William Buchanan; Publisher of Declassified Documents

William Walter Buchanan, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who later made a career as publisher of top-secret declassified government documents, has died of cancer. He was 74.

Buchanan died May 21 at the Hospice of Northern Virginia.

He was the founder of several publishing companies, including Carrollton Press, which, with the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act of 1974, became known for the publication of formerly classified material containing thousands of what had once been official secrets. They included diaries of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald during the period in which he was living in the Soviet Union and the records of CIA experiments with the drug LSD.

Under Buchanan’s direction, Carrollton Press began purchasing, analyzing, summarizing, indexing and then microfilming copies of the declassified documents, which were then offered for sale for the first time in an organized way to libraries, historians and researchers. This would become known as the Declassified Documents Reference System.

“I knew that there was no way for scholars, libraries or ordinary citizens to find out which documents were available. Nobody in the government even knew,” Buchanan told Joseph Persico for a 1978 article in Parade magazine.

During the 1970s, declassified documents published by Carrollton Press included the first public disclosures that Oswald had planned to kill then former Vice President Richard M. Nixon in Dallas months before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and that in 1959 Oswald had slashed his wrists in an apparent suicide attempt after having been denied Soviet citizenship.

Carrollton Press published CIA papers describing a November 1953 gathering in a log cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Md., in which “ . . . it was decided to experiment with the drug LSD and for the members present to administer the drug . . . to ascertain the effect a clandestine application would have on a meeting or a conference.”

Frank Olson, a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, was at the gathering and, unknowingly, took a drink containing a small amount of LSD. Shortly thereafter, he went into a depression and, 10 days later, jumped to his death from a New York hotel room.

Buchanan’s operation also made available State Department papers that contained records of discussions leading to the exchange of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down in a surveillance flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, for Col. Rudolf Abel, the Soviet super spy.

Carrollton Press published FBI records of a plan called “Operation Hoodwink,” which suggested ways to set off a war between the Mafia and the U.S. Communist Party; Army studies on possible production of synthetic marijuana for use as a chemical warfare agent; and government studies suggesting that the Soviet Union probably had experienced several nuclear power accidents in the 1950s.

The declassified documents also suggested a broad range of official discretion in deciding which documents qualified for the “classified” label. Included in the classified category were the likes of Christmas greetings to U.S. troops overseas and an argument about whether dogs trained to guard Vietnamese villages might have ended up on the dinner tables of Southeast Asian mountain tribesmen.

Buchanan, a resident of Washington, was born in Kansas City, Mo. He served in the Army in the final days of World War II and afterward with occupation forces in Germany.

After the war, he graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, then in 1950 joined the CIA. He was an intelligence officer for seven years, then worked for a year as a consultant in Tehran.

Later, he did management consulting in Washington and New York. In 1967, he founded Carrollton Press in Washington, initially as a publisher of indexes to scholarly journals and government documents.

Survivors include his wife, Marilyn Woodbury Buchanan of Washington; and three children: William Scott of Arlington, Va.; Stephen Woodbury of Albuquerque; and Patricia Lyn Buchanan of Washington.