CIA MAKING U.S. DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

A 'TARGET OF SCORN,' HISTORIANS SAY

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new report to the U.S. State Department concludes that blame for omissions or inaccuracies in the department's official histories of U.S. foreign policy must be "laid at the doorstep of the intelligence community, primarily the Central Intelligence Agency."

As a former historian for the CIA, Indiana University Assistant Professor Nick Cullather agrees that the agency has all but refused to comply with the Presidential Executive Order on Declassification, issued by the Clinton administration. The law states that all federal agencies that play a role in developing and carrying out American foreign policy must release at least 15 percent of their secret documents that are more than 25 years old.

"The CIA is nowhere near in compliance with the law," said Cullather, who is also associate editor of the Journal of American History. "They grab headlines by releasing classified materials whenever they're under attack, thereby creating the illusion among the public that they are being very open. In fact, they've released only a tiny fraction of the secret documents that they are required by law to release."

Despite the CIA's pledge of a new "openness," the report issued by a panel of government-appointed historians to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright charges that delays and resistance by the agency in the declassification of information on its covert activities is making United States diplomatic history "the target of ridicule and scorn."

The report was produced by the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, which evaluates the State Department's multi-volume series Foreign Relations of the United States and determines whether, in fact, an accurate and complete historical record is being presented. The committee has existed in its present form since the early 1990s. The previous incarnation of the committee had resigned en masse after the State Department published an official history of U.S.-Iranian relations that made no mention of well-known covert activity by the CIA in Iran during the 1950s.

The reorganized committee, chaired by Warren Kimball, a history professor at Rutgers University, operates with broader powers and a greater degree of legislatively-mandated cooperation, yet it has found that while progress has been made in obtaining declassification authorization from most agencies, the CIA is a notorious exception.

"State Department historians get excellent cooperation from most agenices," Kimball said. "Some agencies have been very slow because they weren't used to the process, but we're pretty well past that. The CIA, however -- while they respond within the time limits -- doesn't declassify very much at all."

The advisory committee report states that the CIA has released only partial information on two of 11 covert operations it has admitted conducting during the Cold War, those impacting British Guiana and Guatemala.

"Historians from the state department and, in many cases, from the committee I chair have looked at the material that is being denied, and it is our opinion that much, if not all, of that material can be published without jeopardizing national security sources or methods," Kimball said.

Cullather, who wrote the Guatemala report, believes that the recent release of his year-long examination of the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala was motivated more by a desire to deflect public criticism than to comply with the law on declassification.

A few weeks prior to the release of Cullather's report, an article critical of the CIA's Historical Review Panel appeared in the May 1997 newsletter of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The panel was created by the CIA as part of a legislative deal that exempted many of its records from the Freedom of Information Act.

Written by George Herring, a history professor at University of Kentucky and a former member of the Historical Review Panel, the OAH article charged that the panel was nothing more than public relations window dressing for the CIA. Herring, who resigned from the panel in 1996 after serving six years, reported that the panel's recommendations were routinely ignored, and that it had not even met between August 1990 and June 1994. In fairness, Herring felt that some progress had been made, but that the CIA's efforts fell far short of the "openness" promised by CIA directors Robert Gates and James Woolsey.

"Covert operations and the CIA were such a vital part of foreign policy in the '50s and '60s that if they're omitted from historical accounts, you're not getting the whole picture," Herring said.

The OAH article was followed up on by journalist Tim Weiner in a New York Times article. Two days later, Cullather received a phone call from a former colleague at the CIA informing him that his 116-page report was among the 1,400 pages of documents being declassified on covert operations in Guatemala during the 1950s.

"It was another example of a small, highly selective and well-publicized release," Cullather said. "In fact, when I asked my colleague, 'Can you send me a copy of what you're releasing?' he said, 'Oh, the press release is going out right now.'"

Cullather's report was less than flattering to the agency and contradicted what was, for years, mythologized as a model in the use of covert operations in foreign policy. For its part, the CIA was never able to learn from its own secret history and made the same mistakes in future operations, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

"This is in Eisenhower's memoirs. It's in John Foster Dulles' memoirs. It's been written about by some of the operatives that worked on it. All of them talk about it as this almost flawless, smoothly running, well-planned and executed coup," Cullather said. "But in reality it was on the point of blowing up at any second throughout the life of the operation. What eventually became the operation was whatever succeeded. There were dozens of different operations that failed, and the ones that succeeded very nearly failed. It was thoroughly penetrated by Guatemalan spies who knew exactly what was going on at all times."

The CIA's culture of secrecy, and the disregard for historical records it breeds, has not only allowed such problem-plagued operations to pass as triumphs, it has made it difficult for the agency to defend itself against allegations of corruption.

"The myths become deep-rooted and difficult to challenge, as the CIA itself found when the series of articles came out in the San Jose Mercury-News about drug dealing in Los Angeles and ties to CIA operatives. Despite all of their denials, they could not credibly contend that it didn't happen, because no one would believe them," Cullather said.

Secrecy is a constant problem for historians working on accounts of the federal government's activities. Secrecy pervades the military, the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission and virtually every other federal agency. "But the CIA is really unique in the way it resists any attempts to declassify any of its documents," Cullather said

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Another problem, Cullather said, is that the CIA is disorganized in its method of selecting which documents should be destroyed. "If they had a policy on document destruction, you could work to change it," he noted. "But right now, the documents are being destroyed carelessly."

For more information, contact Jeff Austin, Office of Communications and Marketing, 812-855-0084 or 812-855-3911, jeaustin@indiana.edu