Documents wind up missing from public archives for many reasons. Sometimes they're shelved or labeled incorrectly, or lost, and sometimes they're even stolen. But at the National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950's, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

As time passes, the need for secrecy, which should always adhere to a very strict standard, usually diminishes. Apparently the C.I.A. wants to turn back the hands of time.

The new director of the National Archives, Allen Weinstein, rightly put a stop to this nonsense as soon as he heard about it. But he will need to do more than just abrogate these suspect agreements with the C.I.A. and the Air Force. He will need to figure out how they came about in the first place. The former director, John Carlin, has said he knows nothing about them. They appear to have been signed only by the assistant archivist.

What makes this all seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed. They are apparently secret enough that no one can be told why they are secret — so secret, in fact, that the arrangement to reclassify them is also secret. According to the agreement with the C.I.A., employees of the National Archives are also prohibited from telling anyone that the C.I.A. was responsible for removing reclassified documents.

It's hard for us to imagine why a declassified document from the 1950's — one that has perhaps been read and referenced by many scholars — should suddenly be deemed too sensitive for public access. Unfortunately, given the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy, it's all too easy for us to imagine why that may be true of more recent documents. It's worth remembering, after all, that the contents of the National Archives represent the raw materials of history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/opinion/19weds4.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

SHHH! Don't tell anyone: The British and American intelligence services worked together in World War II.

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."

At a House hearing last month, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut denounced what he called an "absurd effort to put the toothpaste back into the tube" and demanded an explanation.

Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, proceeded to recount what he knew about a secretive program he said he had first learned about from a newspaper article. But then he too hit a wall of secrecy.

Mr. Weinstein said part of the reclassification effort was guided by a written agreement between the National Archives and "a component of the Department of Defense." Mr. Weinstein couldn't say just which component or what was in the agreement, because "it contains classified information which I am not prepared to discuss in open session."

This prompted an exasperated Representative Henry A. Waxman of California to ask, "Why is it classified?"

To which Mr. Weinstein forlornly replied, "I don't know."

It was an Alice in Wonderland moment, as one congressman put it, that epitomized government agencies' reflexive urge to keep things secret.

Last week, the National Archives released a declassified copy of the agreement it had signed in 2002 — with the Air Force, it turned out. The document showed the archives had agreed to keep the reclassification secret "to avoid the attention and researcher complaints that may arise from removing material that has already been available publicly from the open shelves for an extended period of time."

J. William Leonard, who heads the Information Security Oversight Office at the archives and is currently auditing the reclassification program, says deciding when a classified document has outlived the need for secrecy can be wildly subjective.

But Mr. Leonard says there is a case for keeping some secrets forever — for instance, the names of foreigners recruited to spy for the United States. "If we're asking people to betray their country, they may want a promise that their identity will never be revealed," Mr. Leonard said.

Archives officials have promised to create a better system for overseeing truly necessary reclassification. Max Weber, the German sociologist, could tell them what they're up against. Secrecy comes as instinctively to bureaucrats as dam-building does to beavers.

"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret," Weber wrote in his 1914 tract "Economy and Society." Secrecy is a source of power, he said, and "nothing is so fanatically defended."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/weekinreview/16shane.html?fta=y