Trapped in the Archives e U S Government’s System for Declassifying Historical Documents Is in Crisis By William Burr November 29 2019 A classified document in the Oval Office of the White House November 2007 Christopher Morris VII Redux D id the United States have a hand in assassinating Congolese and Dominican leaders in 1961 What did President Richard Nixon’s White House know about a successful plot to kill the head of the Chilean army in 1970 After the Cold War ended did top U S military commanders retain the authority to strike back if a surprise nuclear attack put the president out of commission This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE e answers to these and other historical mysteries are likely knowable—but they are locked in presidential libraries and government archives and inaccessible to researchers e reason the U S government’s system for declassifying and processing historical records has reached a state of crisis Congress has failed to adequately fund the parts of the government charged with processing records resulting in understa ed o ces and years-long backlogs At the same time some agencies responsible for declassifying documents have deliberately dragged their feet and erred on the side of needless secrecy Stay informed In-depth analysis delivered weekly SIGN UP Declassi cation is vital to a thriving democracy Not only does it help the public hold leaders accountable it also allows for a more accurate and comprehensive accounting of the past Without declassi cation the American hand in the coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 would have remained hidden and Americans would have no way of understanding their country’s ird World meddling e exposure through declassi cation of the CIA’s assassination plotting in the late 1950s and early 1960s produced public pressure that resulted in executive orders banning political assassinations Declassi ed documents brought to light the intelligence failures during 1962 that delayed the detection of Soviet missile deployments in Cuba For every secret revealed however untold numbers are still hidden away Only by unsealing its archives can the United States live up to its ideals as an open society and learn from its past THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE By law the classi ed documents that most federal agencies produce in the course of their work—from State Department cables to Pentagon policy papers to White House e-mails —must be preserved and eventually transferred to the National Archives or the presidential libraries that it runs Some agencies such as the CIA hold on to their records inde nitely Whether they are marked con dential secret or top secret classi ed records remain classi ed by default there is no rule requiring declassi cation after a given number of years e National Archives does review old records for full or partial declassi cation often in response to requests from the public But the power to declassify a document lies in the hands of the agencies involved in its creation or interested in its contents All the agencies with a stake in a document must sign o on its declassi cation—and any one of them even if it is not the agency where the document originated can block it All the agencies with a stake in a document must sign o on its declassi cation—and any one of them can block it If a request for declassi cation is denied the story does not end there For documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act requesters may le an administrative appeal and ultimately a lawsuit although few choose to undertake such an expensive and time-consuming process Since the 1970s executive orders have provided another avenue called a “mandatory declassi cation review” request through which one can ask for classi ed records that can be speci cally identi ed For this type of request the nal resort is to le an appeal with a body composed of representatives from various agencies called the Interagency Security Classi cation Appeals Panel e whole process takes an unconscionably long time I am still awaiting nal decisions from the National Archives for State Department records from 1969 concerning U S policy toward the Israeli nuclear program I initially made the request in 2005 Nine years later the National Archives responded by informing me that the Defense Department had This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE denied 31 documents in their entirety My appeal is still pending Many historians can’t a ord to wait 14 years is far longer than the lifespan of most research projects PAPER JAM Nearly every federal o ce through which a declassi cation request must pass is simply overwhelmed Agencies handle requests for records that they retain and few devote many resources to processing them For records held at the National Archives requests are coordinated by the National Declassi cation Center a small o ce in a signi cantly underfunded agency that is reluctant to challenge the rights claimed by other agencies Interagency Security Classi cation Appeals Panel for its part has been relatively e ective e in reversing unreasonable decisions made by agencies but it also has a woefully small sta just three full-time employees ings don’t look much better at the presidential libraries ey used to systematically review classi ed presidential records le by le but this undertaking has collapsed e CIA once supported a process for scanning classi ed les at the libraries so that they could be reviewed in Washington by the interested agencies but it has stopped providing essential funding Huge backlogs of classi ed les at presidential libraries have emerged At the Kennedy Library even the review of White House tapes records capturing the kind of rsthand evidence that historians dream of has ground to a halt To help ease the logjam the National Archives has begun to centralize classi ed presidential records in Washington D C but it is questionable whether it has the resources to systematically review them Antiquated practices abound Some agencies lack the technology to electronically transfer classi ed information to other agencies for review ey use couriers or the mail instead Others lack databases indicating what they have declassi ed in the past Often agencies have unwittingly classi ed information that has already been released in 2019 to cite just one example the Defense Department excised much of a 1963 Joint Chiefs of Sta document concerning security guarantees for Israel that had been published in its entirety in 1995 bysite theuses State Department This cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE e National Archives is unequipped to wade through the terabytes of classi ed electronic records it has been accumulating e National Archives is unequipped to wade through the terabytes of classi ed electronic records it has been accumulating—nearly 200 million PDFs emails and other digital les spanning decades from the Ford administration to the Obama years ese include countless tantalizing nuggets such as the infamous messages sent over the Reagan White House’s e-mail system that senior o cials involved in the Iran-Contra a air tried to delete but investigators recovered Over time the mountain of digital les will only grow as agencies turn over their classi ed electronic materials Further compounding the problem