Declassification Dispute Ends, 1963 Document Released
Secrecy News report:
An extraordinary dispute among senior Bush Administration officials over whether to declassify a forty-year-old CIA document culminated last week in the public release of the contested document -- a one-page 1963 biography of Giuseppe Saragat (1898-1988), leader of Italy's Democratic Socialist Party who would go on to become that nation's president (1964-1971).
Declassification of the document was originally mandated in 2003 by majority vote of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) -- an executive branch body composed of representatives of the Departments of Defense, State and Justice, the CIA, NARA and the National Security Adviser.
But the CIA objected, and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet exercised the veto power that President Bush had granted to the DCI in a March 2003 executive order in order to block the document's release.
Other members of the Panel appealed to the White House to override the DCI's veto.
"Even [then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell put pen to paper" to urge declassification of the document, according to a U.S. government source.
The White House did not respond.
But last year, the appeal "was rendered moot when the DCI [Porter J. Goss] later exercised his discretion and declassified the document at issue in its entirety," according to the 2004 annual report from the Information Security Oversight Office (at page 9).
Still, the document remained undisclosed until this month when it was finally transferred to the JFK Library in declassified form. (The citation is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Papers, Box WH 12a, Italy, 2/1/63 - 2/28/63.)
A copy of the document, which is about as innocuous as it could be, was obtained by Secrecy News.
Why did the CIA insist on the document's classification until very recently? Why was it declassified?
To ask such questions presupposes that there is a rational basis to CIA's classification actions. But that may not be so.
CIA classification policy is often unintelligible even to sympathetic observers.
For example, in an attempt to explain how historical intelligence budget figures from fifty years ago could be properly withheld by the CIA even though current budget figures were declassified in 1997 and 1998, federal judge Ricardo M. Urbina was forced to conjecture last year that the DCI may have "made a poor decision in deciding to disclose the intelligence budget totals in 1997 and 1998." But there is no evidence to support such a conjecture.
Like intelligence budget data and presidential briefing papers, among other things, biographical information on foreign leaders has been shielded by the CIA independent of any threat assessment associated with its disclosure. (The National Security Archive sought such biographical information in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit a few years ago.)
The belated release of the CIA biography of Giuseppe Saragat thus marks a small departure from the Agency's otherwise indiscriminate secrecy.
In a separate dispute, the DCI also vetoed an ISCAP decision to declassify a second CIA document in 2003. An appeal of that veto remains pending at the White House.
