Redaction in Action

Sometimes, working at the National Security Archive is like living in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic hell.

You're interested in some specific government action so you file a FOIA request, asking for the documents related to it. Then you wait. And wait. And wait. Months go by. Sometimes years go by. Then, if you're lucky, you get a stack of documents -- thousands and thousands of pages. Pulsing with excitement, you start reading, only to find yourself slogging through reams of hideously boring drivel, some of it so dull that being forced to read it would probably violate the Geneva Conventions. But you wade through it and finally you come to the good stuff, the diamonds hidden in this dung heap and -- they've been blacked out, obliterated by some censor, or, as the bureaucrats call it, "redacted."

Redaction is the bane of an archive staffer's existence, and they love to tell redaction horror stories.

Peter Kornbluh, an archive analyst who specializes in Latin American affairs, remembers receiving the Defense Intelligence Agency's profile of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet only to find that "it was entirely redacted except his name and the phonetic pronunciation of his name."

Malcolm Byrne, the archive's director of research and resident Iran specialist, tells the story of the CIA's secret study of the famous coup it staged in Iran in 1953, overthrowing the prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, and installing the shah in power. In 1999, the archive filed a lawsuit to obtain the 200-page study. The CIA responded by redacting every word in the document except for one sentence: "Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair."

Joyce Battle, the archive's Iraq expert, recently filed a FOIA request asking the FBI for documents relating to any possible connection between Iraq and the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. "They released 122 documents," she says. "That was pretty exciting, but when I took a look at them, virtually all of them were redacted in their entirety."

Faced with a totally blacked-out document, what's a researcher to do?

"You can appeal," says Battle, "and we do that often."

In fact, the archive files hundreds of appeals every year, 549 of them in 2006 alone. When that doesn't work, the archive sometimes files lawsuits, more than 40 of them over the past 23 years. In January, for instance, the archive filed suit to obtain grand jury records related to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the communist spies executed in 1953.

In the long run, Blanton says, documents tend to come out. That CIA study of the Iran coup was leaked to the New York Times by a "former official" in 2000. And Kornbluh finally did manage to obtain a non-redacted version of the DIA's Pinochet profile.

"You could see that one of the things they redacted was that his favorite cocktail was a pisco sour," Kornbluh says, amused, before adding this: "The declassification of U.S. government documents is so capricious, that's why you need a National Security Archive."

After waiting for years, Kornbluh ended up obtaining 24,000 pages of documents on Pinochet and the 1973 CIA-backed coup that brought him to power. He used them to write his 2003 book, "The Pinochet File."