Still Secret After All These Years

On March 2, the National Archives announced yet another initiative to respond to the flurry of bad publicity about reclassification -- this time to check whether documents have been improperly withdrawn from circulation. While the initiative has been welcomed by historians, it also carries dangers. A vast amount of energy, time and taxpayer money is being wasted reviewing and re-reviewing the same documents.

If the missile crisis is any guide, the whole laborious process could be greatly speeded up by better coordination between agencies, improved data management, and what one frustrated National Archives records officer terms the application of "a little common sense." Some agencies -- the Air Force is a prime example -- lack an effective system for tracking documents previously declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.

By contrast, the CIA, which is often accused of dragging its feet, has found a way to make declassified documents instantly available to all researchers. The agency has a public database that includes day-by-day intelligence analyses on the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, based on reconnaissance flights by U-2s and low-level planes.

Archival work is a little like tackling a giant jigsaw puzzle. If you are patient enough, you can eventually make out the picture, even if many of the pieces are missing. In the case of the missile crisis, I have assembled enough of the puzzle to be confident that few, if any, of the missing pieces contain national security information that could be useful to an enemy -- the criterion established by both Bush and Clinton for continuing to classify more than 25-year-old secrets.

So why, if the puzzle is largely resolved, am I -- and other researchers -- making such a fuss? Because history is not just about the big picture. It is also about the small stuff, thousands upon thousands of individual acts of bravery and skill and, yes, foolishness. In order to make sense of the anguished White House debates between Kennedy and his advisers in October 1962, you need to understand how the Cold War was actually fought, by the generals, the spies, the reconnaissance pilots. It is the details that make history come alive -- and in far too many cases those details are still being hidden from us.

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Michael Dobbs is a Washington Post reporter on leave to write a book about the Cuban missile crisis.