Two sides of the declassification room - UFOs and JFK Assassination Conspiracy
"When
we launched the declassification center," Ferriero said, "I hosted
two open forums . . . to get some sense from the user community about what
records they were looking for. They were exactly the same. This side of the
room was Kennedy assassination conspiracy, this side of the room was
UFOs." - David Ferriero
Unlocking
America's oldest secrets ; Beverly-bred archives director pushes for openness
Bryan
Bender Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
The
Boston Globe
03-13-2012
Unlocking
America's oldest secrets ; Beverly-bred archives director pushes for openness
Byline:
Bryan Bender Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
Section:
National
Type:
News
WASHINGTON
- The man entrusted with America's documentary heritage - including the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - learned the value of book
collections in a North Beverly, Mass., flower shop called Conte's.
The shop
doubled as the town's library. Two shelves nestled among the lilies and roses
represented the entire book selection. "I can still remember sitting on
the floor surrounded by flowers and choosing the books I was going to
read," said David Ferriero.
Ferriero
now directs the National Archives in Washington, the first librarian to hold the
post of official "collector in chief." He not only oversees 12
billion pages and 40 million photographs that tell America's story, he referees
release of America's oldest secrets, from the formula for invisible ink to
battle plans for the Spanish-American War.
He favors
openness, he says, but agencies cling to a maze of often-contradictory secrecy
rules and a deep-seated culture to lock away even innocuous information.
"While progress has been made," Ferriero said, "we still have a
huge problem."
Ferriero's
primary job is ensuring the 275 executive branch agencies retain the most
important government records for posterity. But he also oversees the National
Declassification Center, created by President Obama by executive order in 2009.
That makes him point man for an aggressive effort to try to release, by the end
of next year, a backlog of an estimated 400 million records that are more than
25 years old.
It is a
Herculean task that open government advocates complain will probably take many
years. Of the 400 million-document backlog, Ferriero reports, about 125 million
documents have been inventoried but only 26 million have been fully reviewed
and processed. Of those, meanwhile, nearly 10 percent will remain secret on
national security grounds.
Opening
sealed government files to public scrutiny requires navigating a bureaucratic
quagmire of Kafkaesque proportions.
"There
is something like 2,500 separate classification guides in operation now in the
US government," Ferriero said. "What's secret in one agency may not
be secret in another."
He
recently won a symbolic victory when the CIA relented after years of denying
researchers' requests for six "secret" formulas for invisible ink, a
tool of American spy craft during World War I.
"The
reason they caved was because the National Declassification Center staff
discovered that the formulas had actually been published in 1931,"
Ferriero recounts with a hint of exasperation. "The way they found them?
Google Books."
As a
Northeastern University co-op student in 1965, Ferriero, a graduate of Beverly
High School, found himself working among dusty tomes and collections of old
manuscripts in the MIT library. He ended up staying more than 30 years,
interrupted by a tour as a hospital corpsman with the Marines in the Vietnam
War. He later became chief librarian at Duke University and then as Andrew W.
Mellon director of the New York Public Library. The Senate confirmed him in
November 2009 as archivist of the United States after his nomination by Obama.
His
government job carries a wide range of duties. An example: He is responsible
for safeguarding America's most precious documents - the original Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution - in the event of a national emergency.
(There is a detailed plan for whisking the documents to safety, but it is,
well, secret.)
The most
difficult work, said Ferriero, is attempting to change the culture of secrecy
in certain corners of government. He and his staff, who do not have the
authority to release secret information on their own, are prioritizing the
backlog of documents to be reviewed by archives staff and individual agencies.
Among the
most sought-after files are documents relating to the assassination of
President Kennedy, the CIA, and the National Security Council. Many more,
including the records of military commands, NASA, the FBI, and files from the
Watergate investigation, are also "high interest" but "difficult
to process" because they have to be scrubbed of any sensitive information
and to protect people's privacy. Some former insiders are critical of the slow
pace at which decades-old information is being released and call it testament
to a dysfunctional process.
J.
William Leonard, the former overseer of the classification system, said the
agencies that Ferriero must cajole will continue to hold sway until the
Archives has more staff and resources to review the documents.
"We
are afraid of history," said Leonard, who oversaw the Pentagon's
classification procedures before serving as director of the National Archives'
Information and Security Oversight Office. "Our knowledge of our history
is imperfect, imprecise, but written as if it isn't."
The
Archives this year is requesting about $380 million for its operations,
slightly down from last year.
"Its
budget is declining," said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on
Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.
"What they have accomplished doesn't come close to fulfilling the
president's instruction. It looks now like that goal will not be met."
Ferriero
said one goal is to digitize the billions of records that are on the shelves.
He estimates that less than 1 percent is in electronic form. Another major
challenge is ensuring that in the digital age government records - e-mails,
computer files, and the trillions of electrons that have replaced onion skin
and typewriters - are not lost or destroyed.
Then he
has to deal, as best he can, with the conspiracy theories, which, due in large
part to Hollywood, are constantly swirling. The desire for more raw information
encompasses 50,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of Kennedy
that are still secret and are not expected to be released for at least another
five years.
"When
we launched the declassification center," Ferriero said, "I hosted
two open forums . . . to get some sense from the user community about what
records they were looking for. They were exactly the same. This side of the
room was Kennedy assassination conspiracy, this side of the room was
UFOs."
He was
better prepared than most on the question of unidentified flying objects.
"When
I was at MIT," he said, "we had a file where we kept strange
correspondence. The largest number of questions was on UFOs because at some
point an article had been published about this saucer crash in Roswell and the
aliens and parts of the spacecraft were supposedly sent to MIT for analysis. We
got a tremendous number of letters every week about UFOs."
Bryan
Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
13archivist.ART
Illustrations/Photos:
Caption:
David Ferriero directs the National Archives. Appointed by
President
Obama, he is the first librarian to hold the post. B.
Smialowski
for Boston Globe; A letter written by a young David
Ferriero
to President Kennedy was recovered from the presidential
libraries.
B. Smialowski for Boston Globe
(c) The
Boston Globe Mar 13, 2012
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