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U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
By SCOTT SHANE
02/21/06 "New
York Times" -- - 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thousands of historical documents that were available for years,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.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000
previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central
Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what
they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a
1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It
accelerated after the Bush administration took office and
especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to
archives records.
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had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.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."
After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives'
Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government
classification, began an audit of the reclassification program,
said J. William Leonard, director of the office.
Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16
withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.
"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought
they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard
said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."
If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly
reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them.
But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification,
he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification
program.
A group of historians, including representatives of the National
Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American
Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express
concern about the reclassification program, which they believe
has blocked access to some material at the presidential
libraries as well as at the archives.
Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own
files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons
over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda
leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been
published by the State Department in 1996.
Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had
copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly,"
including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador
to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade
newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.
Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to
be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason
to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the
security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem
guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up
embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance,
gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese
intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just
two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed
into Korea.
Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification
program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might
technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a
circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians.
But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified
documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be
located.
"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 group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his
account of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org/~nsarchiv,
on Tuesday.
The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly
declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had
been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the
National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of
high explosives.
But the historians say the program is removing material that can
do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part
of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush
administration, which has increased the pace of classifying
documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release
of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.
Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy
agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the
reclassification program.
"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have
bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of
the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online
weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the
administration's overall embrace of secrecy."
National Archives officials said the program had revoked access
to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush
took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of
the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday
at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials
said.
Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but
said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more
than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the
reviewers work.
Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said
the National Archives sought to expand public access to
documents whenever possible but had no power over the
reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those
agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.
Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which
agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist
said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense
Intelligence Agency were major participants.
A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the
agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the
National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the
highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.
"Though the process typically works well, there will always be
the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and
multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.
A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was
unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the
program.
Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American
University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in
recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives
with little explanation.
"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she
believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I
think the public is being deprived of what history is really
about: facts."
The document removals have not been reported to the Information
Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal
reclassifications since 2003.
The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a
bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position
that the reclassified documents were never properly
declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped
"declassified," freely given to researchers and even published,
he said.
Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and
pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.
Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem
strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the
complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision
to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for
deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.
"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr.
Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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