Recent Actions by
Declassification Panel Show Pattern of CIA Overclassification and Tight
Grip on Early Cold War History
Documents Released Offer New
Revelations on October War Intelligence and the Israeli Nuclear Weapons
Program
Washington, D.C., June 5, 2009 - Now that President
Obama has announced a review
of U.S. secrecy policy, critics of secrecy policy and
declassification requesters alike can only hope that those who carry it out
understand the serious failings of the secrecy system as it currently
exists. One of the absurdities of the system is that historical
national security information, even information 60 years old, is subject to
standards that are nearly as tough as those applied to recently-produced
information. A group of documents recently declassified by the Interagency
Security Classification Appeals Panel and a CIA history
that ISCAP could not release illustrate the problems raised by current
standards, overly strict interpretations of those standards, and legal
obstacles blocking the declassification of historical intelligence
information.
ISCAP acts as the court of last resort for mandatory declassification
review requests. Supported by the staff of the Information
Security Oversight Office, which provides the panel’s
executive secrecy, ISCAP can overturn, modify, or affirm agency decisions
that requesters have challenged with an appeal. Recently, in response
to appeals from the National Security Archive, ISCAP reversed several
Central Intelligence Agency initial denials of documents from the 1960s and
1970s. While ISCAP withheld material it regards as sensitive secrets,
it nevertheless found that much of the information denied by the CIA could
be declassified without harm to national security. ISCAP released:
- The
U.S. government’s first intelligence estimate—a Special
National Intelligence Estimate from December 1960—on the purposes of
Israeli nuclear activities at a nuclear reactor complex near
Beersheba: “We believe that plutonium production for weapons is at
least one major purpose of this effort.”
- Biographical
sketches of members of the Soviet delegation to the
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1969. For years, the CIA
routinely refused to declassify its biographical reporting.
- The
intelligence community’s post-mortem on the intelligence
failure to anticipate the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in October
1973. This absorbing report was the equivalent of a “best seller” in
the intelligence establishment after it was published.
- A
National Intelligence Estimate from April 1986 on “The
Likelihood of Nuclear Acts by Terrorist Groups,” which found that the
“prospects that terrorists will attempt high-level nuclear
terrorism” were “low to very low.” While the CIA analysts speculated
that even the terrorist groups of the 1980s may have had inhibitions
against actions that produced civilian mass casualties, they suggested
that the inhibitions could erode and that groups “with a different
state of mind” could emerge.
ISCAP’s decision to declassify these documents is commendable, but the
CIA’s initial denials suggest that the Agency is following overly
restrictive declassification review standards. Just as troubling, the
Agency used the CIA Information Act to prevent ISCAP from making a decision
on the classification status of a history of early covert operations,
“Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952.”
These CIA examples suggest that the rules and regulations that support
the U.S. government secrecy system enable government agencies to follow unreasonably
narrow standards. Moreover, as the CIA’s action on the covert
operations history suggests, laws on the books give the Agency inordinate
power to keep the veil of secrecy over important parts of its
history. Indeed, President George W. Bush’s executive order on
secrecy policy, still in force, gives the CIA veto power over ISCAP
decisions on intelligence records. These problems point out the need for
significant change in the U.S. government’s secrecy policy.
Creation of ISCAP
One of President Bill Clinton’s innovations in Executive Order 12958 was
the possibility of a final mandatory review appeal to an Interagency
Security Classification Appeals Panel. The Nixon administration
established mandatory review in 1972, under Executive Order 11652, as a way
for members of the public to request declassification review of national
security classified information; since then, mandatory review has become an
important element of the federal government’s declassification system. (Note 1) FOIA is useful for requesting all kinds of U.S.
government information, classified or unclassified, but mandatory review is
tailor-made for the declassification review of classified information on
diplomacy, intelligence, and military policy and operations.
Moreover, for requesting classified presidential records produced before
the Presidential Records Act (up through the Carter administration),
researchers must use mandatory review. Those records were
not subject to FOIA because the former Presidents effectively owned them
(mandatory review must be used for all classified donated records).
But mandatory review can also be used for requesting non-presidential
records from the national security bureaucracy when the requester can specifically
describe documents so that government officials can easily find them.
