Secrets for Sale

Most U.S. Government secrets grow banal with age, but the very fact of their secrecy gives some of them an odd fascination. An enterprising publishing company called the Carrollton Press has begun selling microfilms of formerly classified documents that have entered the public domain as a result of amendments to the Freedom of Information Act (TIME, April 14). The Washington, D.C., firm's collection of 8,000 documents goes for $1,575. It includes such minutiae as then Ambassador to France Charles Bohlen's 1964 memorandum to Lyndon Johnson on Charles de Gaulle's tactics of "mystification and concealment" and a memo from a planning session of June 26, 1950--the day after the start of the Korean War--when Harry Truman sat down with his top foreign policy advisers. "General Vandenberg reported that the first [North Korean] plane had been shot down," the memo begins. "The President remarked that he hoped it was not the last."

Several libraries have already bought the package. So has the Far East Book Co. of Hong Kong. Carrollton's president William Buchanan, a former CIA officer, smiled when this particular order came in. "That's obviously for transshipment to Peking," he said. "That's been their method of operation."

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