The U.S. Department of State has blocked the publication of a long-awaited documentary history of U.S. covert action in Iran in the 1950s out of concern that its release could adversely affect ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

The controversial Iran history volume, part of the official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, had been slated for release last summer. (“History of 1953 CIA Covert Action in Iran to be Published,” Secrecy News, April 16, 2014).

But senior State Department officials “decided to delay publication because of ongoing negotiations with Iran,” according to the minutes of a September 8, 2014 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation that were posted on the Department of State website this week.

Dr. Stephen P. Randolph, the Historian of the State Department, confirmed yesterday that the status of the Iran volume “remains as it was in September” and that no new publication date has been set. The subject was also discussed at an Advisory Committee meeting this week.

The suppression of this history has been a source of frustration for decades, at least since the Department published a notorious 1989 volume on U.S. policy towards Iran that made no mention of CIA covert action.

But the latest move is also an indirect affirmation of the enduring significance of the withheld records, which date back even further than the U.S. rupture with Cuba that is now on the mend.

It seems that the remaining U.S. records of the 1953 coup in Iran are not only of historical interest but they evidently hold the power to move whole countries and to alter the course of events today. Or so the State Department believes.

“The logic, as I understand it, is that the release of the volume could aggravate anti-U.S. sentiment in Iran and thereby diminish the prospects of the nuclear negotiations reaching a settlement,” said Prof. Richard H. Immerman, a historian at Temple University and the chair of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee.

“I understand the State Department’s caution, but I don’t agree with the position,” he said. “Not only is the 1953 covert action in Iran an open secret, but it was also a motive for taking hostages in 1979. The longer the U.S. withholds the volume, the longer the issue will fester.”

Besides, if the documents do have an occult power to shape events, maybe that power could be harnessed to constructive ends.

“I would argue that our government’s commitment to transparency as signaled by the release of this volume could have a transformative effect on the negotiations, and that effect would increase the likelihood of a settlement,” Prof. Immerman suggested.

“At least some in the Iranian government would applaud this openness and seek to reciprocate. Further, the State Department of 2014 would distinguish this administration from the ‘Great Satan’ image of 1953 and after,” he said.

Continued secrecy has become an unnecessary obstacle to the development of US-Iran relations, argued historian Roham Alvandi in a similar vein in a New York Times op-ed (“Open the Files on the Iran Coup,” July 9, 2014).

“Moving forward with a new chapter in American-Iranian relations is difficult so long as the files on 1953 remain secret,” he wrote. “A stubborn refusal to release them keeps the trauma of 1953 alive in the Iranian public consciousness.”

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The State Department published a new Foreign Relations of the United States volume today on the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1978-80. It is the ninth FRUS volume of the year, and it came out “a little ahead of schedule,” said Dr. Randolph, the Department Historian.

New products from the Congressional Research Service obtained by Secrecy News include the following.

Selected CRS Materials on Detention and Interrogation of Terrorist Suspects and Enemy Belligerents, CRS Legal Sidebar, December 16, 2014

The SSCI Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program: Issues to Consider, CRS Insights, December 16, 2014

Big Deal? U.S. Changes Stance on Cruelty Prohibition, CRS Legal Sidebar, December 16, 2014

Special Prosecutors: Investigations and Prosecutions of Police Use of Deadly Force, CRS Legal Sidebar, December 12, 2014

Each year millions of pages of government records are declassified that few if any members of the public will ever look at. This is an awkward fact which is not often discussed because it might call into question the whole declassification enterprise.

“Statistical Records Relating to Ship Stability, 1918-67,” anyone? A new collection of declassified records on that subject was among those processed for release recently by the National Declassification Center. Like too many other such records, it seems unlikely to generate or to justify much public attention.

In response to this problem, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an official advisory committee, said that agencies should do more to selectively prioritize topics of high public interest for declassification review rather than trying to declassify most records as they become 25 years old.

“After studying declassification practices in use at agencies and at the National Declassification Center (NDC), we concluded that a coordinated government-wide policy focused on declassifying historically significant records with greatest interest to the public made most sense,” wrote former Congressman David E. Skaggs, the acting chair of the PIDB, in a letter to President Obama last week transmitting a new PIDB report on the subject.

“Currently, all classified records of a certain age receive the same attention, regardless of their historical value or potential research interest,” the PIDB report said. “Such indiscriminate use of dwindling government resources makes no sense.”

