TESTIMONY OF PENN T. KIMBALL PROFESSOR GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR THE FILE (HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH 1983)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP89B00236R000200200021-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 11, 2008
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: May 24, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Testimony of
Penn T. Kimball
Professor
Graduate School of Journalism
Columbia University
and author
The File (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)
before the
Government Information, Justice and Agriculture
Subcommittee of the
Committee on Government Operations
United States House of Representatives
on the
Freedom of Information Reform Act (S. 774)
May 24, 1984
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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee,
I appear here today as one who has been a practicing journalist for more than
45 years, a professor to graduate students of journalism for 25 years, one who
has been the unknowing target of secret investigations by the intelligence
arms of three federal agencies - the Department of State, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency - and finally one. who
for the past seven years has been in constant search from these authorities of
rry rights as a private citizen under current Freedom of Information/Privacy
statutes as adopted by the Congress.
My experience in all these roles leads me to the firm conclusion that the
urgent need is more, not less access to government records by the public at
large. There should be more, not less accountability among public servants who
collect, evaluate and file information about institutions and individuals in
our society. Freedom of Information means the.onus should always be upon the
government to defend the need for secrecy, not upon the citizen to prove the
case for access.
I speak as a grateful user of Freedom of Information in the imperfect state in
which it now exists in this country. Without it I could never have learned, at
the age of 62, that I had been classified a national security risk for more
than half my life. Without it, I could never have discovered the dossiers of
hearsay, innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations distorted by government
bureaucrats who, without due process of any description, amassed and
circulated the files branding me as a disloyal American, a dangerous radical,
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a definite national security risk, a subversive "too clever" to be caught
holding a membership card-in the Communist Party. All without a single scrap
of concrete evidence, with no opportunity to defend myself or to know the
identity of my anonymous accusers. And to this day the government persists in
its refusal to permit me to see large portions of the expurgated records it
has grudgingly made available after endless delays.
Take the Central Intelligence Agency, which is beseeching this Congress to
exempt its operational intelligence files completely from Freedom of
Information petitions, and to impose all the costs of any Freedom of
Information search of the rest of its files on the petitioner. Responding to
my requests under existing law, it took the CIA three years, two months and
six days to deliver portions of 14 documents it had been holding in its files
under my name for more than 20 years. A fifteenth document, from its
operational intelligence files, was "denied in entirety". A sixteenth document
-- a letter from John.Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, to Colonel Sheffield
Edwards, Director of Security for the CIA - was completely blacked out ,
except for a single sentence: "There are enclosed two copies of a memorandum
containing information regarding Penn Townsend Kimball." That document, dated
June 4, 1959, will be 25 years old next month, hardly on the cutting edge of
this nation's security in the year 1984.
What was the CIA doing in my private life 25 years ago? The CIA had no legal
authority then to conduct domestic surveillance; in fact, it was specifically
prohibited from such activity. The CIA documents released to me have been so
emasculated that there is no way I can find out why on earth they would be
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investigating me. (I was working for Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York
when the investigation began; I had just been appointed a professor at
Columbia University when that investigation was concluded in 1960.) I have
reason to believe that one part of the documents censored from my view deals
with the methods by which the CIA gathered its information about me. Could
these methods have also been illegal?
Such questions could be cleared up in a moment, of course, by the simple
process of full disclosure by the CIA. But that agency, which is seeking
alleged "reforms" in the bill before this Committee, consistently and
systematically is avoiding its responsibilities under current FOI regulations
in my opinion. That is also the opinion of my attorneys who have prepared a
complaint in my behalf for filing in Federal District Court.
When I finally managed to obtain a partial release of heavily censored copies
of my CIA file, I discovered to my utter amazement that even my late wife had
been implicated by the CIA in the course of its investigation of me. Since she
can no longer defend herself, I have been seeking since October, 1982, for the
release of my late wife's CIA file - a request that has produced no tangible
response after more than a year and one-half. All told I have been petitioning
the CIA for almost exactly five years. I am 68 years old now, going on 69. I
have visions of a CIA official in its Freedom of Information section holding
my repeated petitions in one hand and an actuarial table in the other as the
years go on. It strikes me as an unfair race in which a stonewalling
bureaucracy is attempting to outlast the victim. But I have every intention,
in fact I can feel the adrenalin flowing, of staying the course.
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It does occur to me, however, that my experience suggests a real and practical
reform of the Freedom of Information Act which this Committee might want to
consider: namely, that anyone seeking personal information from government
files who reaches the age of 65 should automatically be placed at the head of
the line waiting for their Freedom of Information and Privacy requests to be
processed by a government agency. A priority. for senior citizens in getting a
look at their own government files would give them a decent crack at
exercising their supposed legal right to amend these records where they
contain error and grave misrepresentation.
