CIA Planning Steps to Open Classified Files

The Central Intelligence Agency will take the first steps toward declassifying hundreds of thousands of its secret files, including those on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the 1954 Guatemala coup, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.

CIA Director Robert M. Gates announced in a speech before the Oklahoma Press Assn. in Tulsa on Friday that all agency documents more than 30 years old will be reviewed for possible declassification and release to the public.

Acknowledging that throughout the Cold War era the agency has been excessively secretive, he said the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union allowed a “real shift on the CIA’s part toward greater openness and a sense of public responsibility.”

He said the agency had moved haltingly in recent years toward more public access, “but all this took place against a backdrop of undifferentiated secrecy, a reluctance to talk at all--much less on the record--about intelligence issues and process. This is going to change.”

While the gesture was applauded by academics, researchers and lawmakers, the process of reviewing and declassifying documents can take years. Furthermore, some skeptics questioned whether the CIA could be objective in deciding which files could safely be released.

In other efforts toward greater openness, Gates also announced that the CIA will make senior officials available for more media interviews and public speeches, send intelligence officers to universities as visiting scholars, eliminate bureaucratic barriers and “compartments” that inhibit the flow of information within the government and begin the process of declassifying all intelligence estimates on the former Soviet Union that are more than 10 years old.

The CIA will also declassify and publish some articles from its internal publication, “Studies in Intelligence,” co-sponsor academic conferences on current and historical issues and publish an annual index of all declassified documents, Gates said.

Of particular interest in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film, “JFK,” has been the issue of declassifying the agency’s Kennedy assassination files. Gates said the agency would cooperate with congressional efforts to declassify all government documents connected with the assassination.

Gates emphasized, however, that the CIA “is and will remain an intelligence organization which acquires secretly information critical to our national security and which conducts legitimately secret activities.”

He said he is obliged by law to protect the agency’s sources and methods from disclosure and that he intends to zealously guard the crown jewels of the government’s espionage apparatus.

“There will be no press room at the CIA,” Gates told his audience of newspaper editors and executives. “We still must be able to keep secrets in order to do our work.”

Gates’ announcement was applauded by researchers, who have struggled for years to pry loose historical CIA documents through lawsuits and the federal Freedom of Information Act. The CIA routinely denied most requests to declassify documents on grounds of national security and protection of sources.

“I think it’s great,” said Thomas S. Blanton, acting director of the National Security Archive, a private group that attempts to document classified government programs and operations. “It’s a big step forward--but when you’re coming from a base line of zero access, anything is a big step forward.”

Blanton said he particularly welcomes Gates’ announcement that the CIA chief will create a 15-person historical review unit to speed the enormous job of reviewing the agency’s files for possible release.

But Blanton said he is concerned about the potential bias of the officers on the review panel. “The question remains, will the culture of secrecy prevail over these signals of openness? The folks who are doing the review are products of the culture, not necessarily born-again access professionals,” Blanton said.

Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also welcomed the Gates initiatives.

“These actions are clearly appropriate in the post-Cold War era,” Boren said in a written statement. “Access to important historical documents about past intelligence programs helps to create a climate in which the wisdom of current operations will be carefully weighed. It will also make an important contribution to scholarship and academic inquiry in the intelligence field.”

In his speech, Gates admitted that until now, the presumption has always been against release of CIA documents. “We must acknowledge that the results of our historical review program have been quite meager--the consequences of low priority, few resources and rigid agency policies and procedures heavily biased toward denial of declassification,” the director said.

Gates’ announcement grew largely out of recommendations from an Openness Task Force that he established shortly after assuming the leadership of the CIA last November. The panel was made up of seven agency officials representing each of the CIA’s directorates--science and technology, intelligence, operations and administration. It was headed by the agency’s director of public affairs.

Agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said Gates adopted many of the task force’s recommendations, rejected several and added some of his own. He would not reveal which of the recommendations were denied and which were Gates’ own initiatives.

“The task force report is classified,” Mansfield said. He also asked that the name of the director of public affairs not be published because that person is leaving the post shortly to assume another position in the agency.

But to prove that the CIA is not invulnerable to irony, Gates opened his speech by noting that “CIA openness” is an oxymoron rivaling “bureaucratic efficiency” or “government frugality.”

Gates said the Cold War had fostered an atmosphere that stifled communication among the government’s security organs and within the CIA itself.

“Indeed, for many years, armed guards and physical barriers separated some parts of CIA from others,” he said.

He added later: “If communication inside CIA and the intelligence community has been a problem, our relationship to the outside world has been worse still. Over the years, CIA’s approach to dealing with the media and the public has been, at best, uneven.”