PIDB therefore proposed that agencies move away from broad-based “automatic declassification” (which is rarely if ever automatic) to “topic-based prioritization [that] would ensure declassification review of records of the greatest potential for use by the public, historians, public policy professionals and the national security community itself,” the report said.

The PIDB proposal, which addresses a genuine problem, itself raises several concerns.

Automatic declassification of all (non-exempt) historically valuable 25 year old classified records was originally mandated by the Clinton Administration in 1995 in order to compel agencies to take declassification seriously. It served as a forcing function, requiring documents to be released if they were not reviewed or exempted, and it yielded more than a billion pages of declassified records.

A move away from automatic declassification could eliminate that forcing function without replacing it with another equally compelling rationale. The PIDB report says, a bit vaguely, not to worry: “Lessening the burden of automatic declassification [in a shift to topical priorities]… should not reduce the overall declassification activity across government.” It is not immediately clear why not.

Another concern is how to establish which declassification priorities are actually dictated by “the public interest.” There are certainly passionate communities of interest surrounding topics such as the JFK assassination, prisoners of war, or intelligence history, but these are not necessarily a proper basis for a “public interest” declassification agenda. Even a preliminary list of declassification topics that was compiled by the PIDB itself and published in the new report is admittedly “too extensive and diffuse… to inform decisions leading to implementation of a priority-based declassification program.”

A deeper problem than the choice of topics or the impact of resource limitations is the question of which criteria are to be used by agencies for making declassification decisions. If the declassification criteria are obsolete or overly conservative, then applying them even to well-chosen topics won’t do much good.

The PIDB report does not directly engage the question of how to optimize and update declassification criteria. It does propose, however, to eliminate the crude pass/fail process that is often used to withhold entire documents when even a small portion of them is found to be exempt. The report also notes in passing that the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Review Act mandated disclosure requirements for assassination-related records that were “much more stringent” than those of past and current executive orders. There is perhaps an implicit suggestion that a similarly forthcoming approach could be adopted in other topical reviews.

The PIDB report also discusses new applications of technology to declassification, the need for increased risk tolerance, and other topics.

Meanwhile, the demand for declassification is persistent and growing.

Just last week, Sen. Carl Levin renewed his request to the Central Intelligence Agency “to fully declassify a March 13, 2003 cable from CIA field officers to headquarters. This cable provides information about the Bush administration’s campaign to build public support for the Iraq invasion” on grounds that were erroneous and misleading, Sen. Levin said in a December 11 floor statement.

A day before, Sen. Mark Udall introduced a resolution calling on the Administration to declassify records on mass killings and U.S. covert action in Indonesia in the 1960s. “Some may ask, why is this resolution needed? Why now? This is why: The survivors and descendants of victims continue to be marginalized. Many of the killers continue to live with impunity. Very few Americans are aware of these historical events or our government’s actions during this time. These events demand our attention and resolution as we work together to build a strong Asia-Pacific partnership,” he said.

And also last week, Congress approved the new FY 2014-15 intelligence authorization act containing a provision (sec. 321) that “requires the DNI to submit a report to Congress describing proposals to improve the declassification process.”

New products from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Legislation to Facilitate Cybersecurity Information Sharing: Economic Analysis, December 11, 2014

FY2015 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Issues, December 11, 2014

Analysis of H.R. 5781, California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014, December 11, 2014

Addressing the Long-Run Budget Deficit: A Comparison of Approaches, December 9, 2014

Cost-Benefit and Other Analysis Requirements in the Rulemaking Process, December 9, 2014

Overview of Federal Real Property Disposal Requirements and Procedures, December 10, 2014

Anti-Terrorist/Anti-Money Laundering Information-Sharing by Financial Institutions under FINCEN’s Regulations, CRS Legal Sidebar, December 10, 2014

Argentina: Background and U.S. Relations, December 9, 2014

Latin America and Climate Change, CRS Insights, December 11, 2014

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation.

Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full.

That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell.

“The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing.

Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.

Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”)

The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions.

It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public.

Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.

“Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said.

“I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.”

But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views.

Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who criticized what she said were methodological flaws in the Committee report, said in her additional views that “Despite these significant flaws, the report’s findings lead me to conclude that some detainees were subject to techniques that constituted torture. This inhumane and brutal treatment never should have occurred.”

By the same token, the most important omission from the report is the absence of any discussion of remedies.

Now that it is firmly established that “we tortured some folks,” as President Obama awkwardly put it, the question is what to do about it. Confession without atonement is incomplete.

