Chapter 11: “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable,” 1990–1991

As the Department of State responded to congressional pressure, FRUS stakeholders debated the appropriate contours of responsible historical transparency. As Congress cited the remarkable geopolitical changes unfolding in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to legislate greater openness, Department historians shifted from accelerating FRUS by limiting its scope to prioritizing the comprehensiveness and integrity of the series. These developments alarmed Department officials responsible for declassification policy. Throughout 1990 and 1991, the Office of Freedom of Information, Privacy, and Classification Review (FPC) and its Historical Documents Review branch (HDR) mounted a futile defense of unaccountable secrecy against pro-transparency forces inside and outside the Department. Accustomed to winning bureaucratic struggles insulated from public scrutiny, the Department’s declassifiers were largely—but not entirely—disarmed by the attention FRUS received in the wake of the Iran volume and Cohen’s resignation.

This chapter focuses on the debate over the future of the Foreign Relations series within the Department of State during 1990 and 1991, where bureaucratic struggles over the purpose of FRUS and the proper response to academic, media, and congressional pressure for greater openness reflected stark differences about the utility and the value of responsible transparency. This focus on decisionmaking within the Department (and, to a much lesser extent, across the rest of the executive branch) complements Page Putnam Miller’s previously published account of the roles played by her own organization, the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, the academic community, and key Senators and congressional staffers in securing passage of the statute.1 Repeatedly, outside forces influenced the Department’s legislative and public relations strategy. In doing so, they helped arrest and then reverse the decade-long marginalization of responsible transparency as an essential mission of the Department. The “inside game” emphasized in this chapter complements Miller’s “outside game” account.

Action Plans: The Pell Amendment and the Departmental Stalemate, May-September 1990

The Department’s disappointing initial responses to congressional inquiries about the FRUS problem2 spurred Pell and Boren to introduce legislation to govern the FRUS series and empower the HAC. The “Pell Amendment,” introduced on May 24, envisioned radical changes in the compilation, declassification, and release of foreign affairs documentation. The amendment’s most important provision was also its most enduring: a mandate for the Department to produce a “thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity” at a 30-year publication line. Over the next year and a half, Congress significantly modified other elements of the Pell Amendment, but this core remained intact. The amendment also employed language from the original 1925 Kellogg Order to require “the editing of the record . . . to be guided by the principles of historical objectivity and accuracy.” Throughout the legislative process, Congress intended FRUS to promote transparency.3

Over the ensuing months, however, Congress displayed flexibility about the means it prescribed to achieve those ends. The initial Pell Amendment defined a very narrow range of declassification exemptions; only details about weapons and cryptographic systems and the identity of intelligence sources received automatic protection from disclosure. Such a constricted definition of presumed secrets would have created a radically different declassification system within the Department: all other excisions from FRUS would require HAC approval. In effect, the original Pell Amendment would have transformed the Committee from an advisory body into a declassification authority. Although the Pell Amendment responded to public criticism of the Iran volume, it focused far more on settling the conflict between the Department and the HAC in favor of the Committee.4

Congressional involvement galvanized the Department to address its FRUS problem. As the HAC collaborated with Congress to revise FRUS legislation, academic and congressional assessments of the Department’s plans for the future of the series assumed decisive importance. Department officials hoped that their proposed reforms could preserve vital national interests, placate the academic community, and avert congressional intervention. Even before the passage of the Foreign Relations statute in the autumn of 1991, public interest in the FRUS problem constrained the Department’s flexibility in adapting the series for the post-Cold War era. On the same day that Pell introduced his amendment, Slany expressed hope to HAC member Bradford Perkins that, if “top people in government” got involved, it might be possible to “lay down some standards and timeframes for access and release of historical records.”5 Also on that day, Ronald Spiers’s replacement as Under Secretary of State for Management, Ivan Selin, initiated a vigorous, months-long debate within the Department about how to restore a program for responsible historical transparency.6

Persisting disagreement among FRUS stakeholders about the nature and scope of the FRUS problem, which reflected the late 1980s “civil war in the Department,” complicated efforts to placate critics and forestall congressional intervention. To the academic community and to Congress, the “fraudulent” Iran volume and the HAC’s lack of access to classified information were equally serious issues. For these FRUS consumers, any credible solution to the FRUS problem would have to provide for HO’s access to (and ability to declassify) sensitive intelligence documentation and confirm the HAC’s role in ensuring the integrity of the series. Within the Department, HO initially focused on reinvigorating its FRUS acceleration efforts and mitigating the damage caused by the breakdown in the Department’s relationship with the HAC. As external criticism mounted, however, HO exploited outside pressure to lobby for longstanding objectives: expanded access to other-agency records and liberalization of the FRUS declassification process. The public outcry about the Iran volume and Cohen’s resignation shifted HO’s attention from improving the timeliness of the series to assuring its comprehensiveness and integrity.

