Mike Gravel was Fearless

June 28, 2021– A few words for today. The papers carry word of the passage of former Alaska senator Mike Gravell. He played a key role in bringing to light the Pentagon Papers, the 50th anniversary of the leak of which we’ve recently been celebrating. For decades the most authoritative version of the Pentagon Papers was one published by Boston’s Beacon Press in 1972. That edition was made possible by Gravel, who used his post as chairman of a Senate subcommittee on buildings and grounds to call a hearing which no one attended, and then use the fact of being in session to read into the record the huge leaked study. Beacon Press used the resulting version in the Congressional Record as the basis for its four volume publication.

Much more recently Senator Gravel undertook an initiative for which he should also be remembered. This was to create a system for direct voting. He thought of this at first as a mechanism to pass laws, but think how valuable it would have been in last year’s presidential election. No tinkering with state voting regulations or electoral votes, no delay for mail-in or other ballots. In particular, no way to dispute the outcome of the election. Voters go up or down on buttons connected to their televisions, telephones or other electronic devices. That’s it. Vote cast. The outcome would be the outcome.

Mike Gravel could think outside the box. We need more like him.

Score a Point for Openness

June 17, 2017–Every so often the public gets to crow about something that is a real advance for transparency and openness in government. This is especially welcome during these days when plots, counterplots, and maneuvers swirl around us relying upon secrecy. Today’s point concerns the State Department documentary records series called the Foreign Relations of the United States. This series of bound volumes and, more recently, electronic versions, constitutes the official record of American diplomacy. You can find sets of it at good libraries. Multiple volumes focus on each region of the world, and on some global topics, for each American president. Kudos to the State Department Historian, his staff, the Historical Advisory Panel, and declassification authorities at the State Department and the CIA.

This story concerns President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Iran. Back in the first year of Ike’s presidency (1953), he ordered a CIA covert operation that overthrew the legally-installed prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1989 the State Department published a FRUS volume that pretended there was no CIA role in the fall of the Iranian leader–a populist by the way. By that time, however, the spooks’ covert operation had become pretty widely known–for example I had written of it at some length in my book, first published in 1986, called Presidents’ Secret Warsand the FRUS volume was met by derision.

A panel of historians advises the State Department on maintaining the FRUS as our authoritative record. The panel not only guffawed at the volume, it told the Historical Office to redo its sums and produce a new FRUS volume properly recounting the story. When State demurred, the historians lobbied Congress, with the eventual result that today it is a matter of statute that the FRUS series must reflect the activities of all U.S. agencies and must be truly “authoritative,” starting with a new Iran 1953 volume.

Eventually the Iran volume would be supplemented by one, just as long, which contained the hidden history. That volume went into declassification review in the late 1990s. There it sat. And sat. And sat. And sat. Mind you, this was at a time when President Bill Clinton had instituted secrecy rules providing that, with narrow exceptions, all documents older that 25 years should immediately be declassified. Iran 1953 was already past that. As the FRUS volume languished, an internal history of the CIA operation leaked to the public. Later a similar account was declassified. From time to time historians, including my colleague Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive, advocated for release of the FRUS. The State Department actually did release two other FRUS volumes on CIA covert operations–on Guatemala in 1954 and on the Congo in the 1960, plus a dual-volume on Cuba which covered the Bay of Pigs and more–while the Iran records sat in the secret vault. Until two days ago, June 15, 2017. The Iran volume has finally emerged!

A look at the final product shows that there’s work still to be done. The FRUS volume has 10 CIA documents that were wholly deleted, 38 which contain deletions of more than a paragraph, and 80 that have lesser redactions. This amounts to a large percentage of the material that covers the actual CIA coup. More to the point, it includes the operative portions of the project planning papers, the detail of CIA monthly reports, and much more. The new FRUS volume is a great advance over what we had before, but the redactions make it plain the CIA believes it can still live in a world of secrecy.

Working at the National Security Archive

The National Security Archive, where I’m a senior fellow, is an advocate for openness and government accountability. I’ve been with the Archive in an active role for more than fifteen years and before that I was an ally. The Archive began in the mid-1980s with donations of documents from a number of scholars and journalists, including me. One day I’ll post the story of its creation. Visit the National Security Archive website and see the breadth of our coverage.

