The Amateur Sleuth Who Gave the Archives a Red Face

"I had been on a slow burn for months at this point," Aid said. "None of the reference librarians would tell me anything. . . . They knew I was suspicious about something, but they clearly had been ordered not to talk about it."

Finally, someone took him aside and told him the CIA and other agencies had been pulling files since 1999. Aid took the matter to friends at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library. Other researchers also had started noticing irregularities, and together they sent a letter to the Archives requesting a meeting.

At the meeting, held at the end of January, Archives officials "admitted everything," Aid said. "They said, 'Yes, there has been a reclassification program going on here.' "

The next month, the New York Times broke the story. Allen Weinstein, the head of the Archives, soon announced a moratorium on reclassification while the agency undertook an audit of the withdrawn documents.

Completed in April, the audit found that at least 25,515 records had been removed by five agencies, including the CIA, the Air Force, the Energy Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Archives itself, which had agreed to keep the program secret.

Although the agencies said the documents were improperly declassified in the first place, Weinstein announced that more than a third of them should never have been removed. Auditors also found that the CIA withdrew a "considerable number" of records it knew should be unclassified "in order to obfuscate" other records it was trying to protect. Weinstein announced new procedures to ensure that withdrawals of records are rare and that the public will be notified when they occur.

Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia history professor who in October will become the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said Aid had performed "a great service" in exposing the reclassification program.

"His work helps all of us fight against the culture of secrecy in Washington today. We don't have enough watchdogs," Naftali said.

Aid applauded the audit and the policy changes. But he said the intelligence agencies are still dragging their feet when it comes to declassifying records.

"This entire experience has been an eye-opener for me," Aid said. "What's at the National Archives, I thought, was sacrosanct. It had nothing to do with the secrecy that was prevalent in Washington and I read about in the newspapers. So this has come as a huge shock for me. . . . You don't stand up and take notice until it has a direct impact on you. I'm taking it very personally."