Why the Secrecy? Only the Bureaucrats Know
What may seem to some an obvious historical fact struck a Central Intelligence Agency apparatchik in 2002 as a secret still worth protecting. He redacted a sentence describing the "close coordination" of the allies' spies from a 1946 memorandum recounting war propaganda duties before approving its public release. For good measure, he also took out the number of American spies in 1946 ("400 in the field and 260 in Washington") and the name of Brig. Gen. John Magruder, then the intelligence chief.
The anonymous security reviewer's vigilance was for naught. Matthew M. Aid, a Washington historian, noticed recently that the memorandum had been published in 1997, details intact, in a historical volume by the State Department. The department had even posted the document's text on its Web site, where anybody can read about the "close coordination" between British and American spies.
Why do bureaucrats insist on spending the taxpayers' money to keep aging government paperwork from the taxpayers?
The question has arisen anew because of the discovery that military and intelligence agencies have pulled some 55,000 pages of decades-old documents from public access at the National Archives. Some documents were photocopied long ago by researchers. In the case of the redacted 1946 memorandum, the State Department had already published it in the multivolume history "Foreign Relations of the United States."