Ten years ago, the National Security Archive, looking over an inventory of the papers of Kennedy administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, sent a “declassification request” (like a Freedom of Information Act but used when asking for a specific file) to the Pentagon for a file involving nuclear missile policy in 1961. (This was when the administration discovered the Soviets actually had only a handful of missiles and there was, contrary to Kennedy’s campaign attacks, no “missile gap.”)
A few months ago, the Archive got the file, apparently in its entirety. Ten years is pretty much warp speed in the world of national security FOIA. So this was just wonderful.
Unfortunately the key 16 pages were all whited out, still marked as classified. But, as usual, the Pentagon justified the excisions on some very serious-sounding grounds — “state of the art weapons technologies,” “weapons of mass destruction information,” “war plans, damage to foreign relations and national emergency preparedness … would be damaged.
Then archive senior analyst William Burr, going through the document, recalled having seen some of this information somewhere. So he went to a huge stack of FOIA releases that the organization had put out in its Digital National Security Archive, and sure enough, the document, with but a few deletions, was released 24 years ago, back in 1990.
But Burr, who has a formidable memory, was pretty sure this was not where he first saw that document.
So he ran a quick search of State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, known as the FRUS, and found that the document, with virtually no redactions, had been published in 1996. Not under a FOIA request, just published in the official State Department history.
Archive director Tom Blanton tells the Loop that he concluded two things from this experience: “The Pentagon can’t tell a real secret from a public secret” and secondly, President Obama’s effort to empower a national declassification center apparently can’t override Pentagon secrecy claims.
Or maybe more people should pay attention to the FRUS.
