The historian’s access to government documents and information is being blocked today by questionable interpretations of the law, by restrictive guidelines and directives that keep documents locked up for longer periods of time, and by unsympathetic bureaucrats whose commitment to secrecy is excessive. Diplomatic historians particularly face problems that do not stem so much from inadequate budgets or insufficient staffing at the National Archives or Department of State, although such deficiencies are conspicuous and disturbing, but rather from definitions of national security that are alarmingly sweeping. The issue is what is being declassified to satisfy the historian’s need for thorough documentation and the people’s right to know. And the fundamental question is this: What kind of history will we be getting if the current policies of restriction continue?
The special problem of the declassification of diplomatic documents is part of a general trend in recent years toward what we must unabashedly call “thought control.” I am not talking about the burning of books, but the prevention of books. Information is being controlled and managed as never before. Sweeping definitions of national security elevate secrecy to new levels. The Freedom of Information Act is under attack. Government officials apparently see historical information as a threat to the nation, rather than as a vital component of a functioning democracy in which the people must be informed and their government held accountable. In studying this subject, I found myself descending into a dark cavern of executive orders, legislative acts, executive directives, proposed amendments, letters of explanation, secret guidelines, and court rulings. I am sure I do not understand all of it, and I am assured by archivists and historians in the government that they have not mastered the rules either. But the procedural cloudiness should not obscure the critical question: What kind of history will emerge from our government’s current policies?
The pattern of thought control is coherent and defined—there can be no mistaking it. Take several recent examples. The first occurred in early 1983 when the National Security Agency (NSA) ordered the George C. Marshall Library in Virginia to remove letters from the private papers of William F. Friedman. These letters heretofore had been open to researchers; indeed, James Bamford’s 1982 book on the National Security Agency, titled The Puzzle Palace, cited these letters. NSA representatives must not have found Bamford’s study friendly enough, for they moved into the Marshall Library, rubber-stamped the letters “Secret,” and insisted that they be placed in the library’s vault. In other words, federal agencies have the authority to classify private papers in private libraries if the documents are claimed to be sensitive under the rubric of national security. President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 executive order permits agencies to reclassify materials which have already been released to scholars. The problem we face in the future, then, is not simply one of hurrying the declassification process, but of preventing reclassification. Which collections will these federal censors move into next? (The American Historical Association has recently become a co-plaintiff in a suit that seeks to deny NSA’s authority to close opened materials and to restrain NSA from further efforts to block public access to such information.)
A second case study of thought control springs from the United States Information Agency, which has been known to select speakers for its overseas programs on the basis of their allegiance to Reagan Administration policies. Professor Richard O. Curry of the University of Connecticut, whose specialty is nineteenth-century American history, hired by the USIA to lecture in Australia, was told by American officials that if he spoke out against Reagan policies he might never receive another Fulbright award (see Curry’s articles in recent issues of the OAH Newsletter). Professor John Seiler of Dutchess County Community College, New York,. scheduled to undertake a lecture tour of six African nations, was told his trip was canceled because his views on South Africa did not accord with current United States policy. The USIA has also compiled, and perhaps now abandoned, a blacklist of eighty-four people to be denied participation in its overseas speakers’ program. Included on the celebrated list were Stanley Kutler, Walter Cronkite, John Kenneth Galbraith, James Fallows, and McGeorge Bundy. Are our cultural and academic exchange programs becoming nothing more than instruments of national propaganda?
.A third example of thought control: the government has revitalized the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 to bar foreign speakers from the United States. Recent cases include Nicaragua’s Interior Minister Tomas Borge and El Salvador’s Constituent Assembly President Robert D’Aubuisson. They were denied visas on the grounds that their presence here would be “prejudicial to the public interest.” Professor John Coatsworth, who had arranged for Borge’s appearance at the University of Chicago, remarked that the “First Amendment means nothing at all if it does not permit American citizens to listen to views their government disapproves of.” A Washington Post editorial of December 1983 asked: “Can no official see the absurdity of demanding, under threat of arms, that the Sandinistas open up Nicaraguan society while the American government in limited but crucial respects closes its own?”