We work on secrecy issues in two ways. The first is to support measures to simplify and streamline the government regulations that apply to the declassification of official records. The other is to apply for the release of specific records which we make available to anyone who wants to use them.

The Archive makes records available in several ways, including “Electronic Briefing Books” (EBBs) which contain small selections of declassified documents that are introduced and contextualized by analysts like me. Those are posted directly on the Archive’s website and can be accessed at any time. Another is a set of larger document collections, often thousands of documents at a time. The third is what we call the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) which contain most of our holdings in an electronic format that is machine-searchable. These two are subscription services which are available at many university libraries and other institutions. Researchers can also come to the Archive’s offices and consult our collections directly, including materials not available on DNSA, among them several hundred donations of materials from individuals. Beyond that the Archive has also provided U.S. documents and expert advice to groups seeking to institute freedom of information procedures in their countries, and to justice officials in foreign countries seeking U.S. information for their enforcement of human rights statutes.

At the Archive I currently focus on the Central Intelligence Agency and on Vietnam, both areas where I direct documentation projects. In the past I also functioned as deputy director of our Iraq project and I did work on Afghanistan. I compiled the Archive’s two sets on Vietnam, and now am engaged in creating an even larger collection on intelligence covert operations, the first set of which was released in the spring of 2013, and the second in the spring of 2015. I’ve also done a number of our Electronic Briefing Books. Those can be found and downloaded from the Archive’s website. I won’t mention all the EBBs I’ve created, but the ones I talk about below are some of my “greatest hits.” Some of the Archive’s “great issues” are mentioned as well. I also discuss my book Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War

*Kennedy and Cuba after the Bay of Pigs: If anything, following the massive failure of CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy redoubled his efforts to dispose of Fidel Castro. This briefing book shows documents from CIA Set III that illustrate Operation MONGOOSE, the continuing covert operation against Cuba. It displays Kennedy’s and CIA’s determination to unseat the Cuban leader (EBB-687, “Kennedy and Cuba: Operation MONGOOSE,” October 3, 2019).

*The High Command of the Secret War: Who gives the CIA its marching orders? There is a “special group,” a high-level committee of agencies across the government. This has had different names and some changes of function over the years, and this EBB discusses the practice during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. The briefing book illustrates some of the contents of CIA Set III, which I discuss below. This will be one of a series that shines more light on the Set III revelations. The story appears with some eye-opening documents in EBB-667 (“Understanding the CIA: How Covert (and Overt) Operations were Proposed and Approved during the Cold War,” March 4, 2019″).

*William Barr, Dick Cheney and the CIA Reforms that Never Happened: One of the scandalous revelations of the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s was that the CIA had failed to notify Congress of its covert operations, as required by law, and had even confected “notifications” to cover operations that had already happened (so-called “retroactive notifications”). It was widely agreed among all political sides that these notification rules needed to be tightened. In a process that extended from 1987 through 1992 U.S. officials who included William Barr, John Bolton, and Richard Cheney teamed up to knock down the reform. Their efforts led to the only rejection of an intelligence annual budget in history, as well as an early articulation of the theory of the “unitary presidency.” Read the story, with documents, in EBB – 659 (“What the CIA Tells Congress or Doesn’t) About Covert Operations,” February 7, 2019.

*CIA Covert Operations, Kennedy to Nixon, 1961-1974: The CIA document set goes into its Set III, which ProQuest released on June 20, 2018. This covers activities during an important phase of the Cold War, and brings the content of the CIA sets overall to roughly 6,000 documents, potentially revolutionizing research into the history of United States intelligence. The new release contains major document subsets on CIA’s actions aimed at Fidel Castro, on Che in Bolivia, on the CIA against Cheddi Jagan, Indonesia, Kurdistan, and more. The set contains John McCone’s personal records of his meetings with presidents Kennedy and Johnson: minutes of directors’ staff meetings, Special Group 5412 and 303 Committee meetings, and other events; CIA management reviews of covert operations, monthly reports for CIA stations in Miami and Mexico City, regulations governing the Directorate of Plans, official histories, including the CIA official biographies of John A. McCone and Richard McG Helms, and much, much more.