Prosecution seems problematic for a number of reasons, including the difficulty of localizing responsibility, when it is entire institutions and not just particular officials that failed.

A different approach to the problem would start by considering the individuals who suffered abuse at the hands of the U.S. government, including a number of persons who were detained in error. Congress could now ask how some of them (i.e. those who are still alive) could be compensated in some measure for what was wrongly done to them.

Several previous efforts to seek remedies for torture were deflected by use of the state secrets privilege. In light of the detailed findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, that sort of evasion should be harder to sustain. Congress could accelerate a resolution of the problem with a focused investigation of what potential remedies are now feasible and appropriate.

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Federal Inspectors General: History, Characteristics, and Recent Congressional Actions, December 8, 2014

Attorney General Nominations Since the Reagan Administration, CRS Insights, December 4, 2014

Army Active Component (AC)/Reserve Component (RC) Force Mix: Considerations and Options for Congress, December 5, 2014

Nuclear Energy Cooperation with Foreign Countries: Issues for Congress, December 8, 2014

Hospital-Based Emergency Departments: Background and Policy Considerations, December 8, 2014

Federal Lands and Natural Resources: Overview and Selected Issues for the 113th Congress, December 8, 2014

Preventing the Introduction and Spread of Ebola in the United States: Frequently Asked Questions, December 5, 2014

Closing a Congressional Office: Overview of House and Senate Practices, December 5, 2014

Selected Privileges and Courtesies Extended to Former Members of Congress, December 5, 2014

The Tibetan Policy Act of 2002: Background and Implementation, November 5, 2014

For the next two years, Congress wants to receive quarterly reports from the Department of Defense on how the Pentagon is responding to leaks of classified information. The reporting requirement was included in the pending National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2015 (Sec. 1052).

“Compromises of classified information cause indiscriminate and long-lasting damage to United States national security and often have a direct impact on the safety of warfighters,” the Act states.

“In 2010, hundreds of thousands of classified documents were illegally copied and disclosed across the Internet,” it says, presumably referring to the WikiLeaks disclosures of that year.

“In 2013, nearly 1,700,000 files were downloaded from United States Government information systems, threatening the national security of the United States and placing the lives of United States personnel at extreme risk,” the Act states, in a presumed reference to the Snowden disclosures. “The majority of the information compromised relates to the capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures of the Armed Forces of the United States, and is the single greatest quantitative compromise in the history of the United States.”

The Secretary of Defense will be required to report on changes in policy and resource allocations that are adopted in response to significant compromises of classified information.

The defense authorization act does not address irregularities in the classification system, such as overclassification or failure to timely declassify information.

It does call for additional reporting on the Department of Defense “insider threat” program (Sec. 1628), and on “the adoption of an interim capability to continuously evaluate the security status of the employees and contractors of the Department who have been determined eligible for and granted access to classified information.”

By definition, this continuous evaluation approach does not focus on suspicious individuals or activities, but rather is designed to monitor all security-cleared personnel.

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Fact Sheet: Selected Highlights of H.R. 3979, the Carl Levin and Howard “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for FY2015, December 3, 2014

FY2015 Budget Requests to Counter Ebola and the Islamic State (IS), December 4, 2014

Proposed Train and Equip Authorities for Syria: In Brief, December 3, 2014

U.S. Assistance Programs in China, December 2, 2014

New books sent to Secrecy News for review (thanks!) but not yet read include these:

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter (reviewed in WaPo, WSJ)

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle (reviewed in WaPo, WSJ)

National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Joseph Masco

Russlands “neuer Adel”: Die Macht Des Geheimdienstes Von Gorbatschow Bis Putin von Ulf Walther

Updated below

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC IG) received a tip last year that the Intelligence Community might have assembled a database containing US person data in violation of law and policy.

“A civilian employee with the Army Intelligence and Security Command made an IC IG Hotline complaint alleging an interagency data repository, believed to be comprised of numerous intelligence and non-intelligence sources, improperly included U.S. person data,” the IC IG wrote. “The complainant also reported he conducted potentially improper searches of the data repository to verify the presence of U.S. persons data. We are researching this claim.”

The resolution of that complaint concerning improper collection of U.S. person data was not disclosed. But the IC IG evidently found it credible enough to justify a rare report to the White House Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB).

