THE NUMBER OF SECRETS IS UP, BUT NOT BY SO MUCH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00561R000100030076-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 17, 2012
• Sequence Number: 76
• Publication Date: August 9, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100030076-5
ARTICLE APPEAR HEW YORK TI1S
ON ?AGE 9 August 1983
Pentagon -7--
The Number of Secrets Is Up,
but Not by So Much
By RICHARD HALLORAN and by cutting back on funds to pay
Spodal to The New Ymt Time for scrutinizing the documents. The
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - For a Administration has also issued a di.
year now, the Reagan Administration rective meant to control what public
has been trying to bring. order to the officials write even after they leave
Federal Government's chaotic.sys- the Government. .
tem of keeping secrets, first by mak. In a new report to President Rea-
ing fewer secrets, then by imposing. ga, the Information Security Over.
tighter safeguards to prevent them sight Office noted that last year "the
from slipping out. - . Department of Defense and the 0m.
The Administration has markedly
slowed the growth in secrets and has
restrained the number of officials
who have authority to wield a secret
stamp. Before 1980, Government se-
crets went up at a rate of roughly 10
percent a year. In 1980, officials took
16,058,764 separate actions to classify
information. The next year that fig.
ure was up 8.2 percent to 17,374,102
decisions. But in 1982 the number
grew less than one percent to
17,504,611 secrets.
Even so, the pile of secrets is moun-
tainous. If each of those stamped a se-
cret in 1982 was enclosed in a folder
only one-eighth of an inch thick, 328
piles of secrets could be stacked be-
side the Washington Monument at the
same height of 555 feet.
The effort to prevent secrets from
becoming public knowledge has been
less successful. Congress has put a
hold on Pentagon plans to rely more
on lie detector tests to find the
sources of leaks and has rejected a
proposal to withhold information on
the causes of military air crashes.
The Justice Department still has 20
to 25 cases a year to evaluate for
potentially serious violations of se-
crecy regulations, such as unauthor-
ized disclosures to the press or 1eav-
ing a secret document in the trunk of
a car. Minor infractions continued to
rise last year, with 475 cases, of unau-
thorized access and 1,197 instances of
unauthorized transmission. Nor was
tral Intelligence Agency generated
nearly 98 percent of all classified in.
formation." The Pentagon was first,
by far, making 291,831 original deci.
sions to classify information. Under
authority delegated from superiors,
other officials ballooned that into
13,738,420 "derivative" decisions to
classify information. :
For instance, when Defense Secre-
tary Caspar W. Weinberger signed
his Defense Guidance last year to pro-
vide strategic direction to the armed
forces, be was the original authority
in- classifying the following para-
graph secret:
"In Central Europe, first priority
will be to stop the initial Warsaw Pact
thrust with minimal loss of territory
,
then to gain the strategic initiative to
restore the integrity and security of
the region."
Later, whenever a military planner
referred to that-guidance to justify his
war plans, he used derivative author-
ity to continue the classification. On
an average, every original classifica-
tion in the Pentagon led to 47 more
chops with the rubber stamp.
Some of those decisions seem ques-
tionable, at least in retrospect. In one
case, the Defense Department classi-
fied the dispatch of an Awacs early
warning aircraft to Egypt. But the
Awacs landed at Cairo West, Egypt's
biggest civilian airport, and parked
next to a plane from Aeroflot, the
Soviet airline.
there any noticeable slackening of ""`u's we war Detween lsntatn
leaks to the press by Administration and Argentina over the Falkand Is- .
officials to serve their own purposes. lands , the Pentagon classified
weather information secret even .
New Report to Reagan though it was obtained from the
On the other hand, the Administra. United States Weather Service and
tion has substantially slowed the re- was available to anyone, including
lease of older secret materials that the Soviet Union. In addition, the
may be of historical interest, both by Soviet Union was gathering its own
tightening the regulations for release
information from 16 satellites over
the South Atlantic that were monitor-
ing the weather, military action and
communications.
.. The information overseeing office
'reported that, by the end of the year,
the inventory of top secret papers
throughout the Government had
.dropped 18 percent from the year be.
'fore to 1,434,668 documents as Fed-
eral agencies cleared outtheir files.
Big Black Capital Fetters
Top secret is more stringent than
secret or confidential (the markings
are always in big black capital let-
ters) and is ..defined as information
that would cause "exceptionally
grave damage to the national securi-
ty" if disclosed. But, despite the re-
duction in inventory,-most -officials
have a hard time saying with a
straight face that every document in
the inventory fits that prescription.
Moreover, the overseeing office la-
mented that there had been a"signifi-
cant increase in original top secret
'classification decisions," with the
'C:I.A_ leading the way. That sug- -
gested more top secret papers would
show up in the next coact.
Mr. Reagan's executive order that
became effective, a year ago in-
structed officials to release secret
documents as they became 30 years
old, compared with the 20-year limit
set by President Carter. That, and a
lack of funds, has slowed that flow.
Moreover, officials reviewing older-
documents have been instructed to be
more chary about what they release'
as the 30-year-old documents refer to.
the era of the cold war and the Korean
War, and. may expose information the
Administration prefers kept secret.
As a result, the number of pages
being reviewed has fallen steadily,.
from 90.3 million in 1980 under an ex- -
ecutive order issued by President -
Carter, to 19.5 million in 1982 under:
President Reagan's executive order.
Beyond that, the percentage of pages-
released has dropped from 99.5 per-
cent 10 years ago to 85 percent last'
yam. -
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100030076-5