*Nomination of Gina Haspel as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency: In the spring of 2018 President Donald Trump nominated Ms Gina Haspel to be the next CIA chief. Haspel, then already serving as deputy, had a major role in the agency’s black sites and torture program during the decade of the “00s.” Agency officials had worked to keep that program in the shadows, and Haspel went into her Senate nomination hearings thinking she could skirt the issue. The Archive made a concerted effort to illuminate, rather than cover up, the controversial torture activities. We filed suit for declassification of the CIA message traffic (“National Security Archive Sues CIA for Gina Haspel Torture Cables,” April 27, 2018), posted an electronic briefing book on the overall CIA interrogation program (EBB-626 “The CIA Black Sites Program and the Gina Haspel Nomination,” May 9, 2018, with Wendy Valdes and Thomas Blanton), and another one more narrowly focused on Haspel’s particular role (EBB-625 “Gina Haspel’s CIA Torture File,” April 26, 2018 with Thomas Blanton). The Archive also put up a Special Exhibit of the CIA Inspector General’s investigation of the torture program, comparing the version declassified in 2016 with those released in 2009 and 2008. See for yourself the words the CIA tried to keep secret–nearly everything about its larger role in the torture and administration of it.

*Congress has Its Own Capability to Declassify Documents: During 1975, the “Year of Intelligence,” Gerald Ford’s White House faced off against the congressional investigators on the provision of documents and on the release of the resulting investigative reports. The climax came when Ford refused material to the House Select Committee on Intelligence (HSC) chaired by New York Representative Otis G. Pike, who responded by issuing subpoenas. Both White House and CIA lawyers advised President Ford that the HSC would win in court–its subpoenas were valid and executable. Henry Kissinger demanded Ford reject them and trigger a constitutional crisis. Mr. Ford made a compromise. The rules of the eventual House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) reflect this episode by providing a mechanism for the House committee to release information to the public. The Senate intelligence committee has a similar mechanism for declassification (EBB 596, “The White House, the CIA, and the Pike Committee, June 2, 2017).

*Petition to Unseal 1942 Grand Jury Proceedings: National Security Archive joined with the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press to support an initiative to open the secret records of the grand jury the U.S. convened in 1942 in an attempt to obtain an indictment of the Chicago Tribune newspaper for an article it had published about the Battle of Midway in the Pacific theater of World War II. The backstory is that the Tribune’s article mentioned the names of Japanese aircraft carriers sunk at the battle, which the U.S. knew due to breaking enemy naval codes. The U.S. government did not understand at first that the same information had been incorporated into an information sheet posted on many U.S. Navy ships, from which a Tribune reporter copied it. The Justice Department dropped the case once authorities realized that a prosecution of the newspaper would alert the Japanese to the fact their codes were being read. These grand jury proceedings have been secret ever since. In Carlson et. al. v U.S. the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sued to open the proceeding material. The National Security Archive joined the petition to argue the substance of the issue that the Grand Jury proceedings no longer required the protection of secrecy and that, conversely, the contents would be of value to history.

*Cheney Suppresses CIA Assassination Report: Back in 1975, known as the “Year of Intelligence” for all the investigations of the security services that occurred, one had been chaired by the Vice-President of the United States, Nelson A. Rockefeller. While the Rockefeller Commission inquiry was underway, President Gerald R. Ford revealed the CIA had been involved in plotting assassinations. The Rockefeller investigation had to be widened to include the assassination issue, but once its report had been completed, Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited it. Cheney’s edit inserted recommendations the commission had not approved, dropped ones they had, and changed the Rockefeller Commission presentation. One of Cheney’s biggest edits was to drop the commission’s entire assassinations report. The reason that only the Church Committee’s study of CIA assassination plotting is known is that the one assembled by the Rockefeller commission was suppressed in this way. Electronic Briefing Book 543, on February 29, 2016, includes the White House-edited text of the Rockefeller report, the suppressed assassinations report, commentary from commission staff warning against this action, and more.