Before Executive Order 12958, there was little advantage to using mandatory
review for requesting non-presidential records. As under FOIA,
requesters had only one chance to appeal an adverse agency decision.
While FOIA gave requesters the right to sue, it is a right that is
difficult to use because of the costs and complexity of litigation.
The dynamic changed, however, when President Bill Clinton signed Executive
Order 12958, which created ISCAP and made mandatory review a more
attractive option by giving requesters an opportunity for a second appeal.
Chaired by the director of the Interagency Security Oversight Office, ISCAP
includes representatives from the State Department, the Department of
Defense, the Department of Justice, the National Archives, the National
Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
As long as requesters believe that ISCAP will give fair treatment to
their appeals, the panel’s existence increases the advantage of mandatory
review. That ISCAP could and would overturn agency decisions when it
believed that they were incorrect became evident early in its history. One
of the most sensitive and secret set of arrangements authorized by U.S.
presidents during the Cold War concerned advance authority
(“predelegation”) to top nuclear commanders to use nuclear weapons in
emergency conditions, specifically, surprise nuclear attack. The
documents at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library that embodied the
predelegation arrangements remained highly secret for years, with the
Pentagon and other agencies refusing to declassify them.
Nevertheless, when it became possible to appeal the denials to ISCAP, the
panel responded in 1998 by releasing significant information on Eisenhower’s
predelegation decisions. Plainly, it believed that doing so was consistent
with U.S. national security. ISCAP made other important decisions,
but its actions on predelegation were persuasive evidence that the White
House had created an authority that could check excessive secrecy at the
agencies.
Operational Files Exemption
While ISCAP has broad authority, there are limits to its freedom of
action in reviewing classified information. One restriction on
ISCAP’s power is the operational files exemption established by the CIA
Information Act (1984). The purpose of the Act was to
facilitate CIA’s FOIA process by exempting operational files (intelligence
collection and covert action) that were considered unlikely to be
declassified. Nevertheless, Congress wanted CIA to open up some of
the files to declassification requesting over time. Therefore, the
Act called upon the DCI to review the exemptions every ten years to
determine “whether such exemptions may be removed” from any file category,
and to use “consideration of historical value or other public interest” to
determine whether a “significant part” of the information can be
declassified. That, however, has not happened. Indeed, the DCI has expanded
the scope of Directorate of Operations file series that may be excluded,
including explicitly “Clandestine Service History Program Files” as well as
files of the Directorate of Science and Technology and the “Security Center.”
The operational files exemption constrained ISCAP’s freedom of action in
a recent decision on a CIA history. In 2004, the National Security
Archive filed a mandatory review request for a CIA history of its covert
operations during the early years of the Cold War, “Office of Policy
Coordination, 1948-1952” (see Document 4
below). The CIA had released portions of the history in 1997 and Archive
staffers hoped that it might be possible to get more of it released in
light of the passage of time. If not, then it would be a useful test
of the ISCAP process and whether CIA would block the declassification of
sixty-year-old information. As it turned out, in its initial
decision, in early 2005, the Agency refused to release any more information
than it had provided in 1997. Appeals to CIA as well as to ISCAP were
unavailing. In December 2008, ISCAP informed the National Security
Archive that “the remaining classified information within this document is
exempt from mandatory review, and as such does not fall within the purview
of the ISCAP.” What happened was that the CIA claimed the operational
files exemption to support its denial. Apparently the Agency
had mistakenly released portions of the OPC history and would not release
any more of it. ISCAP has no authority to challenge the Agency’s
decision.
