America's Secret Obsession

But other items raise more disturbing questions. Among them are materials, still considered classified even though they may have been used in front-page stories or in bestselling books, donated by leading journalists and authors, including four Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters: former New York Times writers Hedrick Smith, Neil Sheehan and William Safire, and former Washington Post investigative reporter George Lardner. Today, no member of the public -- not even the authors who donated them -- has access to those papers unless the government formally declassifies them.

Each year, the State Department prepares several volumes of official diplomatic history known as the Foreign Relations of the United States. For years, the CIA, saying it must protect its "sources and methods," has withheld or selectively shared its records with the authors of the series, sometimes holding up volumes for years and leaving glaring omissions in others.

A few years ago, the State Department and the CIA entered into a memorandum of understanding on the FRUS series. The department denied my repeated requests for a copy of that agreement, which is not classified but is, like a growing number of government documents, considered to be for "official use only." Not even members of the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation were allowed to see it. Department historian Marc Susser told me that the agreement permits the CIA to read not only those portions of the draft histories related to agency activities but the entire volume in advance and gives the agency a voice in when the histories are published, lest they come out at a time of heightened sensitivity. Beyond that, he would say little about the agreement -- not because it holds critical secrets, but because the State Department wants to stay in the CIA's good graces.

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Even before 9/11, the nation was expending enormous energy sifting through historical records that had been public for 25 years or more, searching for anything that might aid terrorists. At the National Archives, an Energy Department employee, relying on a list of key or "dirty" words, spent month after month going through hundreds of thousands of dusty records for anything that might be used against the nation and therefore require reclassification.

He and a cadre of security specialists were focused on the nuclear threat. On Sept. 10, 2001, he found himself perusing a box of decades-old files in which he found records chronicling the story of a B-25 bomber that flew into the Empire State Building in a thick fog on July 28, 1945, killing 14 people and traumatizing the city of New York. But neither "airplane" nor "skyscraper" appeared on his word list, and he had the records returned to the open shelves. The next day he realized that he had been staring into the face of the real peril.

It was a humbling lesson in the limits of secrecy -- and a stark reminder that what we have to fear is not information but a lack of imagination.

tedgup@att.net

Ted Gup is a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University and author

of "Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life."