31 July 1998
Thanks to DL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-07/31/190l-073198-idx.html The Washington Post, July 31, 1998 Defense Bill Provision Could Curb Declassification By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 31, 1998; Page A23 Tucked into the defense authorization bill now in a Senate-House conference is a provision that experts say would "essentially gut" President Clinton's 1995 order calling for the automatic declassification of old government secrets. Introduced on behalf of the Department of Energy, it would require all federal agencies to conduct a painstaking inspection of "all" record collections more than 25 years old to find out if they contain any pages stamped for nuclear secrets. If they do, the agencies would then have to set aside the entire collections for review by Energy. Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin warned in a letter to the White House earlier this month that the provision would "bring cost-effective declassification to a halt and essentially gut" Clinton's executive order. Steven Garfinkel, director of the government's Information Security Oversight Office, added in an interview that the costs of complying with such a provision would be "monstrous," causing perhaps endless delay in the bureaucracy's response to a decree widely hailed when it was signed as the most significant step in reducing government secrecy since the start of the Cold War. As envisioned by the 1995 decree, all historically valuable, classified records more than 25 years old would be automatically declassified by 2000. The plan provided for exemptions for the most sensitive information, such as secrets "that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction," but even these were to undergo a document-by-document review aiming at declassification by a certain date. According to Garfinkel, who oversees the effort, of the 10 major agencies with large amounts of classified information, only one, the Air Force, "probably" will meet the deadline. Many of the other agencies, such as the CIA, are waiting for Clinton to give them formal exemptions from the automatic declassification rule and, officials say, are acting as though they have already been granted. The CIA, anticipating White House approval, has embarked on a page-by-page review of 40 million to 60 million pages and intends to keep even more of its holdings, perhaps 105 million pages, secret forever. The FBI has already won a blanket exemption for its files. The Energy Department in 1996 won a law giving it an exemption for its records. Even so, several senators contend that some highly classified material, known in the parlance of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act as RD (Restricted Data) and FRD (Formerly Restricted Data), "has been improperly released" in the process of setting aside old records for automatic declassification and "much more is in danger of improper release in the near future." RD concerns the design and development of nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors; FRD deals with the use of nuclear weapons, such as their location and yields. "We do not contend that the individuals declassifying the information desire to do harm to the national security of the United States," Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said this week in a letter to White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. Shelby is chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Smith heads the Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces and Kyl is chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on technology, terrorism and government information. "However," they wrote, "it appears that, in a frenzied attempt to meet the deadline mandated by [the executive order], officials are not taking proper care to ensure that Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data that may be commingled with other classified information is not being improperly released or scheduled for automatic declassification." The Energy Department has been at odds with historians for some time over the slow pace at which it has released documents and, since 1996, over the exemption it won to the presidential order. "This prohibits any bulk declassification of Department of Energy records and severely undermines the reforms of the new executive order," Page Putnam Miller, director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, said of the 1996 measure. Reaching further, officials at Energy embarked on surveys at other government agencies, including the National Archives and some of its presidential libraries. In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget last week, Kenneth E. Baker, deputy director of Energy's Office of Nonproliferation, depicted the results as alarming. The surveys, he said, covered files "supposedly containing only NSI [National Security Information] marked 'Top Secret,' 'Secret,' or 'Confidential' and found Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data as well." Some of the records, Baker said, have been scheduled for bulk declassification. Speaking of this information as having been "compromised" although it is not clear whether it has been made public yet, Baker warned: "Some of the compromised information found in these file series involved design information of special value to proliferants seeking to weaponize their nuclear devices, such as India and Pakistan. The last thing the U.S. Government should do is make it easier for potential weapons protagonists to have access to information to design their delivery systems and nuclear weapons in order to attack each other." Without hearings or debate, the Senate last month approved a Kyl-sponsored amendment requiring the Archives and every other agency in the government to conduct a page-by-page review of all old records "prior to declassification" to see if they contained any pages with RD or FRD markings. The collections that contained even one page would have to be set aside for inspection by Energy. Saying his agency was "vehemently" opposed to the measure, Carlin warned that it would not only "completely nullify" Clinton's order but also be the most "retrogressive" rule ever laid down since declassification efforts began under President Richard M. Nixon in 1972. He said there was "no evidence that declassification has had any effect on the proliferation of nuclear weapons" over the past 36 years. Within the Archives alone, Carlin said, "there are over 495 million pages that would require page-by-page examination" while still more will be pouring in at a prodigious rate. He said it would be "a waste of time and resources" to screen all these files "for the possible misfiled document" and recommended instead a survey to determine what collections or "file series" were likely to contain nuclear data. Only these would need to be inspected page-by-page. The administration had tentatively decided to oppose Energy's bid, according to correspondence obtained by The Washington Post, but a spokeswoman at OMB, Linda Ricci, said yesterday that officials there were still mulling over the question. Senate-House conferees, meanwhile, may have already accepted Kyl's amendment and moved on to other sections of the defense bill. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, charged that both Energy and now Congress "are focusing on scare stories" instead of allocating "the necessary resources to determine where truly sensitive Restricted Data might be located." "It's not true that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack," she said. "If you look at the files of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, for instance, they're organized by subject, and by year. The files relating to Latin America, the files relating to Africa don't have Restricted Data in them." Garfinkel said automatic or bulk declassification of many World War II records has actually been taking place since 1972. "That includes the Manhattan Project [which developed the atomic bomb]. It hasn't resulted in any horror stories of proliferation or how to make a bomb." Energy Department officials, Garfinkel said, "take the position that the cruder the bomb, the more sensitive the information is because the more countries there are that will be able to develop it. When we tell them the whole world knows how to do this but just doesn't have the resources, they get very angry at us." In his letter to OMB, Baker offered to settle for compromise language, acknowledging that there are collections of records that are "highly unlikely" to contain nuclear weapons or deployment data. But that offer does not seem to have been communicated to Capitol Hill. Garfinkel said the situation reminded him of his early days in government, about 25 years ago, when he was assigned to review the records of several World War II procurement agencies and found them piled floor to ceiling in a huge, auditorium-sized room at the Federal Records Center. He found box after box of still-classified papers about purchases of toilet paper, uniforms, helmets, "every item you can possibly imagine." "I was able to declassify that room in a single day," he said. But if the Kyl amendment had been the law, Garfinkel said, "I would still be in that room, 25 years later." © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company