The report, conducted by the department's inspector general and completed last September, notes State is "generally considered by cognizant authorities" like the Information Security Oversight Office to have "one of the best -- if not the best -- declassification programs in the federal government."
Another evaluator of State's progress, the State Department Historical Advisory Committee, included similar praise in a 1997 report lauding the department for setting "a standard for systematic declassification review of the archival records that is, so far, the best in the government."
Other agencies with huge repositories of classified documents subject to review under the 1995 executive order have not been so successful in their declassification programs, according to critics and authorities on secrecy in government. Some in government have tried to undermine the order on the grounds that it could damage national security.
But according to the State Department inspector general, the department's performance in declassifying documents under the terms of the EO "demonstrates that the declassification provisions of the [executive order] are obtainable."
At the time of the IG report's release, the State Department had released approximately 97 percent of the 48.7 million pages reviewed so far, a report summary states. "They seem to be doing an exceptionally good job," says Steve Aftergood, director of the government secrecy project for the Federation of American Scientists.
The executive order, No. 12958, was issued in April 1995. It mandates that "records over 25 years old will be presumed declassified by April 17, 2000 unless an agency acts to keep them classified based on exemptions provided in the Order," the IG report explains. "Prior to the Order there were no requirements for the automatic declassification of older information."
The tenets of the EO, however, have come under fire in recent months. Energy Department concerns over the possibility that nuclear weapons data might inadvertently be declassified and released led to the passage of an amendment to the 1999 Defense Authorization Act calling for a new plan to overcome those concerns. Critics of government secrecy decried the law and charged that the amendment could force all government declassification efforts to grind to a halt while a new structure was ironed out. The nuclear secrets protection plan was recently delivered to Congress (Inside the Pentagon, Feb. 11, p3).
According to a leading authority on State Department and government declassification procedures, the passage of the so-called Kyl amendment, named for Arizona Sen. John Kyl (R), "could have paralyzed the entire federal government's declassification effort -- even the successful State Department program," stated historian Warren Kimball, then the chair of the advisory committee on historical diplomatic documentation, in his March 2 annual report for fiscal year 1998.
Kimball, who has since stepped down as chairman but continues to serve on the committee, added in his report that the "good efforts of the archivist of the United States and the leadership in the Department of Energy will ensure that a sensible balance between security and openness is maintained."
However, Kimball told Inside the Pentagon this week that he and other historians interested in opening up government records have in recent weeks grown less optimistic over the possibility that the effect of the new guidelines for the declassification of restricted data and formerly restricted data might be mitigated.
Nonetheless, Kimball believes the IG's assertion that State's declassification successes show the executive order's goals are obtainable.
"I firmly do think that for all of the faults . . . the State Department performance has demonstrated that the executive order is not a bridge too far. It sets achievable goals," he said.
Aftergood, an advocate of less government secrecy, believes the State Department IG report and the annual report of the historical advisory committee point to some positive trends in declassification. However, he and others see a number of factors suggesting those trends are coming to an end and may even be on the verge of reversal.
"I'm worried that this may be the tail end of a period of openness" sparked by the executive order, he says, citing a host of recent events including the passage of the Kyl amendment. Aftergood also notes the Energy Department is reviewing huge amounts of previously declassified documents at the National Archives to determine if they include nuclear weapons data. Further, he points to the Defense Department's decision last year to scrub all of its Internet sites for unclassified information that might be construed as sensitive when combined with other information, and the U.S. Space Command's more recent decision to restrict public access to satellite tracking data that has long been made available to a wide community of users (see related story).
Aftergood, who has successfully sued the government for the release of the total budget for U.S. intelligence activities, also said that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet has moved to restrict not only the release of the intelligence budget request for fiscal year 1999, but also the annual appropriation number.
"Now he's saying 'we're not going to give you what we gave you last year," says Aftergood, decrying a "growing stinginess" on the part of government agencies to release information. "These [factors] represent a striking reversal of the openness policies of the past," he adds.
Kimball agrees that the trend toward less government secrecy has become apparent in recent months; some "well-meaning zealots" within the government, he believes, are "carrying their concerns to the point of ludicrousness" and retarding the declassification process.
Although the State Department gets high marks from critics and its own inspector general for its declassification progress, the IG report includes several recommendations for improving the process. One recommendation involves "identifying CIA equities," which has become one of the "major activities" of the State Department's team of declassifiers.
This refers to those documents that must be referred to other agencies -- namely, the CIA -- because they include information created by those agencies. The process, the IG notes, is burdensome because "documents must be marked, copied, packaged and securely transported; this is repeated for every record that contains another agency's equities, and in many cases the records contain multiple agencies' equities." There are also no deadlines for these agencies to respond to these transfers.
While the State Department has "released the vast majority of its historical classified records," the IG believes "that even more could be declassified."
"OIG concluded that about half of the documents referred to CIA could be routinely declassified and that some of the documents the department has exempted do not clearly pose a danger to national security if they were released."
An IG review of some of these documents, which were exempted or referred to the CIA because of the rules on other agencies' equities, "indicates the intelligence community tends to resist extensive declassification because of the opinion that information -- even previously acknowledged or generally known through unclassified sources -- might be useful to adversaries intent on countering U.S. intelligence operations or discourage cooperation in future operations."
About half of the one million pages of documents referred by State to CIA were done so because the phrase "controlled American source" or its acronym, CAS, were contained in the document, or because "the document contained a routing slip that reference an organizational entity at a U.S. mission that might be construed as an intelligence organization under cover."
According to Kimball's advisory committee, such references "are usually quite innocuous and unclassified," an assessment with which the IG agrees. "If the department and CIA were to agree that such references need not be grounds for exemption the Department could immediately start to declassify thousands of additional documents and significantly reduce the time and cost required searching through Department records for such CIA references; marking the documents; and securely forwarding the documents."
The State Department, however, takes issue with these conclusions. In its response to the report, State says the department is engaged "virtually on a daily basis with CIA" to iron out declassification issues, and the historical advisory "has become deeply involved."
"CIA is increasingly sensitive about public criticism of its declassification record and some modest progress is being made," the response states. "Our own criticism of CIA, however, must remain objective and fair if further progress is to be achieved. It is both unfair and inaccurate to publish the report's sweeping generalization that half the one million pages of documents referred to CIA are basically innocuous and could be released with a State-CIA agreement on CIA acronyms. This conjecture seems based more on anecdotal evidence than rigorous analysis."