Public Statement from CIA's Historical Review Panel
July 2017

The Director, Central Intelligence Agency's Historical Review Panel (HRP) was formed in 1995, replacing a panel that was less formally organized and that had met only episodically. Since then, the HRP has met twice a year, with the mandate to:

• Advise the Central Intelligence Agency on systematic and automatic declassification review under the provisions of Executive Order 13526.

• Assist in developing subjects of historical and scholarly interest for the Intelligence Community declassification review program.

• Advise CIA and the Intelligence Community on declassification issues in which the protection of intelligence sources and methods potentially conflicts with mandated declassification priorities.

• Provide guidance for the historical research and writing programs of the CIA History Staff, and when appropriate, review draft products.

• Advise Information Management Services on its mandatory and voluntary declassification review initiatives and the Center for the Study of Intelligence on its academic outreach programs.

• At the request of the Director of Central Intelligence Agency, advise on other matters of relevance to the intelligence and academic communities.

• Advise Information Management Services on archival and records management issues.

The HRP, like the other DCIA panels, is convened by the Director to provide him with confidential advice and assessments. Because the HRP's advice to the DCIA must be completely frank and candid, we are not reporting Panel recommendations. But because this panel's primary concern is the program of declassification and the release of information to the public, the DCIA and the Panel concluded that it should inform the interested public of the subjects and problems that the Panel is discussing.

HRP met June 7-8, 2017, with Frank Costigliola, Robert Jervis, William Inboden, and Thomas Newcomb in attendance. We discussed how to balance the competing demand for resources among the declassification programs, and especially the need to continue to serve the Presidential libraries and the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series which are of such great value to scholars and the public. We discussed FOIA releases and how responsiveness to requests could be improved. There are significant opportunities for targeted releases on issues and cases of great interest and historical importance, but also a continuing need to review and release under the standing 25-year and 50-year programs. As the former and the Reagan-era FRUS volumes encounter email and related electronic documents, reviewing demands increase so much that new technologies are required, and we discussed the progress of the CIA's Next Generation Information Management (NGIM) program. We met with CIA leadership and presented our written recommendations to Director Mike Pompeo, and we will meet again in December, probably including a joint session with the State Department's Historical Advisory Committee.

Professor Tami Biddle
Department of National Security and Strategy
US Army War College

Professor Frank Costigliola
Department of History
University of Connecticut

Professor William Inboden
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin

Professor Robert Jervis (Chair)
Department of Political Science
Columbia University

Professor Thomas Newcomb (retired)
Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice
Heidelberg University

Professor Jeffrey Taliaferro
Department of Political Science
Tufts University

Professor Ruth Wedgwood
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
Johns Hopkins University