CIA withdraws 55,000 pages from open view

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CIA withdraws 55,000 pages from open view

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday February 22, 2006
The Guardian

The CIA has spent the last seven years covertly sifting through millions of pages of decades-old public archives and removing documents that the agency deems sensitive or embarrassing.

Matthew Aid, a historian and a visiting fellow at the National Archives and Records Administration, stumbled on the secret reclassification programme in the course of his research. He published his findings on the website of a watchdog group, the National Security Archive, saying that the CIA and military intelligence had reviewed millions of pages "at an unknown cost to taxpayers" and withdrawn more than 55,000 pages that had been in the public domain for years.


Documents taken off open shelves included a complaint by a CIA director about the bad publicity the agency had received for failing to predict anti-American riots in Colombia in 1948, and a record of which foreign magazines the state department had ordered on behalf of US intelligence agencies in the same year.

The reclassification began seven years ago as a response to an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 declassifying large quantities of old intelligence, a process in which other agencies released material without CIA approval.

"The CIA has released more than 26m pages to the national archives since 1998 - a huge amount of work by a small number of people. Other agencies also released CIA documents," Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman said. "Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly."