Archives Pledges to End Secret Agreements [... w/fed agencies.. CIA, etc]

The National Archives will no longer enter into secret agreements with federal agencies that want to withdraw records from public access on Archives shelves and will do more to disclose when documents are removed for national security reasons.

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Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, announced the policy change yesterday after the release of a second secret classified memorandum, this one between the CIA and the Archives. In it Archives officials agreed in 2001 to conceal official CIA efforts to withdraw thousands of historical documents from the Archives, even though the records had been declassified.

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Independent historian Matthew M. Aid uncovered the reclassification program last summer when his requests for formerly available documents were delayed or denied. In February, the Archives acknowledged that about 9,500 records totaling more than 55,000 pages had been withdrawn and reclassified as secret since 1999.

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Nevertheless, the Archives' decision to shun secret agreements is a step forward, said Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library in Washington. "For the National Archives to go into cahoots with the CIA and Air Force to mislead researchers about what was going on was over the top, and a strong signal of a secrecy system that is genuinely broken," he said.