Still another example is the “gag rule” the Reagan Administration announced in National Security Decision Directive 84 (March 1983). This directive requires over 100,000 government officials with access to classified materials to sign a lifetime secrecy pledge. They are required to submit their speeches, articles, and books prior to delivery or publication—again, for their lifetimes. The government has been unable to demonstrate that enough classified information has been leaked in the last several years to warrant such a sweeping order. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball, whose memoirs would have had to be submitted to the censors had the directive been in place when he held office in the 1960s, called it “an appalling document.” If this directive goes into effect—the Congress has temporarily delayed it and the President has said he is suspending controversial portions of the order until a compromise can be struck with Congress—the officials of one administration could censor the writings of their predecessors. Certain documents should, arguably, be kept secret: diplomatic codes, weapons designs, and perhaps the names of overseas intelligence officers. But the danger is a lifetime, government-imposed silence, a direct challenge to the writing of respectable history. If the directive becomes the rule, it might mean that historians would be impeded in their conduct of oral histories. And even if the rule is not rigorously enforced, the fear and intimidation it necessarily inspires will produce self-censorship. Memoirs would be even less useful and candid than they already are. Is a modern-day George F. Kennan to be muzzled for life?
Yet another case study of thought control can be seen in the recent trend toward classifying at high levels documents generated by officials today. From 1981 to 1982, for example, the number of documents classified “Top Secret” increased 45 percent. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter introduced a new category for very sensitive documents culled “Royal.” Steven Garfinkel of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) does not think any documents were stamped in this manner. But, of course, had they been, being so sensitive, they might never have been shown to him.
A sixth example of thought control involves the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1975 or so the FBI began destroying documents in an apparent attempt to render the Freedom of Information Act (see below) ineffective. Substantial FBI holdings were destroyed before a January 1980 court order stopped the destruction and instructed the agency to provide the court with plans and schedules for files retention. Judge Harold Greene of the Federal District Court in Washington, DC, declared that “perhaps more than those of any other agency” the documents of the FBI “constitute a significant repository of the record of the recent history of this nation. . . . The lessons of history can hardly be learned if the historical record is allowed to vanish.” The FBI appealed this injunction. Historical associations lined up to support the court order. In mid-1980 Judge Greene denied the FBI’s motion to dissolve the injunction. The FBI persisted. In fall 1983 a US Court of Appeals rejected the FBI appeal. So Judge Greene’s order stands: the National Archives and Records Service and the FBI must initiate plans for archivists to inspect and evaluate FBI records before the agency is permitted to destroy anything. Scholars who know the history of the FBI cannot feel confident that the agency will give its full cooperation, court order or not.
Let us turn next to the status of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Passed in 1966 to “empower individuals to hold government accountable,” the FOIA has served scholars well. Although the FOIA exempts from declassification those documents, which, if released, might endanger the national security, company trade secrets, or private individuals, many recent books in diplomatic history have utilized the act. But the scholar’s use of the FOIA is now threatened in a variety of ways. Long delays—sometimes two to three years—set back research, and often what is released is heavily sanitized. Moreover, the government has tightened its rules on fee waivers. The act is generous on fee waivers; that is, fees should be waived if the release of the materials is “in the public interest.” Fees, which can include both search-time and photoduplication costs, can run very high. My own research on Cuban-American relations from the 1950s to the present is now encumbered by fees of well over a thousand dollars. The Department of Commerce will not even begin to search for relevant documents on the sugar trade until I first pay $450; the FBI, on the other hand, has reduced its large fees by half for documents on Cuban-American topics.
A January 1983 Justice Department memorandum on fee waivers causes us to suspect that the imposition of hefty fees, as well as the denial of waivers, is a way of discouraging FOIA requests and thereby our historical research. This memorandum interprets “public interest” this way: “No matter how interesting or vital the subject matter of a request, the public is benefitted only if the information released meaningfully contributes to the public development or understanding of the subjects. . . .” Are we to leave to government censors the definition of what is “meaningful”? Scholars shudder at the thought.