The HAC’s critics in the Department defined the FRUS problem differently. Declassification reviewers in FPC/HDR believed that the Department’s existing practices fulfilled its responsibility for transparency. As the Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security (which oversaw the declassification staff during this period) Sheldon Krys argued in the summer of 1990, FRUS’s consumers needed to “look at the issue with a somewhat different perspective. The FRUS is not intended as a complete historical record. Rather, it is a presentation of the government’s documentary record within the constraints of national security and intelligence interests. For more than a century it has been appreciated for what it is and only a handful would argue now that its integrity is diminished.”7 Management Operations staff, relocated to M/FMP, cited media and congressional criticism following Cohen’s resignation as proof that their earlier warnings about the HAC had been correct. They urged the Department to solve its “HAC problem” by limiting the Committee’s mandate to exclude declassification issues altogether. As HO worked to address the elements of the FRUS problem that most rankled its primary consumers, bureaucratic rivals within the Department continued to warn of the dangers of excessive transparency and champion the need for greater security.

Unlike during the 1980s, declassification reviewers and management operations advisers proved unable to dictate Department policy for FRUS and the HAC. Although external pressure—especially congressional interest—played a decisive part in promoting greater transparency, altered internal dynamics also played a critical role. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler was much closer to Secretary of State James Baker than any of her predecessors were to George Shultz; although she delegated the “FRUS problem” to her deputies (principally Deputy Assistant Secretaries Kim Hoggard and George Kennedy), PA wielded more bureaucratic clout in 1990 and 1991 than during the 1980s. Under Secretary of State for Management Ivan Selin also proved far more amenable to giving the HAC access to classified material and far more invested in ensuring FRUS’s integrity than Ronald Spiers had been.8 These internal factors helped marginalize FRUS’s bureaucratic opponents as the Department publicly responded to the FRUS problem, especially after congressional initiatives forced the Department to devise an action plan in an ultimately futile effort to preempt unwelcome legislative intervention.

HO and PA seized the initiative in these efforts, first with a staff study prepared in the spring and later with a draft action plan to implement the study’s conclusions. Although the FRUS staff study initiative began as a way to reinvigorate acceleration efforts that flagged in the late-1980s, HO’s priorities shifted substantially in the spring of 1990. In January, Slany had jumped at the chance to “reduce the process of preparing and publishing Foreign Relations volumes into a realistic undertaking” that could lead to a “modernized, slimmed down, and accelerated Foreign Relations series.”9 By the time the draft staff study was prepared in early May, however, HO acknowledged that the 1980s acceleration effort had largely failed. Not only had “the series not reached or even drawn nearer the 30-year line,” but “questions and concerns have arisen among academic users regarding the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the series.” Addressing the FRUS problem required both improving and verifying the integrity of the series. The staff study proposed reviving the acceleration of the series to meet the 30-year publication line, expanding HO access to interagency documents, reforming the declassification process, and assuring “adequate access” for the HAC to verify the integrity of the series.10

HO hoped that a revised Presidential directive could promote these objectives in the face of bureaucratic resistance. HO’s draft directive differed from Reagan’s 1985 initiative in several ways. It characterized the “timely and comprehensive official disclosure of historical foreign affairs records” as “more vital than ever” in light of “momentous world changes.” It recognized the “public’s absolute right to the authoritative disclosure of foreign affairs commitments and undertakings of government officials.” It identified FRUS as “the proper vehicle for the systematic official disclosure of the main lines of American foreign policy in its proper historical context.” It required other government agencies to “facilitate necessary access to their historical records” and then “accord necessary priority” to the declassification of selected documents “to move toward and achieve a date-certain of 30 years for public release.” Finally, the draft directive ordered the Secretary of State to “maintain a suitable advisory process . . . to assure that the published record adheres to generally accepted standards.” These pro-transparency additions notwithstanding, HO’s staff study placed its hopes for protecting the future of the series upon the same ephemeral Executive branch mandates to improve interagency cooperation that had failed since the 1950s.11