You may wonder why the CIA has taken so long to tell me so little about what
is in my own file. The inferior quality of the information gathered by the,
lead agency in the gathering of intelligence vital to our national security
might astound you as it astounded me. In the year 1941, for example, I shared
an apartment in New York City with a newspaperman colleague of mine whose name
was Amos So-and-So (I omit his last name to protect his privacy from being
associated with a dangerous character like me.) When I received my CIA file,
it reported that in 1941 I was sharing an apartment with "a Miss So-and-So."
Forty years ago such living arrangements were more shocking to security
checkers than they might be today - if true. This precious piece of bum dope
is accompanied in my security file by a report from an agent of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation who found someone in my home town who reported that
"Kimball had a very permissive upbringing and was allowed to drink cocktails
at an early age." A special investigator from the Department of State
painstakingly recorded that "Kimball was seen drinking beer in the company of
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Communists, although it was not clear whether he was attracted by their beer
or their politics." In the hands of government summarizers, who accentuate the
negative and throw out everything coming from anyone identified as a friend of
the subject under investigation, this kind of junk is used to build a picture
in the file of a suspect human being who is totally unrecognizeable to the
real-life person who manages to obtain his government file through Freedom of
Information.
I don't wonder that the keepers of such files come to this Committee to
complain that they are overburdened with citizen requests for information,
hopelessly backlogged by paper work and would just as soon nobody was ever
permitted a peek at some of the stuff they have gathered through the years
with tremendous expenditure of time and taxpayers' money. The cream of the
jest is the bill now before your Committee which would charge the victims the
expense of finding out the extent of the damage to their character and
reputation.
If I am to assume that the government has been making a good-faith effort to
search its files in my behalf, then I would have to conclude that the
administration of the Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts within the Executive
Branch is seriously underfunded. But the way to eliminate the delays, the
backlogs, the practical emasculation of the intent of these statutes to open
up the channels of information would be to appropriate the funds necessary to
carry them out - certainly not to saddle the petitioner with fees which do
nothing to expedite the process.
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Many suggested "reforms" of the Freedom of Information Act - such as those
suggested in S. 774 and similar legislation before the Congress - seem to
focus on supposed burdens imposed by current regulations and guidelines on the
administrative capacities of the Executive Branch. These arguments seem to
assume that the Government is in possession of a vast storehouse of
universally valuable and sensitive information which irresponsible citizens
are likely to compromise. My own experience with government security branches
suggests that the compelling area for reform is in the manner in which
government agencies amass their security files rather than making it more
difficult for the public to discover the results of such activity. There is
little or no due process in the system under which individual citizens are
judged, as I was, to be disloyal to their country and unfit for positions of
public trust.
The accused is not informed of the charges against him. He is not accorded the
opportunity to confront his accusers or even to know who they are so that he
might comment on their motives or creditability. He is not permitted to speak
or offer evidence in his own defense. Murderers, rapists and bank robbers have
more civil rights than an individual classified as a national security risk.
When government investigators set out to check the loyalty of a person under
surveillance, one would expect the process would meet at least the minimum
standard of competent journalism. One would expect an FBI agent, for example,
to gather his information from a wide variety of sources, assembling the
positive and negative assessments in a fair-minded manner, checking and cross-
checking the facts as presented, going to the records whenever possible which
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might illuminate the whole picture, looking for concrete evidence to
substantiate allegations regarding personal beliefs and behavior, searching
out sources who knew the individual under scrutiny best and finding examples
from the individual's own writings and actions to buttress any evaluation of
his character and reputation.
That is not what the FBI did when it investigated me. The agents were
instructed to concentrate on "known anti-Communists" as sources and to focus
their attention on "communistic sympathies or any other subversive information
that may be found." The agents rewrote much of the material they gathered in
their own words. Then they passed it on to government evaluators who selected
those portions they wished to emphasize and discarded information which did
not fit their final conclusion. The evaluators, of course, have everything to
lose and nothing to gain by giving a person under surveillance the benefit of
the doubt. The summaries in my own government files are case histories in the
familiar bureaucratic exercise of covering one's rear end against every
possibility of personal blame.
We are entering an era when, I fear, there is going to be more and more
questioning of the patriotism of those who disagree with the policies of the
government of the day, as those who acquired files during the Vietnam war
learned during. that time. That is one more reason why it is imperative to keep
open the window of Freedom of Information which so many seem eager to close.
And it is another argument for incorporating guidelines of due process into
the system by which government attempts to pass on the beliefs and values of
individuals who may differ with the conventional wisdom expressed by those in
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positions of power.
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Representative democracy in a complicated and organized society means that
very important decisions are constantly taken by small groups of people out of
sight of the public. For consent of the governed to be meaningful it must be
informed consent. Information is power. People are entitled to a maximum
degree of information about how their government is operating. That is the
most effective way to make government more responsible and accountable to.
those it is supposed to serve.
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