Secrecy & Government Bulletin - July 1994

SECRECY & GOVERNMENT BULLETIN
Issue Number 37
July 1994

DOE Hears Calls for Openness Loud and Clear

Energy Secretary Hazel O~Leary accelerated the remarkable transformation
of her agency with a June 27 press conference on openness and
declassification. Hundreds of pages of fact sheets documenting 119 new
declassification decisions were released in an impressive sequel to her
first openness press conference last December 7.

"We have been listening," O'Leary said, "and what we've heard loud and
clear is that openness in government is very important to our citizens."

Newly disclosed information included descriptions of the quantities and
locations of the unexpectedly large U.S. stockpile of highly enriched
uranium, new data on nuclear weapons tests, and selected information on
the size (up to 1961) of the nuclear weapons stockpile along with annual
"megatonnage" and other characteristics, and additional information on
human radiation experiments.

Even more important than any of the newly declassified facts and
figures, however, was the Secretary~s extraordinary invitation to the
public to participate in the formulation of DOE classification policy,
an unprecedented development in a national security bureaucracy that is
otherwise indifferent or hostile to public input.

"We want to bring the public into the decision making process," said A.
Bryan Siebert, director of the DOE Office of Declassification, at the
June 27 press conference. DOE released a draft document describing DOE
classification policy and identifying the types of information DOE
classifies. Public comment was solicited on items that should or should
not be classified. Likewise, guidelines for implementing the
controversial system of Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information were
released for comment. And DOE released a 112 page study outlining the
history of declassification since 1946 and describing exactly what has
been declassified and when. Within the limits of law and other
constraints, Siebert said, "We want people to tell us what they think
should be classified and declassified."

This is a momentous shift in attitude, especially when compared with the
adversarial stance toward the public that is habitually adopted by the
intelligence community and other national security agencies on
classification issues.

The latest DOE action elicited fierce opposition from other government
agencies. The Defense Department blocked disclosure of the total size of
the current nuclear arsenal along with other isolated facts. More
seriously, some officials challenged the entire DOE openness initiative,
perhaps fearing that it would raise expectations for them to follow
suit.

O'Leary preempted any questions about the interagency conflicts with the
questionable assertion that "my colleagues in the national security
community all want the same thing that I do." She frequently invoked
President Clinton's rhetorical commitment to openness and generally made
it clear that she is a team player. The problem is that she seems to be
the only one on the team who is playing. Thus, in the last year or so
DOE has issued about as many declassification decisions as it did
altogether in its previous 50 year history.  But that doesn't alter the
fact that overall government classification activity increased during
the last year while declassification dropped precipitously.

White House Chokes on WWII Documents

In contrast to DOE, White House declassification policy is stalled by a
lack of leadership and a desperate desire for consensus. The
Administration's paralysis is now holding up the declassification of
some of the oldest and least sensitive documents imaginable, including
28 million pages of classified World War II records and tens of
thousands of additional pages dating back to World War I.

The White House had originally considered a proposal to declassify in
bulk 48 million pages of classified documents, mostly from the World War
II era, on the occasion of the D-Day commemoration. But executive branch
agencies, who were apparently concerned that disclosure could threaten
national security if the Wehrmacht struck again, balked and the National
Security Council yielded to their objections.

A June 28 meeting at the NSC failed again to resolve the issue, which
has a significance far beyond the value of the documents themselves. The
inability to release fifty year old records raises troubling questions
about judgment and competence at the NSC, and dims the prospects for the
urgently needed bulk declassification of more recent documents.  Even
some of the agency officials who objected to declassification of the
records were amazed at what they called NSC's "spinelessness."

"Anthony Lake is not what you would call an activist national security
adviser," said one official. As a result, executive branch agencies have
a clear field to manipulate policy as they see fit. When it comes to
classification policy, no one is effectively in charge and, said another
official, "It's become kind of dirty."

Mystery Programs Thrive at DOE

While the Department of Energy generally is at the forefront of secrecy
reform, the special access programs conducted by the Department are an
exception to its otherwise admirable transformation.

Special access programs (SAPs) employ a variety of security measures
that are far more restrictive than those used in 'ordinary' classified
programs and that largely shield them from independent oversight. After
more than a decade of controversy and purported reforms, the special
access system government-wide still remains secure against the threat of
effective oversight.

Lately both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have
criticized the Department of Energy for failing to submit a report
describing its highly classified SAPs. The House Defense Authorization
bill for FY 1995 would prohibit the obligation of any funds for such
programs until the DOE report, which was due February 1, is submitted.

The Senate Armed Services Committee said it "is concerned that the
failure to provide full and complete budget justifications for all
classified programs... severely limits the committee's ability to
conduct meaningful oversight and to fulfill its responsibilities. In
some instances, the Department has been reluctant even to acknowledge
the existence of these programs." (S.Rep. 103-282, pp. 271-272).

This is of course an old familiar story. But there is more to it than
that. In many cases, DOE officials apparently don~t even know what
secret programs are being conducted within their own agency and they
have no reliable indication of what they may cost.