Consideration of the staff study within the Department reflected battle lines drawn during the 1980s. Declassification reviewers rejected HO proposals to grant the HAC access to classified materials and expand HO’s role in interagency declassification coordination. In comments written in the margin of the draft staff study that was transmitted to HDR, Department declassification officials dismissed a six-month review deadline as “unrealistic” and pronounced that the “current [declassification] system ain’t broke.”12 To deflect focus from HDR and to forestall Department adoption “of a number of fundamental points which would adversely affect I[nformation] M[anagement], and which are unacceptable,” Frank Machak urged Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Information Services Robert Johnson to reiterate declassifiers’ longstanding complaints about HO mismanagement of the FRUS production process.13 In a May meeting with HO managers, HDR representatives warned that initiatives to broaden the scope of FRUS would threaten interagency cooperation. Moreover, they dismissed HO’s approach as “exaggerat[ing] the need of the public to be informed about its foreign affairs past.” HDR believed that “a 50-year line would be as useful as a 30-year line for release.” HDR wanted the HAC “muzzled and reorganized in order to narrow drastically its mandate” since the Committee had “no business making judgments about the accuracy or comprehensiveness of documentary volumes.” Despite the growing urgency of the FRUS problem, HDR predicted that “it will take months, perhaps until 1991, to coordinate the various steps required by the Staff Study within the Department and with other agencies.”14

Pell’s proposal and Selin’s engagement ended HDR’s complacency. On May 11, Hoggard forwarded HO’s draft staff study to Selin and solicited his assistance in finding “some measures [the Department] can take to address some of the concerns of the Advisory Committee”—concerns that PA considered “legitimate.”15 On May 24—the same day Pell introduced his amendment in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—Selin met with PA and FPC officials to “discuss PA/HO’s problem in getting access for its staff to historic records of other agencies.” FPC reiterated its concerns that reforming FRUS could have “adverse operational repercussions” and tried to steer the discussion away from the role of the HAC. Selin nevertheless ordered an action plan that addressed the full range of problems identified by the HO staff study.16

HO intended for its action plan to address both dimensions of the FRUS problem by ensuring that Department historians had sufficient interagency access to compile comprehensive volumes and providing the HAC with the information required to verify the integrity of the series. Although Slany’s plan concluded that measures to improve the quality of FRUS would not “compromise” plans to reach the “30-year line by 1996,”17 all of its recommendations focused on improving FRUS’s comprehensiveness, not its timeliness. The plan addressed four elements of the FRUS production process implicated in complaints about the “accuracy and completeness of the record”: broadening interagency research access, reforming the declassification process, providing editorial mechanisms for identifying and explaining omissions within the volumes, and expanding HAC access to classified material. Slany envisioned a multifaceted solution to the access problem. For most agencies, a Presidential memorandum would suffice to ensure requisite HO access. For the CIA, Slany described a cooperative arrangement with Agency historians that would obviate the need for Department of State historians to access CIA archives directly. He also proposed expanding documentation of Congress’s role in the foreign policy process. To reform the declassification system, Slany proposed expanding FRUS historians’ role in the declassification coordination function by reversing the changes that had been made following the 1980 re-review. He also suggested empowering an ombudsman to oversee the Department’s declassification system. To make the extent of excisions and deletions more apparent to FRUS consumers, Slany promised expanded prefaces, “precise accounting” of omissions within documents, and improved unclassified summaries of documents that could not be declassified. Finally, the plan called for the HAC to review clearance denials and excisions so that it could evaluate the integrity of the series.18

As the Department deliberated on HO’s action plan during the summer of 1990, an interagency consensus arose that the Pell Amendment posed significant constitutional and functional problems for effectively conducting foreign relations and safeguarding national security. FPC/HDR predicted that, if enacted, FRUS legislation along the lines of the Pell Amendment would “pose serious operational and practical difficulties for the Department.” Declassifiers complained that the Pell Amendment’s “limited grounds” for exempting information from declassification “pertain[ed] to only some aspects of national security,” were “overly vague and open-ended,” and “conflict[ed] with other laws.” They also worried that the law would “result in a fundamental change in the whole information security system, which would become, in effect, ‘declassification by default.’” Finally, FPC/HDR cautioned against augmenting the role of the HAC, whose members would find both the security procedures and the time commitment required to fulfill its new mandate too onerous. They warned that, “in the last three years[,] there have been at least two security violations by historians involved in the advisory committee process.19 Can the USG [U.S. Government] afford,” they asked, “to take [the] risk” of giving academics the responsibility of balancing openness with national security? FPC/HDR hoped President Bush would veto the law if Congress passed it.20