*President’s Daily Briefs: The Archive marched in the forefront of efforts to obtain the declassification of the President’s Daily Briefs, the series of intelligence reports produced especially for presidents to see. They serve to index the concerns of America’s top leaders. In 2004 the Archive teamed with scholar Larry Berman to file suit for declassification after the CIA denied Berman a couple of these reports with the (silly) argument that the reports–which embody intelligence analyses–were about “sources and methods.” Remarkably, the agency succeeded in protecting the two documents, except that in 2007 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit threw out the agency’s blanket “sources and methods” justification, forcing the government into a systematic review for declassification of this entire class of documents. As a result the Obama administration adopted a rule that PDBs will be reviewed for secrecy at the 40-year mark. In September 2015 the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence held an event at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, at which the agency opened a collection of roughly 2,500 PDBs. The Archive marked this event by posting our EBB No. 530 on the PDBs (September 16, 2015).

*White House Attempts to Blunt Church Committee Investigation: From the materials gathered for Part II of the Archive’s CIA document collection I selected a cross-section of exemplars that illustrate just how the Ford White House, spearheaded by Dick Cheney and Philip Buchen, attempted to evade congressional investigation of the CIA, NSA, and other elements of U.S. intelligence EBB-522, July 20, 2015). It is a story exactly parallel to the very recent one in which Obama administration officials worked to undermine a Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry into CIA torture programs and then to eviscerate the committee’s report. If past is prologue, then this 1975 case, which also involves a presidential blue ribbon commission chaired by Vice-President Nelson A. Rockefeller has lots to teach us.

*CIA Operations Document Collection, Part II: In May 2015 Proquest released Part II of the Archives’s CIA document collection. This presents a thousand key documents, all from the year 1975, when U.S. intelligence agencies were successively investigated by the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee of the United States Senate, and the Pike Committee of the United States House of Representatives. The set shows in explicit detail how the intelligence agencies and White House collaborated to fend off inquiries into all manner of intelligence activities, including abusive domestic operations.

*CIA Operations Document Collection, Part I: In the fall of 2013 the Proquest Publishers released the initial part of Archive’s CIA document collection. This selection of more than 2,200 documents illustrates CIA operations across the globe from the time of President Jimmy Carter through the administration of Barack Obama.

* History of Vietnam’s Southern Resistance: In 2008 the Vietnam Documentation Project of the Archive began an initiative together with the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) that sought to encourage the Vietnamese government and veterans of the National Liberation Front to open their records to researchers. The context was that a council of Vietnamese scholars and war veterans had begun assembling a semi-official history of the Resistance in South Vietnam to cover the entire period from 1945 through 1975. We were disappointed at being unable finally to get archives opened, but the Vietnamese published their history and it became available to us in late 2012. Archive and CWIHP recruited an expert panel to evaluate the multi-volume history. In September 2013 we held a symposium at the Wilson Center to discuss the panel’s findings. It took more than a year to obtain written versions of all the presentations, review and edit the results, and for me to craft the introduction to the symposium package, which was posted at the CWIHP website on October 23, 2014.

*Inside Story of the Pueblo Incident: On the 46th anniversary of the day in 1968 that North Korean warships opened fire upon and captured the U.S. Navy spy ship Pueblo the Archive posts a fresh analysis of the incident, in which the American crew were imprisoned and interrogated for nearly a year, and the U.S. lost a mass of top secret encryption gear. For this project I teamed up with author Jack Cheevers to present a selection of key documents that reveal the inside story of the Johnson administration’s efforts to cope with this crisis. It’s a revealing story that includes President Johnson’s deliberations, U.S. military contingency plans, NSA damage assessments, even a CIA psychological profile of the ship’s skipper (EBB 453, January 23, 2014).

* Secret History of CIA Director William E. Colby: CIA historians write classified biographies of the agency’s directors. Bill Colby figures as a key figure because on his watch the present system of congressional oversight of intelligence emerged, while Colby’s own innovations within the agency included creation of the system for drafting intelligence estimates which is still used today. When this CIA document became available I added an analysis and introduction and presented it to the public. (EBB 362, October 28, 2011.)

