How to Bury a Secret: Turn It Into Paperwork

"Each time we crack a new record group, we have to wait for that learning curve," says Meredith Wagner, an archive specialist.

Discovering the precise intent of these codes takes up time with perhaps annoying phone calls to the agencies. "But they are more annoyed if we release something they didn't intend for us to release," says Schauble.

Another minefield is the "equity" issue, which involves more than one agency having an interest in a document and its classified information. For example, if the State Department has used CIA information in its document, then both agencies have to review it for declassification. That means a document has to be pulled from boxes repeatedly -- not a good idea with delicate old paper, often of the onionskin variety.

To solve this problem, a National Declassification Initiative has been established so that agencies can sort out their equity issues together, around the same table, at the same time, and perhaps prevent embarrassments such as occurred last year when previously public information was reclassified. This new project is in its early stages.

Finally, the archivists spend their days poring over these papers, straining their eyes, kinking their necks and knowing that a lot of those classified documents never needed to be classified in the first place. In the secrecy system, over-classification is rampant. On that point, people in and out of government agree. The 9/11 Commission Report decried the level of government secrecy as a national security obstacle. A Defense Department official testified before Congress in August 2004 that perhaps 50 percent of classified documents did not need that designation.

Leaks and unauthorized disclosure of classified information are bad, "but the flip side is equally damaging, and that is the over-classification of information," says J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which reports to both the National Archives as well as the White House.

To manage all this secrecy -- to store it, secure it, process it -- costs the country $7.7 billion in 2005, Leonard says.

Says Aftergood: "We are reaping the consequences of past neglect. For decades, the agencies have been allowed to run roughshod. They've been allowed to classify at will and to completely neglect the declassification side of the equation."

Old secrets also can provide context for new crises. For example, U.S. dealings with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s are still coming to light.

"It's our history, and in many cases, it's our present," Aftergood says.

With a proverbial sword hanging over their heads, agencies (excepting those associated with national security) were forced to change their secrecy culture when Clinton signed his executive order. They had to review their documents and argue for their continued classification, or see them all automatically made public. Some 400 million were declassified even before the Dec. 31, 2006, deadline. Add that backlog to the most recent 700 million declassified pages, and the mountain of paper surpasses a billion pages. But it wasn't as if these documents spilled out of a vault or were shoved out the front door of the FBI.

"You can't come down Pennsylvania Avenue and find them on the sidewalk," joked David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI's record/information dissemination section.

The FBI's declassified records are in its own repositories. Many other declassified agency records, including those of the State and Treasury departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Federal Aviation Administration, are at Archives II in College Park.

Aftergood says he is expecting some surprises of an unknown nature, not based on anything he knows but on what he doesn't know. That, he says, is the value of declassification: offering up the unexpected.

"Without having a clue as to what they are," he said, "I'm confident they're in there."