‘Declassification Diplomacy’: Lessons Learned on The Argentina Declassification Project (ADP)

In what is called the first part of a “tasker,” this document provides background on the Argentina Declassification Project (ADP) and asks the agencies to support and prioritize it. Suzanne A. George, Executive Secretary at the National Security Council, sends this memorandum to eight Executive Secretaries and Deputies at the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), affirming the Obama administration’s “[continued] support efforts to clarify the facts surrounding human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and political violence in Argentina during the ‘Dirty War’ period from 1975 through 1984.” The administration is committed to expand the “… declassification effort, to include documents from the Intelligence community, law enforcement departments and agencies, [as well as] the military.” “Your department or agency is asked to prioritize support for this effort consistent with further direction from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and National Security Council (NSC) staff.”

NSC Director of Information and Access Management John Powers issues the second part of the tasker to support the 13 June 2016 memorandum (Document 1). It provides details on how to conduct and complete the project, outlining schedules, deliverables, guidelines, and expectations to the seventeen agencies and departments that will participate in the Argentina Declassification Project. “Agencies should conduct a detailed search of their documents and records series, documenting those series and keywords searched. Attached at Tab A is a list of search terms and supporting information intended to assist agencies in the identification and retrieval of documents for declassification review that shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism, and acts of political violence between January 1, 1975 and December 31, 1984.”

In reviewing documents, “the President has directed that agencies release as much information as possible. Public disclosure is in the foreign policy interest of the United States.” The first of five tasks outlines an intense chronogram directing “Agencies [to] search their records and records series …. provide [a] detailed list of potentially responsive documents …. conduct [a] public access review …. The ODNI completes all quality control processes …. and provides copies to agencies by November 30, 2017 …. The Department of State provides the Government of Argentina with CDs of declassified documents by December 15, 2017 [and all] Agencies make the declassified documents available on their website by December 30, 2017.” Tasks 3 reads: “The CIA searches for, identifies, and conducts discretionary public access review, including any referrals to other agencies, on potentially responsive portions of the President's Daily Brief,” while Task 4 instructs the Department of State to “Make Previously Withheld Documents Available to the Public.”

In the words of NSC staff member John Powers, “The third part of the tasker, the list of terms, was also critically important—perhaps the most important. Once finalized, it was a detailed 19-page list of names, key dates and events, places, terms, and organizations that I created to help the agency records managers, declassifiers, and others who were searching for responsive records within their agencies’ files. None of the staff participating were experts, so this detailed list was critical in that it provided them with the information that was needed to conduct comprehensive and thorough searches.” Powers in his presentation at the H-Diplo forum states, “I began creating the list but quickly realized that I needed help. I thought the ADP could benefit from outside expertise.” So, he sought the support of two historians, Sara Berndt, a historian at the Department of State, and Carlos Osorio, Director of the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone Documentation Project.

On January 4, 2017, John Fitzpatrick, NSC Senior Director for Records, Access, and Information Security, requested that all agencies provide an ADP status update and reaffirmed the need for agencies to complete narratives that detail all aspects of their work in completing the project, including search information, methodologies used, and declassification review information.

This narrative states that the “CIA searched all electronic databases and paper records likely to contain responsive records [at] The Directorate of Operations … the Directorate of Analysis … the Office of the Director of CIA, the Office of Congressional Affairs, Office of Public Affairs, and the Office of General Counsel … ” The “CIA approved for release 124 records in full and 691 records in part, and denied 103 records in their entirety … [this] involved approximately 40 officers and approximately 12,000 hours spent … ”

The FBI narrative reports it released ”815 responsive documents consisting of 2,155 pages,” including “the majority of the 1,358 pages which were redacted or denied in full in 2002 [which] are now releasable either in full or with other government agency redactions … A total of 30 employees worked for approximately 850 hours for this project.” Page two in the narrative is an earlier version of page three revealing that all the records were “scheduled to be released on November 29, 2018 ... ” Although the Argentina Declassification Project was complete and ready to be handed to Argentina during the G20 Summit gathering in Buenos Aires at the end of 2018, an expected meeting between President Trump and Argentine President Mauricio Macri did not take place.