The CIA also registered its opposition to the Pell Amendment. In a June 23 letter to Sen. Boren, Director of Central Intelligence William Webster called attention to the legislation’s narrow exemptions from declassification, which “essentially declassifies everything” else. Without incorporating the existing E.O. 12356, National Security Act, CIA Information Act, or FOIA protections for “intelligence sources and methods,” Webster warned that the Pell Amendment “could in effect declassify every Presidential Finding and National Intelligence Estimate by mandating their publication in the historical series.” He demanded, “at a minimum,” that any FRUS legislation incorporate FOIA declassification exemptions and affirm originating-agency authority over “the decision on what documents may be provided or published” via FRUS.21 In response to Webster’s intervention, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff proffered “extensive revision[s]” to the proposed FRUS legislation. Among other changes, “the categories for withholding documents [were] expanded to meet some of the CIA complaints” and other agencies were allowed to “collect and provide” requested documentation rather than grant FRUS historians direct access to their records.22

While FRUS’s stakeholders within the Department agreed in the summer of 1990 that the Pell Amendment was a poor remedy to the FRUS problem, they disagreed about the feasibility and wisdom of Slany’s alternative. Initial reactions to the HO action plan within the Department reflected predictable bureaucratic priorities. Richard Mueller, whose principal objective as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs was placating Congress, thought Slany’s plan offered “basically the right direction.” Selin pronounced it “quite good,” but warned HO that the HAC must not be allowed to oversee declassification, only assess the accuracy and integrity of the FRUS series.23 FPC/HDR dismissed the HO plan as “not likely to be viewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an acceptable substitute for” FRUS legislation. Despite their fear of congressional action to revise information security policies, the Department’s declassification staff obstructed the most plausible alternative to legislative intervention in FRUS.24

Over the summer, FRUS’s detractors within the Department collaborated to kill Slany’s action plan.25 Opponents from FPC/HDR and M/FMP rejected HO’s “assumption” that it was possible to prepare a truly “accurate and complete history of US foreign affairs” and that such a record could be “declassified and published within thirty years under the terms of E.O. 12356.”26 In late June and early July, HDR chief Richard Morefield led efforts to water down the action plan’s proposed changes in the Department’s declassification system, especially those expanding HO’s role in the declassification process.27 M/FMP was even more hostile to Slany’s plan. Susan Tait, the Department’s Advisory Committee Management Officer, and Carl Dillery downplayed the gravity of the FRUS problem and questioned whether secrecy had ever harmed the Department. They also insisted that “clarification of the committee’s mission [to exclude declassification]” would,” in some unspecified way, “allay suspicions on the Hill and in the academic world.” FMP saw the 1990 FRUS problem as part of a pattern of “HAC criticism, Congressional involvement[,] and . . . subsequent confrontation” that demanded a “Department-wide perspective” to address.28 FPC and FMP obstructionism ultimately proved costly to their own stated priorities. Flexibility in the summer of 1990 might have gone a long way to convincing Congress that the Department understood the urgency of dealing with the FRUS problem.

HDR reviewers also attempted to reshape the public discourse in the summer of 1990. In early June, the Foreign Service Journal invited both PA and HDR to respond to Cohen’s charges against the Department. PA’s response outlined remedies for the FRUS problem.29 HDR was more defensive. An early draft denied Cohen’s allegation that the Department reneged on a promise to show the Committee classified material, but this language was removed after a “session with Bovis” that left Dwight Ambach “less than amused” about what his predecessor had offered the HAC in the summer of 1989. The declassification staff also thought better of the draft’s argument that HAC’s criticism of the Iran volume proved that the Committee didn’t need additional access to make judgments about the integrity of the series. While their final letter (which the Foreign Service Journal published in November 1990) was less polemical than these early drafts, HDR remained oblivious about public expectations for openness. HDR recommended that the HAC focus upon its core competency, which was “advising on major substantive questions such as the kinds of issues that should be given priority in the FRUS of the future”—not assessing the integrity or comprehensiveness of the declassification process. When Cohen responded to their letter in the February 1991 issue, he concluded that, “by revealing their inability to recognize the gravity of the [FRUS] problem, they may make a better case for the pending legislation to strengthen the advisory committee than I did.”30