The CIA’s decision on this history points to failings in the
implementation of the CIA Information Act, which ought to be
corrected. But a more basic weakness in the U.S. government’s
declassification system is the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to use
“sources and methods” claims to prevent indefinitely the release of
information about its history, even from the first years of its
existence. For years, the CIA has had great freedom of action to use
its statutory exemption in the 1947 National Security Act to prevent the
release of information about its history. While the CIA has made
progress, e.g., declassifying biographical sketches and satellite
photography, among other “sources and methods,” as the Moynihan Commission
observed almost 12 years ago neither the Act nor subsequent executive
orders ever defined what sources and methods meant. As a result, CIA has
been able to use this exemption in broad-brush fashion to “justify the
classification of a range of information only indirectly related to a
specific source or method.” Consequently, the “sources and methods
rationale has become a vehicle for agencies to automatically keep
information secret without engaging in [any] harm analysis.” Arguing that
CIA has not used the sources and methods exemption in a “thoughtful way but
almost by rote,” the Commission recommended that the intelligence
establishment clarify the “use of sources and methods as a basis for the
continuing classification of intelligence information” and that the DCI
send out instructions on the matter. (Note 2)
The Moynihan Commission's recommendations on sources and methods
received no follow-up. It is unlikely, however, that CIA will revisit
the way it classifies historical sources and methods information without
external stimulus. It is essential that President Obama issue a new
executive order on national security information that includes a reversal
of the CIA veto over ISCAP decisions. But even if the White House was
inclined to reform sources and methods classification standards, a
legislative solution is essential for taking effective action. For
example, an omnibus historical records act could include language amending
the 1947 National Security Act by stipulating that the sources and methods
that require protection in records that are over 25 years old are limited
to those whose disclosure could place a source in personal jeopardy or
compromise an intelligence method that is currently in use. (Note 3)
CIA Veto
Another area where the CIA can restrict ISCAP’s authority emerged during
the first years of the George W. Bush administration—an explicit CIA veto
to protect its information from declassification by ISCAP. The CIA
first challenged ISCAP’s authority over its information in the late 1990s,
but lost that fight. (Note 4) Nevertheless, CIA
officials believed they had an exclusive role in protecting intelligence sources
and methods and after George W. Bush came to power, they had more allies in
the White House. When the Bush administration amended E.O. 12958, it
gave the CIA a veto over ISCAP decisions that concerned its
information. Thus, according to Executive Order 13292, when the
Director of Central Intelligence objects to a decision by the Panel
“because he has determined that [releasing] the information could
reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security and to
reveal (1) the identity of a human intelligence source, or (2) information
about the application of an intelligence source or method (including any
information that concerns, or is provided as a result of, a relationship
with a cooperating intelligence element of a foreign government), the
information shall remain classified.” ISCAP would have the right to
appeal adverse decisions to the president and has exercised that right in a
few cases that are still pending at the White House (e.g., over President’s
Daily Briefs). (Note 5)
By giving the CIA veto power, the Bush administration Executive Order
set a bad precedent that struck at the heart of ISCAP’s authority. As
the OLC put it in 1999, “the decision to classify information bearing on
national security is an exercise of the President's independent
constitutional power to control access to such information” and ISCAP is
the president’s “delegee” in such matters. If the CIA can veto a
decision by the panel, then the system of presidential authority is turned
on its ear. Reversing the CIA veto should be an element of a future
executive order on national security information. If CIA disagrees
with an ISCAP decision, it would still have the ability to appeal to the
President as it did under the Clinton executive order.
This briefing book illustrates serious overclassification problems in
the intelligence agencies, but also ISCAP’s strengths and weaknesses in its
relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. When the National
Security Archive requested the documents that follow, the CIA withheld
several of them in their entirety or excised most of their contents.
Appeals led nowhere: the CIA refused to declassify more information from
them. By contrast, appeals to ISCAP led the panel to overturn
the CIA decisions and declassify much of the information at issue in the
appeals. While these results show that the CIA can work
constructively with its ISCAP colleagues in declassifying important
information, at the same time, they raise questions about the guidelines
and interpretations that led the Agency to withhold so much information in
the first place. Even with the weaknesses in Executive Order 12958,
ISCAP believed that the further declassification was wholly consistent with
it. This may show that the Executive Order needs clarification so
that agencies do not interpret it in such a restrictive fashion that they
deny information that ought to be declassified.
Moreover, as is evident in the decisions on the Office of Policy
Coordination history, as long as the CIA Information Act stays in its
present form, ISCAP will be constrained when reviewing historical
intelligence information and the CIA can indefinitely withhold the record
of its history with little outside accountability. As difficult as
this problem is, it is one that the Obama administration needs to tackle.
Read
the Documents
Note: The following documents are in
PDF format.
You will need to download and install the free Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view.