The Department of State reports on the various releases it has carried out since 2016 under the ADP. In April 2017, President Trump handed President Macri a batch of more than 800 documents “that had been redacted or denied in their entirety in 2002 [that] were now releasable either in full or in redacted form ... ” and “119 high-level documents selected for inclusion in two chapters of a forthcoming Foreign Relations of the United States volume on South America, 1977‒1980.” “Today,” the report reads, “the Department is pleased to release 2,154 records to both the Government of Argentina and to the public … Thirty-five State Department experts in various fields, invested just over 2,500 hours into the search, review, and processing for this project … ”

In response to the final task of this project, the National Archives and Records Administration “identified 1,004 responsive Federal documents totaling 7,165 pages relating to human rights abuses in Argentina during the period specified. After review of these records, NARA, in consultation with equity-holding agencies, is pleased to release 804 documents in full (totaling 5,713 pages), and 186 documents in part (totaling 1,394 pages).” NARA reports that earlier, in August and December 2016, “1,664 pages [were] released by Presidential Libraries ... ” These releases included an unprecedented number of CIA Presidential Daily Briefs of the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. “In all, twenty-five NARA staff members spent 1,280 hours searching for and reviewing responsive records for public access.”

Overall, the Department of Defense [DOD] narrative reports its components “located 872 records totaling approximately 11 ,302 pages. DOD declassified 217 records in full consisting of 3,360 pages, declassified 540 records in part consisting of 7,142 pages (589 pages from this set were withheld in full and therefore were excluded from the partially released total). Further, 115 records were fully withheld from release totaling 211 pages. DOD assigned more than 240 personnel and spent more than 13,000 hours working diligently to complete the task.”

At 51 pages, the DOD narrative is by far the most voluminous of the six published by all agencies. It has the merit of including the three-part historical “Tasker” that gave shape and guidance to the Argentina Declassification Project. The document states that “The individual summaries of the processes and the methodologies used by the DoD Components that had responsive records, the staff and time involved in the search, and a list of all record series searched, along with the results are provided in TABS C-J.” The narratives for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Air Force, the Department of Army, the Department of Navy, the National Security Agency [NSA], the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the United States Southern Command, are not attached to this report. All the mentioned agencies released records. The National Security Agency refused to declassify any of its records.

This report from the Justice Department notes: “The Department identified and reviewed 458 pages in the legal and physical custody of the National Archives and Records Administration and 32 pages in DOJ's legal and physical custody that were responsive to this tasking.”

On November 16, 1978, Oscar Ruben De Gregorio, considered the commander of the Argentine Montoneros in Uruguay and Brazil, was arrested by Uruguayan authorities. The previously redacted section in this document reveals that "After interrogation by GOU authorities at the Fusileros Navales facility in Montevideo, De Gregorio was quietly turned over to Argentine authorities in keeping with close cooperation between GOU and GOA security forces." De Gregorio was transferred to the Argentine Navy and last seen at the infamous Navy Mechanics School ESMA clandestine detention center before being disappeared.

The National Security Archive introduced this document, released as part of the ADP, as evidence in the appeal of the Rome Operation Condor trial in May 2017, just a couple of weeks after its release by the Department of State. The document was part of the evidence in the sentencing in Rome of the head of the Uruguayan Fusileros Navales [FUSNA] in July 2021. It provides evidence of the collaboration between the Argentine ESMA and the FUSNA. In its appeal, the Rome prosecutors point that “Jorge Nestor TROCCOLI FERNANDEZ, Uruguayan, head of the intelligence service of FUSNA (S2) ... periodically went to Argentina, at the ESMA-Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada Argentina, with the task of coordinating the repressive activity.”

Based on unidentified sources in Argentina, this CIA intelligence cable indicates that agents of the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) were responsible for kidnapping, torturing, murdering, and disappearing Argentina’s own ambassador to Venezuela, Hector Hidalgo Sola, in July 1977. Misspelling the street name Bacacay, the cable reports that “When Hidalgo Sola was kidnapped, he was taken to a house at Bacabay 3570 in the federal capital which SIDE rents and uses for official operations of Gordon's group.” Thanks to this document, in his court filing on June 11, 2020, Judge Daniel Rafecas announced the discovery of “a new clandestine detention and torture center that would have been in operation from at least the beginning of the year 1976.” Until the release of the precise address in the CIA document, according to Albertina Caron, an assistant to Judge Rafecas, the judiciary “lacked sufficient evidence” to identify its location.

The FBI records released through the ADP are unusually free of censorship. This cable from the FBI legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, lists more than a dozen sources within the Argentine intelligence and security apparatus.  The National Security Archive introduced this document as evidence in the “Contraofensiva” trial in August 2020, to give the judges on the tribunal a sense of the sources and methods of intelligence contained in the declassified records and to validate the quality of the evidence the documents provide.