The Department focused its summer marketing efforts on the HAC. Selin understood that HAC support for the Department’s action plan was vital to defeating the Pell Amendment. He arranged an emergency meeting—without proper public notice31—with several Committee members on July 23. Hoggard, Kennedy, and Mueller briefed four HAC members on the Department’s tentative plans to modernize FRUS, its progress in upgrading the Committee’s security clearances, and its objections to the proposed legislation. HAC member Anne Van Camp agreed with the Department that the “scope and nature of the responsibility of the proposed Advisory Committee to review all withheld historical documents appeared to be totally unworkable.” The meeting closed with Department officials urging HAC members to defer “strong judgments . . . about the pending legislation” until they had the opportunity to consider the final version of the FRUS action plan.32 The HAC’s discomfort with transforming itself into a declassification body, a key feature of the Pell Amendment, aided the Department’s effort to avoid legislation in 1990. Following this meeting, the Department also began including the broad outlines of HO’s FRUS action plan in its responses to congressional inquiries.33

Selin struggled to secure intra-Departmental agreement on the action plan at the end of the summer. In August, FPC again rejected the idea that “the security requirements [for historical documents] need or even can be ‘balanced’ against the need for ‘an objective and accurate permanent historical record.’ That need must be met within the admitted restrictions required by security. . . . The historical record must be compiled from material which no longer requires protection.”34 This continuing intransigence made it impossible for the Department to forge a consensus strategy to address the FRUS problem. For M, H, PA, and HO, the situation was clear: the only way to avoid congressional interference with Departmental (and executive branch) prerogatives was to offer the HAC a satisfactory action plan so the Committee would endorse the Department’s position.

For FPC and FMP, the situation was more problematic. Although these officials shared the broader goal of avoiding congressional intervention, they believed that the compromises required to placate the HAC posed their own intolerable operational risks and management problems. Richard Morefield coordinated with L and FMP to devise a “mutually acceptable” response to HO. Their criticisms focused on the constitutional issues at stake and they asserted that security requirements trumped the integrity of the historical record and any conceivable HAC responsibility. L maintained that “classification and declassification decisions are functions of the Executive Branch, and committee members have neither the requisite experiences nor expertise with national security matters to engage in such activity.”35 FPC also initiated a parallel effort to refocus attention away from basic issues and toward detailed procedural recommendations for dealing with the HAC and accusations of poor HO management.36

Faced with intransigent bureaucratic opponents, Slany reported to PA in September that “conflicting premises” prevented progress on the action plan. While PA and HO perceived a “problem with the current methodology for selecting and declassifying the record to be printed,” FPC believed the process was working as it should. HO wanted the HAC to play “a prime role in confirming . . . the accuracy and completeness of the Foreign Relations series.” Departmental critics believed that the Committee needed to be reined in rather than given additional authority.37 Developments on Capitol Hill, Slany warned, made this familiar impasse more dangerous than ever in the fall of 1990.

The Inevitability of Legislation, September 1990–February 1991

Even as Department critics worked to restrict the HAC’s role, Pell altered the language of his draft legislation to expand the Committee’s authority beyond FRUS. This second revision of the Pell amendment mandated that Department records be automatically declassified and released at NARA when they became 30 years old unless the HAC “reviewed and withheld” them.38 Claiming that “this is no time for the United States to depart from the tradition of providing an accurate and complete historical record of the actions taken by our government in the field of foreign relations,” Pell introduced—and the Senate passed—this revised FRUS legislation as a stand-alone bill in October.39

