SYSTEM OF SECRECY IS LABELED `ABSURD'

Knight-Ridder News Service

      WASHINGTON - A file designated WCD-9944-X-1 lies under lock
and key on the sixth floor of the National Archives. Inside the
file, faded and frail with age, is the oldest classified document
in the United States.
      Subject: Troop movements in Europe. Date: April 15, 1917 -
nine days after the United States entered World War I.
Classification: Confidential.
      The document stays secret because the US Army says releasing
it would damage national security.
      Archives are opening and secret documents are being released
behind the Iron Curtain. Lies are being erased and blank spaces are
being filled with official histories. Yet in Washington, millions
of documents remain classified for no clear reason, according to
historians, researchers and government officials.
      The secrecy that keeps the seal on file WCD-9944-X-1
"signifies the level of absurdity that he classification system has
reached," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American
Scientists, who discovered the document's existence last month.
      No one knows how many classified documents there are in the
United States.
      "A mountain...tens of millions, or hundreds of millions or
billions," said Steven Garfinkle, whose job as head of the federal
Information Security Oversight Office is to track the government's
secrecy system. 
      No one knows how to go about reading, declassifying and
releasing all of those documents.
      "We've got to do something, or that mountain's going to build
up more," Garfinkle said. "What are we going to do? Wave a magic
wand and declassify it? Burn it?"
      No one knows how much of the hidden record of the nation's
history will stay secret forever.
      File WCD-9944-X-1 is one of "several documents that date back
to the World War I era that remain classified," Garfinkle said.
"Obviously, it seems absurd on the surface."
      Michael Knapp, an archivist at the military-reference branch
of the National Archives, is one of the few people to have seen the
document since 1917. He said he uncovered it in response to
Aftergood's Freedom of Information Act request for "the oldest
military document that we have that is still classified."
      Knapp said the document discusses "troop movements in Europe"
during the first days of World War I. He said he could not discuss
its tittle, its length or its language, because it is classified
"confidential." 
      That secrecy classification remained in place after the Army
last reviewed the document in December 1976. Under a 1981
presidential order tightening security strictures, a document may
be classified "confidential" if its disclosure would damage
national security.
      Since the document remains secret, it's hard to know how the
information in it would harm the nation 73 years after Word War I
ended.