Still Secret After All These Years

Government secrecy will not be an issue, I told myself optimistically as I began to research a history of the Cuban missile crisis.

After all, the classic showdown of the Cold War occurred more than four decades ago, well outside the 25-year period established by the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the automatic release of everything but the most sensitive government documents. The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, and '60s-era defense technologies, such as the U-2 spy plane, are no longer considered secret.

How wrong I was.

It turns out that most government documents on the missile crisis -- including the principal Pentagon and State Department records collections -- are still classified. Hundreds of documents released to researchers a decade ago have since been withdrawn as part of a controversial -- itself secret -- reclassification program. And the backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Archives has grown to two, three or even five years.

Six months traveling across the country in pursuit of missile crisis records -- from the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to the National Archives in College Park to the Air Force Historical Research Agency in Montgomery, Ala. -- spawns conflicting impressions. On the one hand, these institutions are part of a national treasure trove of archival riches. On the other, the system of declassifying government information has become so chaotic in recent years that it is difficult for outsiders, and even many insiders, to understand the logic behind it.

Thanks to the White House tapes declassified in 1996, I have eavesdropped on intimate conversations between President Kennedy and his aides as they struggled to respond to the deployment of Soviet rockets less than 100 miles from Key West. I have perused top-secret signals intelligence released by the National Security Agency, and page after page of U.S. invasion plans for Cuba, down to the gradient of the landing beaches and the Cuban "most wanted" list.

On the other hand, Air Force records describing the inadvertent penetration of Soviet air space by a U-2 at the very peak of the crisis are still secret. The files of former Kennedy military adviser Maxwell Taylor are full of withdrawal slips marked "Access restricted." An archival turf war between competing agencies has blocked access to the records of the State Department intelligence office.

The extent of the reclassification program only became clear late last month after a historian noticed that dozens of documents that he had previously copied from the National Archives had mysteriously disappeared from State Department boxes. The withdrawn records included several documents that had already been published in official government histories, such as a 1948 CIA memo on using balloons to drop propaganda leaflets over Communist countries.

While the reclassification drive is intensely irritating to historians, an even bigger problem is the ripple effect such efforts have had on declassification. The routine declassification of government records has ground to a virtual standstill over the past few years because of the diversion of resources to reexamining previously released records. Documents that would have been released routinely a decade ago are trapped in a bureaucratic twilight zone.

A good example of this phenomenon are the thousands of pages of Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense records on the missile crisis transferred to the National Archives more than five years ago, but currently stored in confidential stacks. Archives officials told me that they will probably be able to release part of that collection in the next few months, but the bulk must go through an elaborate interagency screening process that could take several years.

It is instructive to compare the situation of Cuban missile crisis records with that of World War II records. The last great wartime secret -- the existence of the Enigma code-breaking machine -- was officially revealed in 1974, 29 years after the end of the war. By 1990, 45 years after the victory over Nazi Germany, the wartime records were almost completely accessible. An equivalent amount of time has passed since the missile crisis, but archival access is much more limited.

While the reclassification drive has accelerated under the Bush administration, particularly since 9/11, it actually began under Clinton. The initial impulse came from the Kyl-Lott amendment, passed by Congress in 1998 in response to a scandal involving the alleged leaking of nuclear secrets to China. The CIA and the Pentagon took advantage of the new climate to look for information that had supposedly been released without their consent, and demanded its withdrawal.