Document 1:
Special National Intelligence Estimate Number 100-8-60, “Implications of
the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability,” 8 December
1960, Secret/Noforn, Excised Copy
On the basis of evidence collected during the summer and fall of 1960,
the U.S. intelligence establishment drew relatively firm conclusions that
Israel had an ongoing program to produce “weapons grade plutonium.”
In recent years, the U.S. government has been more forthcoming in
declassifying information about what it knew and when in the early years of
the Israeli nuclear program. In declassifying this previously
exempted document, ISCA is following that pattern.
This Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) was controversial as
soon as it was published because information surfaced showing that the
intelligence agencies and other U.S. government organizations had
overlooked telling evidence that Israel had a nuclear weapons program
underway. As Avner Cohen has shown, an intelligence post-mortem requested by President
Kennedy showed that information available as early as April
1958 could have led to an accurate understanding of Israel’s
purposes. Why this happened can not be easily explained, but Cohen
identified a number of relevant factors, including “Israeli secrecy and
deception,” underestimation of Israeli capabilities, “friends [of Israel]
in high places … who might have helped to suppress the early information,”
organizational bottlenecks at the CIA, and the possibility that Eisenhower
wanted Israel to have the bomb. According to Cohen, “the late 1950s might
have been the only time the United States could have successfully pressured
Israel to give up its nuclear weapons project in exchange for American
security guarantees, but the opportunity was not explored.” (Note
6)
Document 2:
Henry A. Kissinger, Memorandum for the President from Henry A. Kissinger,
“Soviet SALT Delegation Named: Technical Competence Suggests Readiness to
Address Concrete Problems,” 6 November 1969, Secret, Excised copy
Archival source: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Library, NSC
files (hereinafter Nixon NSC), box 874, SALT, Vol. IV, Oct-November 16,
1969
For years, the CIA refused to even confirm or deny that it routinely
produced biographical sketches of foreign officials, used for briefing U.S.
government officials on their foreign counterparts, claiming that
acknowledging the existence of the reports would harm national security and
compromise sensitive sources and methods. In 1999, working with
the law firm Ropes & Gray, the Archive filed a lawsuit against the
Agency for its refusal to declassify biographical sketches of nine former
Communist leaders of Eastern European countries, seven of whom were dead at
the time. The lawsuit challenged the Agency’s use of the “Glomar”
exemption, named after the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny the Glomar
Explorer project during the 1970s. It is rare for federal judges to
rule against the CIA, but in this case, U.S. District Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the Agency could not use the Glomar exemption to
prevent declassification of the biographical sketches. (Note 7)
Although this would not prevent the Agency from using other grounds to
withhold biographical sketches or excised them, it could no longer use the
Glomar exemption to deny them.
While a judicial decision on a FOIA lawsuit does not have effective
bearing on mandatory review requests, the Judge’s decision may have chipped
away at the Agency’s hard-line position against declassifying biographical
sketches. In the instance of the Kissinger to Nixon memorandum on
SALT, the CIA withheld all of the biographical sketches of members of the
Soviet delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talk (SALT) that began
in Helsinki in November 1969. CIA continued to exempt the
biographical sketches despite the Archive’s initial appeal. ISCAP,
however, approved the release of several of the documents, perhaps
persuading CIA to be more flexible and not use its veto. The release
included sketches of some key officials in the Soviet talks, such as
delegation head Vladimir Semenovich Semenov and Georgiy Markovich
Korniyenko, a key Americanist at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, but two
sketches were withheld. They may have concerned the other members of
the delegation: Colonel General Nikolai Alexeyev and academician Alexander
Schchukin.
Document 3:
Central Intelligence Agency (?), “Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?”, 30
October 1973, Top Secret, Excised copy
Archival source: Nixon NSC, Henry A. Kissinger Office Files, box
132, Egypt-Ismail Vol. VII Oct. 1973
In the weeks after the October War, U.S. government officials leaked to
the media information about intelligence gleanings of possible shipments of
Scud missiles and nuclear weapons to Soviet bases in Egypt during the
conflict. While officials were more certain about the deployment of
the missiles, it was more debatable whether Moscow had actually deployed
nuclear weapons to foreign territory because of the great risks
involved. According to the press reports, defense officials saw
a “reasonable possibility” that nuclear weapons were shipped, but members
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John C. Stennis and Stuart
Symington, “said the evidence did not convince them.” (Note 8)

|
Photo of Big Smoke, a motor
yacht used by the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 157, for intelligence collection
operations in the Mediterranean. Photo from Jeffrey Richelson, "Task
Force 157: The U.S. Navy's Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77," Intelligence and National Security 11 (1996), 118; used with permission of the author
and the journal.
|
For the first time, the U.S. government has released one of the
intelligence reports that may have been the basis for the leaks.