Besides long delays, heavy deletions, and prohibitive fees, there is another threat to the FOIA. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in early 1983 asked Congress to exempt the agency’s records from the act. A host of voices, including those of historians and historical societies, cried foul. So a compromise bill has been worked out by Senator David Durenberger and CIA Director William Casey, and it now rests in Congress. Only “operational” files are to be exempted from the FOIA, and the CIA has agreed to review such files at least once every ten years. A selective declassification review program will be undertaken as well. This bill is a serious obstacle to historical research: it permits the CIA to determine what to release or what to review; the CIA will be tempted to define “operational” broadly so as to deny scholars documents; the ten-year interval for review is much too long; and there is no cutoff date—say twenty to twenty-five years—for the review or declassification of CIA records. William Casey has said that “historians would have to trust us. . . .” Since the CIA is openly hostile to the Freedom of Information Act and has even refused to cooperate with the Office of the Historian of the Department of State, he must be kidding. Perhaps Congress will stop this bill.
Finally, the terrible state of the declassification process in the State Department and the fate of the invaluable, red-bound Foreign Relations of the United States series deserve our attention. Both arc bogged down in the environment of thought control. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12356 (April 1982) has further served to bolt the door against scholarship. This order abandoned the systematic declassification process established by previous orders (set by Richard Nixon at thirty years and by Jimmy Carter at twenty years). One provision of Reagan’s order permits the reclassification of material. It continues to exempt from declassification materials considered information from a foreign government (such as a memorandum of conversation with a foreign diplomat). As Garfinkel of the ISOO has proudly claimed, the government is now “managing” information well. Current policy follows the guideline that, when in doubt, classify at the highest level; when in doubt, do not declassify. The battle between secrecy and openness has been vigorous; openness appears to have lost. In fiscal year 1982, the State Department granted in full only 52 percent of the requests for declassification under the mandatory review procedures that apply to documents that have been deposited with the National Archives and Records Service, including the presidential libraries. The figure for the CIA was 28 percent; for the National Security Council (NSC) 48 percent; and for the Department of Defense 77 percent. The number of pages reviewed for declassification in 1982 for all agencies was 78 percent less than in 1980, and 38 percent less than in 1981. The issue, of course, is not quantity, but quality—what are we getting for documents and what kind of history is going to be written from such an incomplete record?
The Classification/Declassification Center (CDC) of the Department of State works under Executive Order 12356. Created in 1979 and staffed by some 150 former Foreign Service Officers, the CDC follows country-by-country guidelines which are in themselves classified. The CDC is a major obstacle to good scholarship in diplomatic history. Documents for the 1950s have been released very slowly; documents for 1955-60 will not be opened to research for a long time. Worse still, the CDC is engaged in reclassification. Some Foreign Service Post records stored at the federal depository in Suitland, Maryland, for example, have been called back for rereview by the State Department classifiers. These materials had been open to scholars. There is a huge backlog in the joint National Archives/Department of State declassification project. State Department lawyers are extremely cautious about releasing documents which contain controversial topics. Large deletions and long delays await any scholar who seeks the declassification of a specific document. And there arc the ridiculous cases. For my research on Cuban-United States relations, for example, I applied for the declassification of many documents held at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. After a two- to four-year wait, some documents I have received show a four-letter word to have been deleted. It required no detective skills whatsoever to determine that the letters were “C-u-b-a.” Who in the bureaucracy spent so much time doing that sort of useless work?