in an e ort to make digital records the norm the National Archives has announced that beginning in 2022 it will no longer accept paper records is policy is particularly worrisome for those interested in CIA’s enormous trove of paper les dating back to the 1940s e growing digital backlog—on top of the analog one—presents the National Archives with a formidable task Yet the National Archives’ budget for 2020 is just $358 million— virtually the same in real terms as it was in the early 1990s Starved for resources the National Archives has stopped providing some of the services it once did For example it no longer creates nding aids for newly opened collections identifying them only with bare-bones information Releasing archival material without nding aids is akin to publishing a book without a table of contents chapters or an index TOO SECRET If only a lack of resources were the end of the problem But certain parts of the government also resist declassi cation as a matter of course While some agencies tend to make This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE reasonable decisions about documents others do not e State Department has a good track record whereas intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency act predictably by denying many requests Congress has given the intelligence agencies wide leeway in excluding their operational les which can involve espionage covert action and communications intelligence from declassi cation requests us important aspects of U S history will remain secret inde nitely unless the White House or Congress intervenes In the past the CIA’s Historical Review Panel an independent group of academics nudged the agency toward greater transparency But this January the panel’s chair announced that the CIA had put the group on hiatus without explanation e suspension was of a piece with a disturbing trend in 2017 the agency virtually halted its program of reviewing records more than 25 years old Yet the intelligence agencies can do the right thing when prodded In 2016 in response to requests from the Argentine government and human rights activists the Obama White House ordered the intelligence community to begin a large-scale declassi cation project concerning Argentina’s so-called Dirty War the campaign of torture and killings undertaken by the military junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983 e project which continued under the Trump administration resulted in the release of some 15 000 documents Alas such focused declassi cation projects create another problem because there is no budget for them agencies nance them by shifting scarce resources away from regular declassi cation work e Pentagon is the poster child for overclassi cation and delay Since late in the George W Bush administration and accelerating during the Obama years reviewers at the Defense Department have routinely refused to declassify information that they allege would in the words of an executive order “cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States ” Never mind that the documents denied often come from the State Department—or for that matter that diplomatic relations are the province of that agency not the Pentagon This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE Unlike the CIA and the State Department the Defense Department has a chaotic decentralized classi cation review process Reviewers are required to consult higher-level o cials in various policy o ces who lack the frame of mind experience and expertise needed to review historical documents objectively O cers working on declassi cation at the Pentagon’s Joint Sta contribute to the chaos Career-minded and fearful of making mistakes they tend to take the path of least resistance—denial—when evaluating requests e Defense Department’s pernicious in uence extends to the Foreign Relations of the United States series the indispensable documentary history published by the State Department In 2018 the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee the body that oversees its publication reported that the Defense Department “negligently” and “egregiously violated” the State Department’s Congressionally mandated work of producing “thorough accurate and reliable” volumes by denying in their entirety nearly 600 documents that the editors had selected And yet the Pentagon has done nothing to address these serious concerns OPEN UP To count on the Trump administration currently consumed by other matters to reform declassi cation procedures would be foolish Nor have legislators shown much interest in declassi cation under both Democratic and Republican control Congress has kept the National Archives on low rations and there are few votes to be gained from pushing for less secrecy If it wanted to however Congress could alleviate the crisis in declassi cation It could start by increasing the budget of the National Archives so that the agency can hire more people to process classi ed records handle declassi cation requests and appeals and create nding aids for new records Some of the new sta could help develop the technological capacity the archive so badly needs for managing its electronic records Congress should earmark funding for declassi cation e orts within individual agencies too But this money should This site uses cookies to improve your user experience Click here to learn more CONTINUE come with certain stipulations Agencies with especially large backlogs such as the Defense Department and the CIA should be required to spend more on clearing them For years Congress has largely abdicated its duty to oversee the declassi cation system It should now step up In 1991 Congress required the State Department to establish a historical advisory committee to oversee the production of the Foreign Relations series and to monitor the declassi cation and of the department’s records Now it should make the Defense Department the CIA and other agencies do something similar establish advisory panels of outside experts to review their declassi cation activities Congress should further require the Defense Department to create a centralized system for reviewing declassi cation requests As part of its oversight Congress should streamline the rules and procedures that agencies use to declassify records It could for example give the National Archives’ National Declassi cation Center the authority to overturn agencies’ refusals or redactions of documents older than say 40 years It could also empower the Interagency Security Classi cation Appeals Panel by requiring agencies to treat its decisions as precedents as matters stand now the agencies simply disregard its past rulings For the endless digital data that agencies currently generate Congress could mandate that an automatic declassi cation date be embedded in each le so that future archivists are not buried under a mountain of classi ed hard drives Historical declassi cation is far from a special interest bene tting only a coterie of obscure researchers It should be of concern to everyone e United States was founded on the principles of reason openness and accountability Yet so long as excessive secrecy and paltry budgets keep the country’s classi ed records locked away those values will be honored only in theory And the United States will be 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