While intelligence agencies exempted this document in its entirety after
the first request to the Nixon Library and also after an appeal, ISCAP
agreed to release much of it, suggesting that the much of the information
had been overclassified.
“Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Egypt?” draws back from definite conclusions,
suggesting why some U.S. officials believed that the evidence was not good
enough. Interestingly, the report indicates which Soviet cargo
ship—the Mezhdurechensk—was one of the objects of suspicion, and
that U.S. intelligence photographed the ship at Alexandria on 25
October. While much of the evidence concerning the alleged deployment
has been redacted from the report, probably on sources and methods grounds,
a prize-winning article by Archive senior research fellow, Jeffrey
Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy’s Secret Intelligence Service,
1966-1977,” published in Intelligence and National Security,
clarifies the issue. According to Richelson’s account, Task Force 157
included a yacht equipped with a special nuclear intelligence sensor that
operated in the Bosphurus and shadowed Soviet ships. The problem was that
the sensor was “prone to giving positive false alarms,” and could not
determine whether the “type of radiation in question” indicated the
presence of nuclear weapons. This makes it all the more
understandable why the authors of the 30 October report were unwilling to
draw firm conclusions about the presence of nuclear weapons on the Mezhdurechensk:
“The evidence should not yet be regarded as though it creates a strong
presumption that the Soviets dispatched nuclear weapons to Egypt.” (Note 9)
Document 4:
U.S. Intelligence Community Staff, “The Performance of the
Intelligence Community Before the Arab-Israeli War of October 1973: A
Preliminary Post-Mortem Report,” December 1973, Top Secret, Excised copy

|
This picture of the U.S.
Intelligence Board, then chaired by Director of Central Intelligence
William E. Colby, includes representatives of the organizations which
collected and reviewed intelligence before and during the October 1973
War. In November 1973, perhaps at the meeting depicted here, the Board
approved the creation of a post-mortem function by the Intelligence
Community Staff’s Product Review Division. (Photo, courtesy CIA History
Staff)
|
Before the 1970s, analysts in the U.S. intelligence establishment
occasionally produced post-mortems on intelligence products, such as
National Intelligence Estimates, “almost always in response to the
complaints of high-level policymakers … who wanted to know what-had-gone
wrong” within the office that has produced flawed estimates and analyses. (Note 10) Apparently, however, the post-mortems were
either ignored by policymakers or were dismissed by their readers as
self-serving. To get around these problems, in 1973 the newly created
Intelligence Community (IC) Staff, took up the post-mortem function, as
part of its overall, if weakly empowered, mission to coordinate programs
and control costs. The Products Review Division (PRD) had
responsibility for post-mortems and produced seven of them during
1973-1975. (Note 11) Only a few of them have
released and most of them have been heavily excised (see, for example, the
post-mortem on the 1974 Indian nuclear test.
