TIGHTENED RULES KEEP NATION'S SECRETS TOO LONG, HISTORIANS SAY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00561R000100030063-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 17, 2012
• Sequence Number: 63
• Publication Date: September 10, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100030063-9
ARTICLE
k1j$
0 ?Au_ WASHINGTON POST
10 September 1983
Tightened Rules Deep Nathscr
Too Loner. Historians
By Ian Black
Waahmgton P0SLStaff Writer
A curious spin of the wheel that brought
President. Reagan to power just as govern-
ment archivists were. starting to declassify
foreign policy documents from the Cold War
years in the early. 1950s has led.to.a heated
conflict. between the administration and the
nation's historians.
The scholars say thousands of documents,
many more than 30 years old, are being held
back by the government under stringent new
declassification rules that demand' excessive
secrecy about long-past events.
Following the release of huge amounts of
material dealing with World War II and its
immediate aftermath, the historians now
face a diminishing availability of documents
from the 1950-1954 period and the increas-
ingly tough criteria used to justify their re-
tention as "classified information."
"
-Things have gradually got. more and more
conservative," said Anna Nelson of George
Washington University. "With the Reagan
administration, the release of documents has
just closed up," complained Barry Rubin,
another historian of U.S.-foreign relations.
Delays in declassification, the historians
say, are making it "virtually impossible" to
write American diplomatic history after
1950. The snail's pace of the process is also
holding up State Department publication of
the multi-volume Foreign Relations of the
A year later, many historians and archiv-
ists are dismayed. "Vt-e think the principle
ought -to be 'When in doubt, declassify,' "
said Dr. Sam Gammon, executive director of
the American Historical Association. "But
now it is 'When in doubt, classify' "
He added: -"We're going to be fighting a
rear-guard action. I think we ? all have the
'
sense that we
re growling and retreating:"
Even under Carter, declassification was
not all that rapid, the historians say. Al-
STAT
"When you are an historian you recognize
that one or two critical documents can com-
pletely change the nature of the story," said
Betty Unterberger, a faculty member at
Texas A&M 'University. "The public's right
to know is being -overshadowed by what bu-
reaucrats say are security interests."
Control over declassification first began to
tighten . up under Carter in 1979, when the
CDC was created within State's Bureau of
Administration to centralize
a process that
though he stipulated review of government had grown hugely because of requests for
documents -after 20 years, instead of 30 documents under the Freedom of Informa-
under President Nixon. a growing awareness tion Act. .
of Cold War sensitivities combined with bu- Declassification was previously handled by
dgetarv and manpower problems rendered the department's Office of the Historian in
the theoretically more liberal approach in- the Bureau of Public Affairs. The office
effective.. was-and remains-responsible for publica-
Reagan 9 order, . according to Milton 'Gus- tion of the Foreign Relations of the ' United
tafson head of the diplomatic records States volumes, but it now depends on the
brancl?i at the National Archives, "confirmed ~ CDC for. authority to publish.
the practice of the Carter order and elimi-. "The historian's office was perceived as
nated some of the anomalies. Carter's was too liberal, and the idea was to have a sep-
liberal in theory and conservative in practice, arate office to have responsibility for declas-
The Reagan order simply eliminated the lib- sification," said Gustafson. "It was seen as an
era!
pu." (administrative problem rather than a public
The declassification process goes on every aff
i
"
t
a
rs mat
er.
working day in the State Department's Clas- William Z Slany, the historian in the
sification/Declassification Center (CDC) to State Department office, makes the same
determine whether historical material can be point: "Historians obviously have a different
deposited for public use in the National Ar- view of documents from professional people
chives.
whose concern is the effective application of
There are 160 -retired foreign service of. re
ulations W
e
d d
f
ficers involved. Using a 6-inch-thick set of
finest work of its kind.
Current declassification policy is based on highlY-detailed country-by-country guide.
Reagan's Executive Order 12356 of August, .. lines, which themselves remain classified,
community committee to provide what ad-
ministration officials describe as "a frame-
work for the executive branch's information
security system."
The main difference between the Reagan
order and its predecessors is not so much in
its standards of secrecy as in the mechanics
of declassification that it requires.
Reagan. dropped the Carter administration
requirement that all government agencies
systematically review their own documents
and said that, only the National Archives-
its budget and staff drastically reduced-
need examine records deposited there.
1982, drafted by an interagency intelligence . these reviewers weed out the sensitive ma-
terial from tons. Of innocuous documents,
leaving behind a record which the scholars,
say is incomplete and possibly. misleading.
The classification decisions are quite com-
plicated. When a visitor came to the classi-
fication center earlier this year, one of the
"annuitants" employed there was reviewing a
telegram sent from the U.S. Embassy in Da-
mascus, Syria, to State on May 27, 1953,
more than 30 years previously. He decided
that- it must remain secret because it con
tained "security/classified information."
g
.
.are moving towar
if
erent
agendas. I regret that this office no longer
has as much of a role as it used to."
And there is another problem: the very
subject matter of .American foreign relations
in the aftermath of World War IL
"The world up to.1949 didn't have quite
the same problems as afterward," said Edwin
Thompson,-director of the Archives' records _
declassification division.
"There was no NATO, no Iron Curtain, no
`East versus- West, the whole deepening of
the Cold War--And you didn't have Korea.
Now much more detailed examination is nec-
essary," he said. -
Among the drafters of Reagan's executive
order, -said "Slany, "there was a growing
L 'TI7Q4-~ TFD
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/17: CIA-RDP91-00561 R000100030063-9