Opening Up Those Secrets

The Government has long been snooping too much and telling too little. Lately, however, Americans have been using new legal weapons to fight against excessive federal secrecy, and have been winning some battles.

The chief target: the bulging files in which U.S. agencies keep billions of classified documents, ranging from sensitive details about the nation's nuclear arsenal to dossiers on citizens who have been put under surveillance because they attended radical (or not so radical) political meetings. Late last year Congress moved to open up more of those files. It liberally amended the 1966 Freedom of Information Act in an effort to remove some of the procedural obstacles that bureaucrats had set up to frustrate the law's purpose, which was to make available to the public all but the most sensitive federal documents. As a result, officials are speedily granting many of the requests for information, and a mass of formerly withheld material is being turned over to academic researchers, reporters and other citizens.

Some agencies used to take more than two months to respond--if they responded at all--and charged up to $1 per page to duplicate files. Now, they must reply within ten working days and limit charges to actual copying costs, usually 5-c- or 10-c- per page. Further, the new amendments permit a citizen to appeal to the courts if an agency refuses to turn over documents; it is up to the Government to prove that the material must be kept secret to preserve national security, protect confidential sources or for some other valid reason. If a judge agrees that the information was capriciously withheld, the official responsible may be reprimanded, suspended or even dismissed.

Mafia Call. In asking for documents, a citizen need not explain who he is or why he wants the information. An FBI official complains that a Mafia don could call for information on how the agency combats organized crime. A CIA official worries more about Soviet agents getting at secrets. Such fears are probably groundless; it seems unlikely that the courts will force agencies to release information that would compromise national security or FBI methods.

Since the amendments took effect on Feb. 19, bureaucrats have been inundated with demands for documents. Compared with the same period last year, requests have increased sixteenfold at the FBI. Altogether, the FBI, the CIA and the Internal Revenue Service have received more than 1,300 letters asking for information, mostly from people who want to know what files the Government is keeping on them.

Democratic Representative Bella Abzug of New York got the file that the CIA had on her, and found that for 22 years, the agency had been maintaining a dossier on some of her activities as lawyer and politician (TIME, March 17). Similarly, the CIA turned over to former Democratic Representative Charles Porter of Oregon 17 items from his file, including a report on his attendance at a 1968 meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality in Oakland, Calif. Asks Porter: "What the hell does that have to do with the CIA? They're treating me like a security risk."

Other people are using the amendments to extract information about historic events, for publication in newspapers and scholarly journals. That was the basis for 30 requests by Morton Halperin, who is working on a study of Government secrecy and national security. He asked for information from the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and the National Security Council. To his surprise, he has found that "generally, the agencies are proceeding in good faith. We've received much more than I would have predicted."

So far, he has been given portions of several secret documents, including Pentagon papers that had not been made public by Daniel Ellsberg, the Secretary of Defense's annual reports to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on U.S. military strength from 1962 through 1972, a study that Halperin did for the Government on the Quemoy crisis of 1958, and transcripts of two off-the-record sessions in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger briefed reporters on the Vladivostok arms agreement. Nothing of significance was revealed in the documents, but Halperin plans to appeal to the courts for portions that were deleted and for other information that was refused.

Foreign Gifts. Columnist Jack Anderson pried loose the State Department's and Pentagon's cables relating to the foreign travel of 250 members of Congress in 1973 and 1974, which led to his writing nine columns on freeloading and high living by legislators. He revealed, for example, that the State Department had shipped home carpeting that the wife of New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya had bought in Hong Kong. The Washington Post got the State Department to open up files on official foreign gifts to former President Nixon and his family. The Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman obtained 17,000 pages of research and other materials that the Army had withheld on the My Lai massacre.

Robert and Michael Meeropol have been refused many documents, chiefly from the CIA and the FBI, that they believe would clear the names of their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 as nuclear spies. Historian Allen Weinstein of Smith College, who has tried in vain for three years to open up the FBI files on the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases, complains: "The amendments haven't made any change as far as I can tell." Historian James MacGregor Burns agrees. After failing for two years to force the State Department to release thousands of pages of material on the diplomatic history of the 1950s and 1960s, he warns: "We should be learning things from U.S. interventions in Korea, Lebanon and Viet Nam and we aren't." Burns believes that the amendments "won't make much difference until the people who actually control the records are willing to live up to the spirit of the law." Indeed, old bureaucratic attitudes die hard. In a Catch-22 situation, the FBI automatically starts a file on everyone who writes asking the bureau whether he or she is in its files.

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