/

Books in Review

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America and The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era

Old Ghosts

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Yale University Press. 475 pp. $30.

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era. By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. Random House. 402 pp. $30.

To label the period after 1945 "The Cold War" is to misconstrue the ideological contours of our times. In the decades following the Second World War, Americans found themselves embroiled in not one but at least two cold wars. The seemingly more dangerous of the two—the political and military struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union—ended abruptly in 1989. With amazingly little fuss, the Soviets simply gave up. They abandoned their empire. When in short order their country began to disintegrate, they could barely rouse themselves to protest. It soon became apparent that this cold war—the contest between democratic capitalism and Marxism–Leninism—had effectively resolved itself years earlier. Somewhere along the line, the long–suffering peoples of the Soviet Union had concluded that their revolution had been a cruel hoax not worth defending.

The second cold war, a conflict within the United States and throughout the West generally, has proven to be more durable. Already by the 1930s, belief that the antidote to capitalist repression and exploitation could be found only on the radical left had become an article of faith for leading members of the intelligentsia. For these self–styled progressives, the Bolshevik experiment in utopia provided both inspiration and model. In the West, revolution acquired an allure that persisted long after it had lost its appeal among those who actually lived under regimes erected on its principles.

Waged in highbrow journals or behind the scenes in labor unions, editorial offices, movie studios, and faculty clubs, this internal cold war has not attracted as much public attention as its external counterpart. There was, however, one exception: from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a succession of exposés, spectacular trials, and headline–grabbing congressional investigations of domestic communism convulsed the nation and transformed the American political scene. The individuals raised to prominence by these events—Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to name only a few—almost immediately assumed iconic status. As individuals, they might be heroes, villains, or simply unlucky bystanders, depending upon one’s political point of view. Yet it was as protagonist in a drama of surpassing moral and political significance that each would henceforth be remembered.

According to the left, the essence of that drama went like this: ambitious, unscrupulous politicians (like Nixon and McCarthy) abetted by neurotic and duplicitous informers (like Chambers and Bentley) victimized innocent citizens (like Hiss and the Rosenbergs) whose only "crime" lay in their commitment to working for a more humane and genuinely democratic order. The result was national hysteria and the de facto suspension of civil liberties for anyone hesitating to enlist in the anti–Communist crusade.

An odd collection of bedfellows—conservatives, Cold War liberals, and a few anti–Stalinist radicals—offered a different and more sinister interpretation. In their eyes, the "victims" of the anti–Communist crusade were not innocents. They were instead agents of Joseph Stalin, engaged in a conspiracy to subvert the existing constitutional order while promoting, by whatever means, the interests of the Soviet Union, even, and perhaps especially, at the expense of the United States. In this interpretation, the story was one of deception, treason, and betrayal.

These controversies of the forties and fifties remained contested terrain for years afterward. Yet with no small amount of skill, the left succeeded in setting the terms of the ensuing debate. In the literature, this became the period of the "Second Red Scare," a label implying paranoia and intolerance. The term McCarthyism, initially a reference to witch hunts and smear tactics, became an all–purpose code word used to place out of bounds questions about the implications of being a Communist Party member or fellow traveler. Despite the efforts by a few historians to show that some Americans actually were complicit in Soviet espionage, the impression prevailed that the controversies of the period had unnecessarily and irreparably harmed the American political system. In sophisticated quarters, at least, the anti–anti–Communists had secured the moral high ground.

By all rights, these two invaluable books should change all that. Venona, the product of two American historians, and The Haunted Wood, a collaboration of an American historian and a Russian KGB operative–turned–journalist, provide crushingly authoritative answers to questions that have lingered since the days when the charges and countercharges hurled by ex–Communists and alleged Communists riveted the nation’s attention. How prevalent was the treason committed by Americans on behalf of Stalinist totalitarianism? How pervasive was Communist influence in American government? Above all, who told the truth and who lied? In putting these issues to rest, the authors of these two volumes make it possible at long last to move on to new questions more relevant to the age in which we now live.

The two accounts cover much the same ground but in ways that complement rather than duplicate. The Venona project, subject of the study by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, was a highly classified government effort to decrypt messages between the Kremlin and Soviet agents in the U.S. during the Second World War. During the period 1942–1946, as a result of production shortcuts undertaken due to the duress of war, Soviet codes, theoretically unbreakable, contained a fatal flaw. In 1943 American analysts identified this flaw. Through painstaking work, they managed by 1946 to decipher portions of transmissions that American intelligence had intercepted. That endeavor continued into the 1970s, by which time the National Security Agency (NSA) had deciphered in whole or in part nearly three thousand Soviet messages.

The Venona project did not by any means provide a complete picture of Soviet espionage in the United States. Despite the best efforts of the NSA code–breakers, many intercepts from the 1942–1946 period remain unbroken. Even during that period, U.S. military intelligence managed to intercept only a fraction of the encoded message traffic between Moscow and its intelligence operatives in Washington and New York. Above all, Soviet encryption procedures used before 1942 and after 1946 avoided the defect that Venona had exploited. Such caveats notwithstanding, Venona produced an intelligence bonanza, as was immediately evident when the project, long a closely held secret, and its findings were finally declassified in 1995.