The Foreign Relations series has suffered under the stricter declassification rules, and apparently the Office of the Historian has suspended work on volumes covering the early 1960s. Now we stand at about thirty years. There have been shortages of staff, but as the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation has stated in its 1983 report: “The revised declassification procedures have been largely responsible for that delay. . . .” The CDC has pulled back volumes ready for the presses to rereview them. Volumes prepared at least five years ago have not yet been printed. Some of the volumes being published are disappointing because they are incomplete. Take the Indo-China volume for 1952-54 (published in 1982). Its list of sources does not include the CIA. And the preface and introduction do not tell us if CIA files were researched or if the CIA, as has happened in the past, denied State Department requests for relevant materials. Moreover, the preface reads: “The publication of Foreign Relations of the United States constitutes the official record of the foreign policy of the United States. The volumes in this series include, subject to necessary security considerations, all documents needed to give a comprehensive record of the major foreign policy decisions of the United States. . . .” This surely claims too much. The wording—”official,” “all,” and “comprehensive”—suggest thoroughness, when in fact the volume appears incomplete.
On the review or declassification of CIA records, William Casey has said that “historians would have to trust us. . . .”
The American Republics volume for 1952-54 (compiled in 1974-77 but not published until 1983) is a real disappointment. Even though the 1954 intervention in Guatemala was a CIA operation, as excellent recent books have explained, the CIA denied the editors of the Foreign Relations series permission to publish documents on the covert role of the agency. The volume covering Iran and the CIA-engineered coup of 1953 has been held up because of similar declassification snarls. And what about the volumes which cover Saudi Arabia? Will they also be gutted because many documents which mention the royal family will remain classified? Will we have more cases like the 1950 volume on Korea, which includes no minutes of National Security Council meetings, because NSC would not permit the Office of the Historian to print them? The series is in danger of taking on the character of an official White Paper, losing its reputation as a respected scholarly tool.
The message of this disconcerting story is that in so many ways our history is being managed for us. The piecemeal, document-by-document, incomplete declassification of documents permits the State Department, the CIA, and other agencies to control our writing of history, to manage the questions we ask, to set the terms or historical inquiry and research. For example, we would not be carefully discussing the question of lost opportunities for negotiations with Mao Zedong’s China in 1949, and we would not have several excellent recent books on Sino-American relations in the 1940s, had the Foreign Relations volume, published in 1977, not printed Zhou Enlai’s demarche. What if the Office of the Historian had lost the debate and the document had not been published? As it was, the volume was held up for some time before the go-ahead decision was made. What kind of history will we be getting in the future if similar cases arise? Not only does this management of information—this thought control—determine in part what questions we can answer, it also leaves the field to the memoirists—self-serving, incomplete. and suspect. How long must we rely on the autobiographies of Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger for the history of 1970s diplomacy?
What can we do? It would help if we had a different President. It would help if we constantly alerted our elected representatives in Washington to the many cases of thought control. It would help if we kept ourselves informed by reading the reports of Page Putnam Miller’s National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, housed at the American Historical Association office in Washington. It would help if we supported organizations like the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA, Inc.) in New York. It would help if we encouraged the various committees of the AHA, Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations to continue their good work to change declassification rules. It would help if government authorities could agree to insert the words “or for historical research” after “in the public interest” to improve the historian’s chances of obtaining FOIA fee waivers.
Professor Anna K. Nelson of George Washington University, who has for years thoughtfully spoken to these questions, has suggested, with others, that we as historians should concentrate on the long run—on preparing a statutory law governing declassification of national security materials after twenty, twenty-five, or, like Australia and Britain, thirty years. The AHA Council at its December 27, 1983, meeting passed a resolution with a recommendation to amend the Federal Records Act to provide for ”basic criteria for all forms of security classification systems in all agencies of the United States Government,” including a twenty-year rule. Until we abandon the current system of item-by-item review, we cannot write the history of the recent past with much confidence. Until we achieve a statutory basis for declassification, we remain at the mercy of leaks or “public disclosures” and individual Presidents who can issue their obstructionist executive orders when they please. It produces little but frustration to challenge the technical language of the latest order, guideline, or directive. We must look beyond this administration and lay the groundwork for a permanent system that Congress will approve and that Presidents will leave alone. Otherwise, the present danger of thought control will flourish, all the while snuffing out the writing of thorough and respected history.
Thomas G. Paterson is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the AHA in San Francisco, December 30, 1983.
