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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reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be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Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr.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.gwu.edu/~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."
02-21-06 03:18 EST
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