The material gathered by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, if acquired by less exotic means, is no less compelling. As a result of a 1993 agreement between Random House, SVR (Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the successor to the KGB), and a cash–hungry association of retired KGB agents, Weinstein and Vassiliev paid for access to KGB operational files from the 1930s and 1940s. Yevgeny Primakov, now Russia’s prime minister but then its intelligence chief, instructed the SVR archivists to provide only selected files; despite this limitation, The Haunted Wood tells a devastating story.

A too brief summary of the findings offered by the two books would include the following points. Prior to and during World War II, the Soviet Union orchestrated a sustained campaign of espionage and subversion directed against the United States. Several hundred Americans, variously motivated by revolutionary romanticism, ideological fervor, or sheer venality, enlisted in that campaign. Some served the Soviet Union as spies, others as controllers, couriers, mail drops, or talent–spotters. Beginning with the New Deal, members of this Soviet–controlled apparatus infiltrated deep into the agencies of the federal bureaucracy. Entrance of the United States into World War II only increased the opportunities for espionage so that, for example, even the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA, had well over a dozen Soviet agents on its payroll.

Stalin’s agents rose to positions of prominence in the U.S. government: Alger Hiss, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field (all State Department), Harry Dexter White (Treasury), Lauchlin Currie (assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt) routinely passed highly sensitive information to the Soviet Union. So too did many other lesser known or still unidentified figures scattered about from the War Department to defense industries. (Indeed, by 1944, a well–placed Soviet agent in the U.S. government had already tipped off his handlers as to the existence of the Venona project.) Internal security for the Manhattan Project was particularly lax. With Julius Rosenberg playing a vital role, American spies provided crucial technical information that accelerated Stalin’s program to acquire the atomic bomb. For its part, the Communist Party USA routinely aided and abetted these efforts and accepted covert financial subsidies from the Kremlin in return. The party’s assertion that it was independent of Soviet control was fraudulent.

As with periodic allegations of presidential infidelities, it might be argued that none of this is really new. In fact, the findings contained in Venona and The Haunted Wood qualify as genuinely significant on several counts. First, they suggest that Stalin never viewed his wartime partnership with the United States as other than a temporary marriage of convenience. Given the scope and intensity of Soviet covert offensive, it becomes evident that the Cold War began not in postwar disputes over Germany and Eastern Europe but, as Haynes and Klehr write, as "a guerrilla action that Stalin had secretly started years before." The belief that more generous or forthcoming American policies, informed by a sympathetic understanding of Stalin’s security concerns, might have averted the Cold War is an illusion.

Second, these two accounts establish beyond any reasonable doubt that witnesses such as Chambers testified truthfully when sounding the alarm about Communist subversion. Diehards will still contend that Hiss was innocent or that Julius Rosenberg was framed, much as some adamantly insist that Oswald did not act alone or that James Earl Ray did not assassinate Martin Luther King. At some point, the accumulation of evidence permits us to dismiss such people as crackpots. We are now well past that point with regard to the most controversial spy cases of the 1940s and 1950s.

Third, Venona and The Haunted Wood show that espionage at the behest of the Soviet Union was much more extensive than previously recognized. To dismiss it as the handiwork of a few misguided souls is to understate the problem by an order of magnitude. The existence of a network on such a vast scale effectively demolishes the notion of "McCarthyism before McCarthy"—the thesis advanced by some scholars that internal security reforms instituted by the Truman Administration after World War II were irrational, unnecessary, and motivated by political expediency. The gist of this argument is that Truman ignited the anti–Communist mania that McCarthy himself exploited shortly thereafter. In fact, Truman was responding to a serious threat that his predecessor had allowed to fester. That response was prudent and necessary, just as the larger American effort to contain the Soviet Union was prudent and necessary.

These conclusions do not justify or excuse the demagoguery of Senator McCarthy and his acolytes. They do not constitute a defense for every action taken under the rubric of eliminating subversion. (Ethel Rosenberg offers a case in point. That she was complicit in her husband’s spying is beyond dispute; her offenses did not justify execution, however.) Nor should Venona and The Haunted Wood be read as suggesting that every American who flirted with communism or fell prey to an infatuation with the Soviet Union was guilty of treason. Indeed, these accounts deserve attention not because they offer an opportunity to settle old scores but because they provide a vehicle for moving beyond a debate that has long since outlived its usefulness.

Only by exorcising the ideological ghosts that have haunted national politics for the past half century will Americans rediscover the nexus of the issue that gave the domestic cold war significance in the first place: the threat posed by a radically materialist philosophy that in the name of "liberation" would snuff out even the possibility of authentic freedom. As was the case when the United States faced off against the Soviet Union, the ultimate question today turns on whether and how man relates to God. "At every point," observes Whittaker Chambers in Witness, "religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men, those who reject and those who worship God, becomes irrepressible." By exorcising old ghosts, these two histories permit us to redirect our attention to the new fields on which that conflict continues.

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9905/reviews/bacevich.html