With the substantial declassification of an engrossing intelligence
post-mortem on the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war it is possible to get a
close look at one of the Intelligence Community Staff post-mortems of an
“intelligence failure.” In the earlier version released by CIA all of the
supporting material on intelligence collection and analysis was excised;
nothing was released from pages 5 through 20, and much of pages 21 through
26 was also exempted. That the other members of ISCAP were able to
work with CIA in determining what needed continued protection, e.g. details
on human intelligence (Humint) and communications intelligence (Comint) and
what could be easily released is a real tribute to the inter-agency
process, but also further evidence of CIA overclassification. While
it would be fascinating to read the discussion on communications
intelligence that ISCAP exempted from declassification, as well as the
coverage of photographic intelligence, it is not surprising that the Panel
did not release those details. (Note 12)
This absorbing document, which was the “IC Staff equivalent of a best
seller,” offers many insights into relatively obscure corners of
intelligence work on the Arab-Israeli conflict during 1973. (Note
13) For example, in October 1998, at a retrospective conference on the
October War, State Department INR staffer Roger Merrick recalled a paper he
wrote in May 1973 predicting a “better than 50 percent change of major
hostilities” within six months. (Note 14) In the
years that have passed since 1998, efforts by various researchers to locate
that prescient INR estimate have failed; it is still buried in government
archives. Nevertheless, with the declassification of this post-mortem, the
section on “A Case of Wisdom Lost,” provides for the first time a detailed
description of, and key quotations from, what the authors characterize as a
“remarkable memorandum.” According to the INR paper, Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat would seek war with Israel not for specific military objectives
but to spur “big power” diplomatic intervention in the Arab-Israeli
conflict. “If the UN debate of next week produces no convincing movement in
the Egyptian-Israeli impasse, our view is that the resumption of
hostilities will become a better than even bet.” As INR analysts had
been skeptical of President Lyndon
Johnson’s Vietnam policy and would reject President George W. Bush’s claims
about an Iraqi nuclear program, what accounted for such prescience would be
worth systematic study.
Document 5:
NIE 6-86, “The Likelihood of Nuclear Acts by Terrorist Groups,” April 1986,
Secret, excised copy
In light of a “new surge” of terrorist acts against NATO installations
and “new levels of terrorist violence” in the Middle East, intelligence analyst
tried to estimate the possibility that Western European or Middle Eastern
terrorists could and would undertake “high-level” acts of nuclear terrorism
involving mass casualties. While the estimators identified a number
of possible scenarios for terrorist acts involving nuclear weapons and
materials, including building a bomb, seizing U.S. weapons deployed in NATO
Europe, or sabotaging a nuclear reactors, they acknowledged the great
difficulty of making “confident or precise estimates” about their likelihood.
So far, Middle East and Western European terrorist groups had been
training in numbers too small (the estimate of the required number is
excised in the text) to overrun a nuclear installation, but the “expanded
use of vehicle bombs” in the Middle East raised the possibility that
terrorists could use a huge truck bomb to “cause extensive damage to a
nuclear weapons site, a fissile material production facility, or a nuclear
power reactor without risking their group by attempting to penetrate the security
of these installations.”
Even terrorists have their limits, according to the estimators, who
identified “norms of terrorist behavior” that, so far, had provided
inhibitions against acts of nuclear terrorism. The norms included
prudence in taking risks, attentiveness to “political consequences of a
terrorist act”, and frugality in using resources. For example, the
norms were not weakening for Middle East terrorist groups, such as
Hezbollah or the Abu Nidel Group, which did take world opinion into account.
Moreover, none of the groups had the “psychological state of mind
necessarily deliberately to kill the tens of thousands that might result
from even a small nuclear explosion.” The “spate of suicide attacks”
in the Middle East was not thought to provide an avenue for nuclear
terrorism, neither was the hostility of state actors in the Middle East,
such as Libya or Iran.
Thinking outside the box, the estimators did acknowledge the possibility
that groups with a different “state of mind” could emerge, without the
inhibitions mentioned earlier, and undertake the “most malevolent and
harmful kinds” of nuclear terrorism.” It would require “terrorists
not subject to current inhibitions, who may not yet exist.” Such a
group could be a cult with an “apocalyptic view of history” seeing “itself
as the agent of change for bringing about” the end of civilization.
Although the CIA denied this document in its entirety, ISCAP decided to
release it in excised form, withholding information about nuclear reactors,
NATO nuclear installations, and U.S. nuclear deployments overseas, among
other issues.
Document 6:
Central Intelligence Agency, “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952,”
n.d., Secret, Excised copy
That ISCAP could release the first five documents is to its
credit. As mentioned above, however, ISCAP could not oppose the CIA’s
decision to use the CIA Information Act to withhold nearly the entirety of
an historical report on the history of the Office of Policy Coordination,
the U.S. government’s first peace-time covert action
organization. The introduction to the report is heavily excised
but gives a sketchy idea of the scope of OPC activity. The second part,
“Enabling Directives and Related Actions,” was substantively released.