* Complete Pentagon Papers at Last: The famous leak of the “Pentagon Papers,” a study of U.S. decisionmaking in the Vietnam War, influenced the politics and analysis of that conflict. For many years, even though incomplete versions of the Papers were published and widely available, the original documents remained in the government’s secret vaults. I’ve worked the Pentagon Papers case for a long time. In the early oughts I succeeded in getting the government to declassify the full text of the “negotiating volumes,” works that documented U.S. peace feelers to Hanoi during the Johnson administration. I’d already applied for the full Papers, twice, but the government resisted releasing them. In 2001 I organized a conference on the Pentagon Papers. When these were finally declassified in 2011, I gathered specialists at the National Security Archive to present a comprehensive EBB that displays side-by-side the pages of the several main editions of the Pentagon Papers. Working from a basic structural analysis I supplied, Archivistas Charlotte Karrlson-Willis and Wendy Valdez compiled a cross-index to the editions, while Carlos Osorio created a web-based framework that displayed the pages. I added the introductory notes. (EBB 359, September 22, 2010.) Unknown to the American public, by and large even today, is that the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in 1969 prepared a similarly comprehensive retrospective on its intelligence work regarding the Vietnam war. The Archive also presented this document to the public, and I contributed an article assessing INR’s involvement with Vietnam. (EBB 121, May 2, 2004.)

* Deciding to Invade Iraq: In 2010 I teamed up with my National Security Archive colleague Joyce Battle and with British journalist Christopher Ames to do an in-depth study presenting the real documents on the George W. Bush administration’s ill-considered decision to invade Iraq. Detailed introductions plus documents appeared in three of the Archive’s electronic briefing books. (EBB 326, September 22, 2010; EBB 328, October 1, 2010; EBB 330, October 4, 2010.)

* John F. Kennedy and the Diem Coup: Audiotapes of his national security meetings secretly recorded by President Kennedy reveal that the U.S. decision to back a coup d’etat by generals in South Vietnam—a coup which actually occurred in November 1963—was really made that August. Standard historical accounts of these events were flawed because paper records of the same meetings failed to present the full picture. I contributed an analysis of the historical record, summaries of the tapes and the related documents, and presented all of them for the interested reader. (EBB 444, November 1, 2013; EBB 302, December 11, 2009.) An earlier electronic briefing book I had also prepared provided an even wider selection of the secret records on the Diem coup. (EBB 101, November 5, 2003.)

* The CIA’s Secret Histories of Vietnam: As a result of my Freedom of Information Act request, after seventeen years the agency declassified large portions of a series of internal histories it had compiled regarding its work in the Vietnam war. I supplied an introduction and summaries and made these materials available to the public. (EBB 283, August 26, 2009.)

* Breakthrough on Vietnam war records: At my request the Archive had requested the declassification of a series of records on fighting the war in Southeast Asia, including an Air Force official history of the air war in northern Laos. Because that campaign had had the Air Force is a role supporting a CIA secret army, a large segment of the history involved CIA activities. As originally released, the Air Force history had much of this material deleted. The Archive sued, arguing the deletions had been inappropriate, and we won. We combined this and other Air Force histories on Vietnam and made them available to the public. (EBB 248, April 9, 2008.) In large part due to this legal precedent, the CIA’s grounds for withholding its own Vietnam histories (above) were eroded.

* Mysteries Solved on the Tonkin Gulf Affair: After repeated declassification requests the National Security Agency released the full texts of cables it had sent, which existed in White House files and represented its reporting on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, an important milestone in the Vietnam War. We were able to show in a concrete fashion that claims of a “second attack” on August 4, 1964 had been wrong. (EBB-132, August 4, 2004.)

* The real story on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: Within months of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s United Nations speech asserting that Saddam Hussein was hiding powerfully destructive weapons, I began work on Hoodwinked, a book that took the Bush administration’s key pronouncements and claims, deconstructed them in detail, and showed how they had been used to create a sense of hysteria about Iraq among the American people. (2004.)