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historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled.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secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.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."
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/