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National Archives Pact Let CIA Withdraw Public Documents    [

    FBI Seeks Access to Dead Columnist's Papers
    By Scott Shane
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 19 April 2006

    Washington - The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.

    Mr. Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.

    Mr. Anderson's son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.

    "It's my father's legacy," said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."

    The F.B.I. says the dispute over the papers, which await cataloging at George Washington University here, is a simple matter of law.

    "It's been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents," said Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman.

    "Under the law," Mr. Carter said, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government."

    The standoff, which appears to have begun with an F.B.I. effort to find evidence for the criminal case against two pro-Israel lobbyists, has quickly hardened into a new test of the Bush administration's protection of government secrets and journalists' ability to report on them.

    F.B.I. agents are investigating several leaks of classified information, including details of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and the secret overseas jails for terror suspects run by the C.I.A.

    In addition, the two lobbyists, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, face trial next month for receiving classified information, in a case criticized by civil liberties advocates as criminalizing the routine exchange of inside information.

    The National Archives recently suspended a program in which intelligence agencies had pulled thousands of historical documents from public access on the ground that they should still be classified.

    But the F.B.I.'s quest for secret material leaked years ago to a now-dead journalist, first reported Tuesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems unprecedented, said several people with long experience in First Amendment law.

    "I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists."

    The George Washington University librarian, Jack Siggins, said the university strongly objected to the F.B.I.'s removing anything from the Anderson archive.

    "We certainly don't want anyone going through this material, let alone the F.B.I., if they're going to pull documents out," Mr. Siggins said. "We think Jack Anderson represents something important in American culture - answers to the question, How does our government work?"

    Mr. Anderson was hired as a reporter in 1947 by Drew Pearson, who bequeathed to him a popular column called Washington Merry-Go-Round.

    Mr. Anderson developed Parkinson's disease and did little reporting for the column in the 15 years before his death in December at 83, said Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington, who is writing a book about him.

    His files were stored for years at Brigham Young University before being transferred to George Washington at Mr. Anderson's request last year, but the F.B.I. apparently made no effort to search them.

    "They waited until he was dead," Kevin Anderson said. He said F.B.I. agents first approached his mother, Olivia, 79, early this year.

    "They talked about the Aipac case and that they thought Dad had some classified documents and they wanted to take fingerprints from them" to identify possible sources, he recalled. "But they said they wanted to look at all 200 boxes and if they found anything classified they'd be duty-bound to take them."

    Both Kevin Anderson and Mr. Feldstein, the journalism professor, said they did not think the columnist ever wrote about Aipac, and his health was too impaired to have reported on the group in recent years.

    Mr. Anderson said he thought the Aipac case was a pretext for a broader search, a conclusion shared by others, including Thomas S. Blanton, who oversees the National Security Archive, a collection of historic documents at George Washington.

    "Recovery of leaked C.I.A. and White House documents that Jack Anderson got back in the 70's has been on the F.B.I.'s wanted list for decades," Mr. Blanton said.

    Jack Anderson had a well-documented feud with the F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose trash he once searched and who once described the columnist as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."

    Mr. Carter of the F.B.I. declined to comment on any connection to the Aipac case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.

    Mr. Feldstein, whose book, "Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture" is to be published next year, said he found it "a little daunting" when F.B.I. agents came to his house last month to ask about the Anderson documents. He found that they knew little about the columnist and his work.

    Asked what the columnist might make of the F.B.I.'s actions, Mr. Feldstein said, "He'd be thunderously outraged, and privately bemused by the ineptness of his old adversaries."

 

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    National Archives Pact Let CIA Withdraw Public Documents
    By Scott Shane
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 18 April 2006

    Washington - The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday.

    Mr. Weinstein, who began work as archivist of the United States last year, said he learned of the agreement with the C.I.A. on Thursday and was putting a stop to such secret reclassification arrangements, which he described as incompatible with the mission of the archives.

    Like a similar 2002 agreement with the Air Force that was made public last week, the C.I.A. arrangement required that archives employees not reveal to researchers why documents they requested were being withheld.

    The disclosure of the secret agreements provides at least a partial explanation for the removal since 1999 of more than 55,000 pages of historical documents from access to researchers at the archives. The removal of documents, including many dating to the 1950's, was discovered by a group of historians this year and reported by The New York Times in February.

    The reclassification program has drawn protests from many historians and several members of Congress, notably Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who held a hearing on the program last month.

    The National Archives, with facilities in College Park, Md., at the presidential libraries and in other locations, are the repository of most official government documents and a major resource for historians.

    "Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being," Mr. Weinstein said in a statement. "Our focus is on the preservation of records and ensuring their availability to the American public, while at the same time fulfilling the people's expectation that we will properly safeguard the classified records entrusted to our custody."

    In a brief interview, Mr. Weinstein said he was particularly disturbed that the archives had agreed not to tell researchers why documents were unavailable. The C.I.A. agreement said archives employees would "not attribute to C.I.A. any part of the review or the withholding of documents." In the agreement with the Air Force, archives officials said they would "not disclose the true reason for the presence" of Air Force personnel at the archives.

    Mr. Weinstein said he would not permit such agreements in the future. If the withdrawal of previously declassified documents becomes necessary, he said, it will be conducted "with transparency," including disclosure of the number of documents removed.

    Asked about Mr. Weinstein's statement, Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said, "Working very closely over the years with the National Archives, C.I.A.'s goal has been to ensure the greatest possible public access to material that has been properly declassified."

    C.I.A. officials have said the reclassification work was necessary because other agencies, including the State Department, released material about intelligence activities without giving the agency a chance to review it.

    First Lt. Christy A. Stravolo, an Air Force spokeswoman, said that any decisions on documents that had been "put back into protective custody" complied with federal guidelines. "The Air Force Declassification Office has a very thorough process for review, and there are no shortcuts so as to protect national security," Lieutenant Stravolo said.

    Thomas S. Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive at George Washington University, praised Mr. Weinstein's actions.

    "He's doing the right thing, no more secret agreements to classify open files," said Mr. Blanton, whose group helped uncover the reclassification program. "The National Archives aided and abetted a covert operation to lie to researchers and white-out history."

    Matthew M. Aid, a Washington historian who discovered in December that documents he obtained years ago had been removed from open shelves, said he was "saddened" by the revelation that archives officials had agreed to hide the reclassification program. "I still don't understand why this all had to be done in secret," Mr. Aid said.

    John W. Carlin, Mr. Weinstein's predecessor as head of the archives from 1995 to 2005, said in a statement that he knew nothing about the reclassification program and was "shocked" to learn the contents of the secret agreements signed when he was in office.

    Michael J. Kurtz, the assistant archivist, who signed both agreements, could not be reached for comment last night. Mr. Weinstein said Mr. Kurtz had told him that he briefed Mr. Carlin about the agreements, but that he understood if Mr. Carlin did not recall being told of the reclassification effort.