Thus, according to an October 1993 DOE Inspector General (IG) Report,
"DOE is not necessarily aware of what SAPs are being worked on in DOE
facilities.... We found this condition to be true at DOE Headquarters, a
DOE operations office, and a national laboratory." (Report No.
DOE/IG-0335, Inspection of Selected Intelligence and Special Access
Program Work-for-Others Projects, p. 54).

Moreover, the definition of what constitutes a SAP is not exactly
rigorous. "At [one] national laboratory," the DOE IG reported, "a
security official told us there were what the official characterized as
`big SAPs' and `little SAPs.' The official stated a `big SAP' was a
formal SAP with the security requirements imposed by the customer. The
official stated a `little SAP' was not a formal SAP [and therefore not
subject to SAP oversight and reporting requirements]....  This official
estimated that there were seven intelligence-related `little SAPs' at
that location."

The Inspector General also found that cost accounting for SAPs and other
classified programs was often wildly inaccurate, if not deliberately
fraudulent. For example, some program costs were charged to overhead and
paid for parasitically by other accounts. Several classified programs
reviewed by the IG falsely reported a total estimated program cost of
zero dollars. One program even claimed that its total program cost was
equal to a negative number!

Among its 46 recommendations, the IG suggested that DOE "establish a
policy that designated officials at each DOE operations office must be
aware of all SAP activity at facilities under their cognizance." All 46
recommendations have been accepted by DOE and have been assigned "target
completion dates," said John Keliher, the director of DOE's office of
Nonproliferation and National Security.

Intelligence Budget Follies

The government cannot acknowledge the size of the total intelligence
budget, so the argument goes, because then there would be pressure to
disclose the size of each individual agency's intelligence budget. Soon
citizens would demand a voice in determining intelligence policy and
priorities. Then they would want access to some of intelligence products
they pay for. The next thing you know, we would all be dining on borscht
and vodka.

This argument is substantially weakened by the fact that the Department
of Energy already publishes the size of its own intelligence budget--
without evident damage to national security or anything else. (Likewise,
the State Department budget for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research
is unclassified.)

The DOE intelligence budget request for fiscal year 1995 is $43.1
million. The congressional appropriations committees publish the size of
the DOE intelligence budget, although the congressional intelligence
committees do not.

Asked whether DOE's budget disclosure policy threatens national
security, the CIA did its best to provide an evasive response: "DOE's
intelligence budget includes, but is not limited to, its National
Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) budget request, which remains
classified. Therefore, neither the size nor the components of the DOE
NFIP request have been publicly disclosed." End of statement.

If logic counted for anything, this response would hardly be
satisfactory. But it is interesting nevertheless. Significantly, the CIA
statement implies that the widely-reported total intelligence budget can
safely be acknowledged since, like the DOE intelligence budget, the
total includes non-NFIP (e.g., tactical intelligence) as well as NFIP
programs. More basically, the CIA statement concedes the obvious point
that the amount of intelligence spending per se is not sensitive.
Rather, from the Agency's point of view, it is the size of the
administrative construct called "the National Foreign Intelligence
Program" that must be concealed from the public-- a purely parochial
interest, and one that is not founded on any clear distinction between
sensitive and non-sensitive information.

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service makes the
interesting observation that during World War II, spending for the
Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, was openly
published. But that was before the cold war poisoned American political
institutions and established secrecy as the norm. The CRS report,
written by Richard A. Best Jr. and Elizabeth B. Bazan and entitled
Intelligence Spending: Should Total Amounts Be Made Public?
recapitulates the twenty year old controversy over budget secrecy, but
chastely refrains from taking sides. A copy is available from S&GB.

The Secrecy System v. Glenn T. Seaborg

Nobel laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, former Chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission (and FAS Sponsor), recounts his arduous struggle with
government officials over the classification of his personal journals in
an article entitled "Secrecy Runs Amok" (Science, 3 June 1994, pp.
1410-1411).

His journals, which constitute an important historical source, were
mutilated over the course of multiple, multi-year classification
reviews, leading him to conclude that classification had become "an
arbitrary, capricious, and frivolous process, almost devoid of objective
criteria." At one point, the government classified "my description of
one of the occasions when I accompanied my children on a `trick or
treat' outing on a Halloween evening." In fact, he writes, "hardly any
of the approximately 1000 classification actions taken so randomly by
the various reviewers could be justified on legitimate national security
grounds."

Government officials claim that there is another side to the story and
that Dr. Seaborg violated established procedures for protecting
classified information. Citing a classified case file on Seaborg, one
official asserted with some hyperbole that "If his name weren~t Glenn
Seaborg, he'd be in jail now." The question of jail time for officials
who abuse their authority to classify in the first place did not arise.

 Secrecy and Government Bulletin  is written by Steven Aftergood and
 published by the  Federation of American Scientists , 307 Massachusetts
 Avenue N.E., Washington, DC 20002.  For more information call
 (202)675-1012 or send email to saftergood@igc.apc.org