Problems with Current U.S. Policy.

Between six and seven million U.S. government documents are stamped "classified" every year; about 17,000 daily. The president's own Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) does not know precisely how many millions--or billions--of secret records are stored in agency vaults. The cost of keeping so many secrets--what with salaries, safes, locks, security training, record management, computer programs, and the like--is equally staggering. The ISOO figured that the government spent some $4.1 billion in 1997 alone on "security classification." And that amount does not include the CIA's share, which is ... secret.

How does one explain this orgy of classification? One reason is the culture of secrecy that dominates the military and intelligence agencies, a culture that rewards obfuscation and opacity and profoundly discourages transparency. Equally importantly, no penalty for overclassifying government information exists, although those who challenge the secrecy system risk censure, sanction, or worse. In the course of a 1995 investigation into human rights abuses in Guatemala, for instance, State Department official Richard Nuccio found classified CIA documents indicating that a Guatemalan army colonel--who was also a paid CIA informant--was helping cover up the murder of an American innkeeper and the torture and murder of the husband of an American citizen. After making what he believed to be an ethical choice to inform Congress of the facts, Nuccio was stripped of his security clearances by the CIA for disclosing classified information, a decision supported by the Justice Department. Nuccio resigned in 1997, sending a chilling message to those facing comparable dilemmas.

Restrictive secrecy practices also cheat history. Despite a variety of legislative safeguards designed to protect the historical record (such as the Federal Records Act), there are few rules and little oversight to guide the preservation of government documents. Currently, only about 3% of U.S. government records are preserved for posterity. Agencies can make unilateral decisions to "disappear" records permanently with little fear of punishment--either by deliberately destroying them or by ceasing to create them. For instance:

* Many of the original files documenting the CIA's 1953 covert operation in Iran--the agency's first successful overthrow of a government--were destroyed, a CIA historian revealed in 1997.

* To guarantee the secrecy of its covert "MKULTRA" program, which for twenty years ran behavior modification experiments on unwitting human subjects, the CIA destroyed most of these documents in 1973.

* The Reagan White House did its best to delete its electronic mail files both during the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s and again when the administration was preparing to leave Washington in 1989. The discovery of an unknown backup collection led to a lawsuit to prevent the wholesale destruction of electronic information, and the courts have since upheld the government's duty to preserve such records. Yet in practice, computerized records are easier to delete, and it is more difficult to discern various versions of a document or to access files among several generations of computers.

In each case, an irreplaceable piece of American history has disappeared forever into the black hole of secrecy. The official remedy for such vanishing acts is the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which Congress enacted in 1966 to guarantee citizens the right of access to government records. With the exception of a brief heyday in the 1970s, however, FOIA has been profoundly dysfunctional, as government agencies consider it an unwelcome trespass on their prerogatives and a drain on their resources. In 1974, for instance, CIA Director William Colby bluntly told a House subcommittee, "The Central Intelligence Agency is not a public information agency."

Today, the CIA exemplifies the ability of national security agencies to substitute public relations spin for substance. "CIA openness" has devolved into an inhouse initiative to publish carefully selected collections of some of the agency's oldest documents, such as reports on the former Soviet Union and intelligence records from the Truman era. Efforts to impose real openness on the agency quickly meet powerful institutional barriers, what former CIA Director Robert Gates described as "rigid agency policies and procedures heavily biased toward denial of declassification." The CIA has also been able to use its mandate to protect "intelligence sources and methods"--its informants and modes of operation--as a legal shield against disclosure.

The extremism of the CIA's position is evident in its refusal to release its budget, repeatedly citing its right to secrecy under the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act. The aggregate intelligence budget, which includes the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and a handful of other agencies, has long been sought by critics of secret government spending. These critics charge that black budgets violate every citizen's constitutional right to a full account of the expenditure of public monies. Yet Congress has refused to order the budget's release. A lawsuit filed in 1997 forced the CIA's hand at last, revealing the total aggregate intelligence budget for that year at $26.6 billion. Director George Tenet disclosed the budget in the following year ($26.7 billion) and then reversed himself by withholding the figure for 1999. A federal court upheld his decision, saying that yearly disclosures could provide dangerous "trend information" to enemies of the United States.

In fact, much of what we know about the CIA today entered the public realm against the agency's will. From the Bay of Pigs bloodbath to the Iran-contra debacle, excessive secrecy gave birth to and then covered up epic policy failures.

Key Problems

* Under restrictive secrecy practices, 6 to 7 million government documents are stamped "classified" every year, and no penalty exists for overclassifying information.

* With few rules and little oversight to guide preservation of documents, currently only 3% of U.S. government records are preserved for posterity.

* Except for two years, even the aggregate intelligence budget has been classified as secret.

Kate Doyle,([e-mail]) a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, is based in Mexico City. This brief is adapted from her essay in National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War.