Update, 12/04/14: The IC IG said it did not corroborate the complaint. “We researched this allegation to determine whether the data repository was operating with sufficient internal controls to provide reasonable assurance that the collection, retention and dissemination of information complied with applicable laws, executive orders, policies, and regulations. We reached a preliminary conclusion that this was the case and thus had no basis for further review.” The case was closed on June 4, 2014.

The report to the IOB was noted in the IC Inspector General’s Semi-Annual report for October 2013 to March 2014 that was released this week (in redacted form) under the Freedom of Information Act.

The IC Inspector General, I. Charles McCullough III, has oversight responsibility both for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and for the Intelligence Community as a whole (but not for its individual member agencies). In addition to monitoring compliance with the law, the IC IG deals with a broad range of administrative, budgetary and personnel issues, several of which are described in the new report.

So, for example, “[An intelligence] contractor misconduct investigation substantiated that a contractor employee routinely misused government equipment and systems to engage in inappropriate and prurient Internet chat over an extended period of time.”

Judging from the Semi-Annual Reports, the IG is also capable of challenging senior ODNI leadership when there is cause to do so.

“An ODNI Senior Official engaged in conduct unbecoming a federal employee while on TDY [temporary duty] conducting official ODNI business,” according to the Semi-Annual Report for March-September 2013, which was also released this week.

“The Senior Official exhibited poor personal judgment that created circumstances which reflected poorly on the ODNI and potentially impaired his ability to perform his duties,” the IG report said. The case was referred to the ODNI Chief Management Officer, but further details such as the identity of the Senior Official were not divulged.

In the concentric circles of U.S. intelligence oversight, Inspectors General are close to the center — receiving allegations, interviewing witnesses, formulating responses, and taking appropriate action.

Though heavily redacted, the new Semi-Annual Reports include multiple points of interest, including these:

**    During the six-month period ending in March 2014, the IC IG processed 5 whistleblower complaints of waste, fraud or abuse, 3 “urgent concern” complaints, 2 requests for external review under the provisions of Presidential Policy Directive 19, and 1 whistleblower reprisal complaint. The outcomes of these cases were not described.

**    During the six-month period ending September 2013, the IC IG investigated two cases of unauthorized disclosures, neither of which was substantiated. There were no such investigations in the following six-month period.

**    “ODNI does not have a policy or process for notifying CIA Covert Capabilities Center when an employee or detailee separates from ODNI or is reassigned,” the IC IG reported. The CIA “Covert Capabilities Center” is not a familiar entity.

**    “An adverse work environment exists” in the IC Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity Office.

**    In the six-month period ending last March, the IC IG complaint hotline “received 135 contacts, 48 internal contacts and 87 external contacts from the general public. ”

**    And while most ODNI and IC employees are directed to have no contacts with the media without prior authorization, the IC Inspector General made special arrangements for himself and his staff:  “We worked with PAO [ODNI Public Affairs Office] so they understood the need for the IC IG to work independently with media contacts to preserve IC IG objectivity and independence.”

In a four-part series this week, the Washington Examiner reported allegations that some agency Inspectors General are improperly subservient to, and protective of, their agency leadership.

The National Declassification Center at the National Archives yesterday announced the availability of 240 sets of records that have recently undergone declassification processing.

Many of the record collections are listed in such banal or generic terms that it is hard to imagine they would attract any interest at all. (“Bureau of Naval Personnel Activity File, Personnel Accounting Ledger Records, 1952-1967”?)

But there are also a few items that will make at least some researchers’ hearts beat a little faster, such as three boxes of declassified “Cloud Gap Field Test Reports, 1962-69.”

Cloud Gap was an ambitious government project in the 1960s to establish the technical basis for new arms control measures. Previously disclosed Cloud Gap Field Test Reports on the verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons are posted here.

New products from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Iran: Interim Nuclear Agreement and Talks on a Comprehensive Accord, November 26, 2014

U.S. International Corporate Taxation: Basic Concepts and Policy Issues, December 2, 2014

Taxation of Internet Sales and Access: Legal Issues, December 1, 2014

The Corporate Income Tax System: Overview and Options for Reform, December 1, 2014

How OFAC Calculates Penalties for Violations of Economic Sanctions, CRS Legal Sidebar, December 1, 2014

What Is the Current State of the Economic Recovery?, CRS Insights, December 1, 2014

Employment Growth and Progress Toward Full Employment, CRS Insights, November 28, 2014

Major Disaster Declarations for Snow Assistance and Severe Winter Storms: An Overview, December 1, 2014

Jordan: Background and U.S. Relations, December 2, 2014

Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, December 2, 2014