Created by the National Security Council in 1948, the OPC’s mission was
to wage the clandestine confrontation with the Communist movement and
Soviet power, initially in Western Europe, but also in the Middle East and
East Asia, with forays in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under NSC paper
10/2 (Note 15), approved by the Truman administration in
June 1948, the OPC would have responsibility for such clandestine
activities as: "propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action,
including sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against
hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrillas and refugee liberations [sic] groups, and support of indigenous
anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
Anything else, “armed conflict” and espionage/counter-espionage was left to
the armed forces or the CIA’s Office of Special Operations.
The CIA did not need to use its formal veto over ISCAP decisions because
it could use the operational files exemption. Nevertheless, the CIA’s
insistence on using this exemption to withhold most of the report is
slightly puzzling. The Agency has already approved the release of
once highly sensitive information about its early covert political
operations; for example, the recent volume in the Foreign Relations
series on The
Intelligence Community, 1950-1955 includes
fascinating detail on the U.S. Army’s pressure on OPC to undertake
clandestine efforts to establish “resistance mechanisms” in Eastern Europe,
including Poland (see documents 142 and 145). These efforts put the
OPC in an embarrassing position when its officials learned that they had
been victims of a Soviet/Polish intelligence deception. (Note
16) The same FRUS volume includes much additional
information about the history of the Office of Policy Coordination.
No doubt the OPC history includes some of this information, but the CIA
withheld it anyway. This decision points to the need for a
legislative solution to the problem of CIA overclassification. The
Agency has a legitimate need to protect some operational files, but
somewhere the rule of reason has to apply so the Agency cannot keep its
history classified indefinitely.
Also worth noting is that the journalist Evan Thomas had access to the
OPC history when he was writing his CIA history, The Very Best Men.
As part of a special access arrangement, the Agency allowed Thomas to
read a number of histories produced by the CIA’s Clandestine Services,
including “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948-1952.” (Note
17) In end-notes, (e.g., note 3 at page 355, note 16 at page 358,
and note 20 at page 360), Thomas provides quotes and information from this
history, all of which the CIA excised when it processed the mandatory
review request.
4. The CIA first challenged ISCAP’s authority over its
information in the late 1990s when ISCAP was becoming a popular venue for
final appeals. Unhappy with an arrangement where it could be
outvoted, the Agency brought the issue to a head in 1999 by challenging ISCAP’s
authority to weigh in on issues involving intelligence sources and
methods. At the request of ISOO’s then-director, and ISCAP executive
secretary Steven Garfinkel, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel (OLC) carefully reviewed the issues and decided in favor of ISCAP:
“We conclude that the DCI's determinations are subject to substantive ISCAP
review” because “information concerning intelligence sources and methods is
subject to mandatory declassification review.” Therefore, “ISCAP has jurisdiction
to review the substance of such declassification decisions.” Office of Legal Counsel, Memorandum, “Re: ISCAP
Jurisdiction over Classification Decisions by the Director of Central
Intelligence Regarding Intelligence Sources and Methods,” 5 October
1999.
5. Executive Order 13292, “Further Amendment to Executive
Order 12958, As Amended, Classified National Security Information.”
6. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), 84.
8. For the leaks, see Michael Getler, “A-Arms Believed in
Egypt; Scud Missiles Seen Under Soviet Control,” Washington Post,
21 November 1973, and John W. Finney, “Officials Suspect Russians Sent Atom
Arms to Egypt, Atomic Weapons Moved, U.S. Suspects,” The New York Times,
22 November 1973.
11. Douglas F. Garthoff, Directors of Central
Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005
(Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005), 71-73;
Shryock, “The Intelligence Community Post-Mortem Program,”15-16.
12. For more on the intelligence community during the
October War, see Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History
of the National Security Agency (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2009), 156-157.
13. Shyrock, “The Intelligence Community Post-Mortem
Program,” 16.
14. Richard P. Parker, ed., The October War: A
Retrospective (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001),
89, 113-116.
16. For accounts of CIA support for Wolnosc I
Niepondenosc (“Freedom and Independence”), see Thomas Powers, The Man
who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, Random
House, 1979), 40-43, and Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of
the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 67-68.
17. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared:
The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1995),
344-345.