May 5, 1993
President Moves to Release Classified U.S. Documents
By TIM WEINER
President Clinton has taken the first step toward declassifying millions of secret Government documents, some kept under lock and key since World War I.
A Presidential directive issued April 26 ordered a sweeping review of cold-war rules on Government secrecy with an eye to opening the nation's bulging secret archives and reducing the number of highly classified military and intelligence programs.
The directive also establishes a task force that will draft new rules on national security secrets by Nov. 30.
Moreover, the order asks the task force to answer these questions:
* What really needs to be kept secret?
* How can information be declassified speedily?
* How can excessive secrecy be avoided?
The questions reflect Mr. Clinton's stated view that it is too hard to declassify old documents and too easy to classify new ones.
"It is time to re-evaluate the onerous and costly system of security which has led to the overclassification of documents," Mr. Clinton said in a recent letter to Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. New Light on Cold War
If carried out, the President's order could lead to the release of millions of secret military and diplomatic records, mostly from the cold war, historians and researchers said today. The release of such documents would shed new light on the hidden history of that twilight struggle.
"So much is being released by the Soviet and Chinese sides on the deepest, darkest aspects of cold war history that you have to wonder what the rationale is for keeping secrets on our side," said John Lewis Gaddis, a diplomatic historian at Ohio University and a professor of American history this year at Oxford University who has advocated easing classification rules.
Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter each issued orders meant to make it easier to declassify secret documents. Neither had much effect, historians say, because they were virtually ignored by the intelligence and military bureaucracies that were told to carry them out.
Now, however, the new heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon are on record as favoring the principle of openness.
'A Huge Mountain'
No one knows how many classified documents exist, said the head of the new task force, Steven Garfinkel, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, the Federal agency that administers the classification secrecy system.
"It's a huge mountain," he said. "Perhaps billions. The National Archives says it has 325 million pages of classified documents. There are hundreds of millions beyond that."
The National Archives is one of about 80,000 Government depositories that store classified material, Mr. Garfinkel said. It holds secret documents older than 30 years and awaiting review for declassification.
The acting National Archivist, Trudy Peterson, said she is drowning under reams of "top secret" paper. For example, under current procedures, it will take 19 years for the National Archives to review recently delivered State Department papers from the early 1960's.
"This is intolerable," Ms. Peterson said in a recent letter to the national security adviser, W. Anthony Lake. "Documents from the World War I era still remain classified."
Nor does anyone know how many secret military and intelligence programs exist, Mr. Garfinkel said. "I guess I'm the only person except the President and Vice President who has the right to know that number and I don't know what it is," he said.
Not every document would have to be read and reviewed to be released, Mr. Garfinkel said. "We have a finite number of real secrets," he said. "You could declassify thousands of documents with the declassification of a single secret."
Classified documents are stamped "confidential," "secret" and "top secret." Others, classified above top secret, bear one of a plethora of code words. All are kept secret under national security laws on the ground that their release would damage national security.
Those laws were strengthened by a 1981 Reagan Administration executive order. The order "resulted in enormous amounts of material being classified each day, and very, very little being declassified," said Page Miller, director of a national group of historians and archivists.
Under the present system, documents can only be declassified with the approval of the agency that stamped them secret in the first place. Historians say these agencies are often reluctant to release potentially embarrassing records from their past.
For example, American involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran that installed Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi was deleted from the official State Department history of those years published in 1989.
Agencies' Presence
Mr. Garfinkel said his task force would have members from 22 military, intelligence, law-enforcement and administrative agencies that create secrets. That drew a skeptical response from long-time advocates of reform in secrecy procedures.
"The President would have been far better advised to establish an independent commission," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. "The intelligence community is the problem. Nothing personal, but they live off secrecy. Secrecy keeps the mistakes secret."
The great majority of official secrets are created by the Pentagon, the C.I.A. the State Department and the White House, which together generated almost six million classified documents last year. Those agencies still classify far more information than they release, said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a prominent critic of government secrecy.
They have made only modest progress in unsealing secret information since the end of the cold war; the C.I.A. began to review all documents more than three decades old in 1991, said Peter Earnest, a spokesman for the agency.
Mr. Lake, the national security adviser, has some personal experience in the secrecy debate. Five years ago, as an author writing a book about the fall of the Somoza government in Nicaragua in 1979, he was denied Government documents for years after filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act, said Mr. Blanton of the private National Security Archive, where Mr. Lake did his research. The denial came even though many of the classified documents he requested were papers he had seen or written as director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter Administration, Mr. Blanton said.