- SOMEWHERE NEAR DULLES AIRPORT -- In a nondescript office building in an undisclosed
Virginia suburb, the Central Intelligence Agency is sifting through millions
of its old secrets -- one page at a time.
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- Joe Ozefovich, a 33-year CIA veteran,
reviews a 1956 folder on the ultra-secret U-2 spy plane. One memo from
the project's "cover officer," charged with keeping the program
secret, rejects a proposal to have the highflying jet set a world altitude
record. "We could establish a record," the officer concedes --
but not without letting everyone know what the spy plane, officially just
a weather aircraft, was really capable of.
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- "Here was someone who wanted to
wave our flag," says Mr. Ozefovich wistfully. "But cover and
security had to prevail."
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- Protecting Sources
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- Forty years later, the CIA is just as
reluctant to give up its secrets -- except it has no choice. Under a White
House executive order, by April 17, 2000, the CIA and every other U.S.
government agency must release every classified document in its archives
that is more than 25 years old, unless the information falls into nine
supposedly narrow exemptions, including protecting human intelligence sources,
current war plans, weapons technology and sensitive diplomatic relations.
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- The CIA's task is especially daunting:
It has an estimated 65 million pages of secrets at least 25 years old.
And while some agencies have judged whole rooms full of files too old or
too arcane to worry about, the CIA has decided to "redact" every
page, editing out sensitive information line by line.
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- To pull it off, the agency has set up
a declassification factory -- the address is secret -- here in northern
Virginia. Staffers open every archive box, scan each page into computers
and read every document, not once but three times, to make sure nothing
dangerous slips by. Redactors, like Mr. Ozefovich, make their cuts according
to a 44-page declassification guide -- its contents also classified --
excising names of CIA employees, descriptions of clandestine methods, and
almost every overseas CIA location, including the obvious ones like Moscow
and Beijing. If the CIA confirmed them, "it would become an undeniable,
uncontestable fact," explains project director Rich Warshaw.
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- The work is expensive: $2.50 a page just
in labor costs. And it is so time-consuming that Mr. Warshaw concedes they
will be lucky to have a third of their workload, about 20 million pages,
done by the deadline. Mr. Warshaw, nevertheless, defends the process. "It's
the only way to make sure that security is protected and the public gets
to see as many documents as possible," he says.
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- A Bug in the Palace
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- Some are skeptical. The National Archive's
Steven Garfinkle, who oversees declassification governmentwide, worries
that CIA definitions of damaging information may be too vigilant. Twenty-five
years, he agrees, is too early to reveal the name of a CIA source or overseas
agent. "The families of sources could be searched out and tortured,"
he says. But he is less certain about the agency's insistence that spycraft
methods also need to be as fiercely protected. "Revealing that in
1955 they bugged the Patagonian presidential palace?" he asks hypothetically.
"Much of it isn't very subtle or unusual."
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- Others are more worried about what the
CIA has chosen not to review. The agency is asking that another 106 million
pages, nearly all from the covert-action Directorate of Operations, be
automatically exempt to protect overseas sources and methods. The costs
for holding back so much information are real, says Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, the New York Democrat who crusades against what he calls excessive
government secrecy. "We don't know our history very well," he
argues. "You also don't correct your mistakes because nobody knows
you made them."
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- For all that, nearly everyone here seems
enchanted with the secrets they do get to see. Pointing to steel cages
stacked with archive boxes, chief of operations Kirk Lubbes jokes that
they come from the " 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' warehouse," Hollywood's
imagined repository for all the wonders the public isn't ready to know.
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- What arrives one morning looks a lot
less glamorous. A box marked "phone files" includes carbon flimsies
of a January 1954 memo announcing changes in CIA telephone prefixes; another
sheet lists overseas phone charges for a four-week period.
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- But the work in an adjoining room would
make a historian's juices run. A microfilm scanner clicks off pages of
1945 files of the OSS, the CIA's World War II predecessor, on de-Nazification
efforts in occupied Germany. A few feet away, a young woman feeds 1958
Soviet military railroad maps into a computer scanner.
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- For the factory's redactors -- all 55
are retired CIA veterans hired for this job -- the work is an exercise
in ambivalence, a daily struggle between their training never to give up
secrets and a more natural human desire to want to tell their stories.
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- "My whole career was based on the
belief that letting out information could get people killed," says
Armand Vallieres, 76, an overseas operative who began with the OSS in China
in 1944. "After I got used to it, I saw that this was history and
it showed we had a done a good job."
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- Salacious Secrets
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- The work has given Betty Grim even more:
a peek at the office goings-on while she served as secretary to 1960s-era
CIA director John McCone. Ms. Grim has been redacting the daily work diaries
of Mr. McCone's top administrator, Col. Lawrence K. "Red" White.
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- Some of it, she says, can be downright
salacious. She has recently been caught up in the saga of a CIA manager
Col. White fired after the official had a questionable liaison with an
agency secretary. "We've been reading some of it aloud to our team,"
she says. "But we haven't found out yet whether she got pregnant."
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- The White diaries also give a fascinating
window on the political times and challenges of managing the CIA's growing
bureaucracy. Pages from the spring and summer of 1964 note a half-dozen
meetings on how the agency should respond to the newly minted civil-rights
law. "The director's ... opinion [was] we should continue our passive
[minority hiring] program, make sure we defend ourselves against any allegations
of discrimination but avoid any drive to place select persons in key positions
so they would be noticed."
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- The diaries also include calls to beef
up administrative support for U.S. intelligence efforts in Vietnam, and
growing frustrations over press leaks -- including one tantalizing reference
to a reporter from the now-defunct Washington Star who, judging from the
deletions, may also have been on the agency's payroll.
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- Playing the Numbers
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- For Gerry Helfenstein, who spent most
of his career as an intelligence analyst, the work gives him a chance to
re-examine the agency's, and his own, intellectual triumphs and failures.
A July 1972 memo prepared for Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser,
describes the "Status of Communist Forces" in South Vietnam as
"48% ineffective." The CIA's view of the war "was always
like the rest of the nation," explains Mr. Helfenstein. "It started
out somewhat realistic, and then the fog of war and politics took over."
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- For nearly all the veterans, the work
raises questions about how secrets are made and kept. Working on the U-2
plane files, Mr. Ozefovich has been patiently excising the names of commercial
contractors who worked on the project, "even though whole books have
been written on the subject," he says. Explains Mr. Warshaw: "We
have to live with a lot of ambiguities." Almost all redactors complain
about the amount of useless paper that collects in classified files. One
favorite is a 136-page series of weekly reports from the agency's "forms
branch" that prints bureaucratic forms.
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- Pat Bogen, a retired secretary working
as an indexer at the factory, says she knows how all ''the junk'' got there.
Every time her boss would ask her to clean out his safe drawers, ''I didn't
feel I could decide what should be kept and what to dump. So I'd put it
all in a box and ship it off to the archives,'' she says. ''Now it's come
back to haunt me.'
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