The Department redoubled its efforts to defeat Pell’s revised FRUS legislation. PA and FPC agreed that the automatic declassification provision was unworkable, but disagreed about the most effective way of influencing Congress. In September, PA urged the Department to endorse the HO plan for the future of FRUS and propose its own FRUS/declassification statute to regain the initiative in Congress. FPC wanted the Department to zealously guard its prerogatives without committing to any specific course of action, especially the still-contested HO plan.40 On October 24, the Department of Justice reinforced FPC tenacity by agreeing that the Pell Amendment “trenches on the President’s constitutional authority to protect state secrets, . . . intrudes upon the deliberative privilege for communications within the Executive Branch, . . . [and] does not provide for sufficient presidential direction and control over the operations of the Advisory Committee to be created under the bill.”41

The next day, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Janet Mullins wrote to Representative Dante Fascell (D–FL), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to dissuade him from following the Senate and bringing Pell’s legislation to a vote before the 101st Congress adjourned. Her letter criticized the statute’s “derogation from the uniform government-wide classification system,” especially its failure to account for statutory protections for several categories of sensitive information; its “creating additional bureaucratic layers and processes”; and its elevation of the HAC into a “high-level declassification review body” whose encroachments on Presidential powers “would raise serious constitutional questions.” Mullins’s letter assured Fascell that “the Department is fully committed to maintaining the integrity of the Foreign Relations series and is pursuing all options of improving the scholarship and timeliness of the series in the future,” but provided no detail about HO’s action plan or the associated internal debate.42 After the House adjourned without acting on the FRUS statute, FPC immediately focused on securing “high level involvement . . . to kill the measure” when the 102nd Congress opened in January 1991.43

As the stakes of the legislative battle rose, Selin endorsed the PA and HO position during the November 1990 HAC meeting. Selin renewed the HAC charter with minimal revisions in advance of the meeting.44 To demonstrate “high-level concern about the FRUS,”45 he arranged to meet with the Committee over lunch. During this meeting, Selin offered the HAC two significant concessions that the Department’s declassification reviewers and management advisers had vigorously resisted throughout the 1980s: “the Advisory Committee would receive the necessary clearances and ‘need to know’ to review documents withheld from Foreign Relations volumes” and “the Advisory Committee’s mandate extended beyond the Foreign Relations series itself to the larger body of Department documents permanently preserved at the National Archives.” Related to the latter, Selin “acknowledged that the Committee’s access to the Department’s relevant systematic review declassification guidelines was necessary to allow it to fully evaluate the accuracy and completeness” of the historical record. Selin hoped that his acceptance of the HAC’s demands would obviate further consideration of the Senate’s FRUS legislation, but his intervention established a baseline for HAC expectations that went beyond anything the FPC and FMP considered acceptable.46

The next day, the Committee encountered two starkly different views of the U.S. Government’s responsibility to inform the American people of its historical actions. Richard Morefield repeated familiar arguments that declassification resided outside the HAC’s purview and tried to deflect blame for declassification delays from FPC to HO. Morefield’s rigidity alienated the Committee at the worst possible moment, just before a discussion on the status of FRUS legislation with key congressional staffers Frank Sieverts (Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and James Currie (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence). Sieverts explained that Senators Pell, Boren, William Cohen, and Jesse Helms feared that, without a legislative mandate for FRUS, both the standards and existence of the series remained vulnerable to the whims of the Executive Branch. They wanted to “make both Foreign Relations and the existence of the Committee a matter of law.” Currie ridiculed the Department’s objections to the FRUS statute, characterizing Mullins’s October 25 letter as “hyperbolic” and “paranoid.” Borrowing the rhetoric of Senator Helms, Sieverts described the Department’s “present system of declassification . . . as ‘corporate statism’” while the legislation “envisioned a ‘free enterprise’ approach in which private scholars would take control.”47 Both staffers emphasized that the legislation would greatly expand access to other-agency documentation for the FRUS series. Currie assured the HAC that its proposed role in the Department’s declassification activities would focus on overseeing review procedures rather than evaluating individual documents. In response to HAC concerns that a legislative mandate would constrain efforts to reform FRUS, Sieverts responded that Congress was primarily concerned with assuring the series’s future. Although prompt Department action could obviate congressional micromanagement, Sieverts informed the Committee and the Department that “Foreign Relations needed a legislative mandate; thus, [Congress] intended to go forward with the legislation. Important declassification and Foreign Relations goals,” he concluded, “belong in the law.”48

Sieverts’s and Currie’s comments during the HAC meeting convinced PA that legislation was inevitable. Early in December, Hoggard issued a stark warning to Selin: failure to deal with the FRUS problem could threaten the credibility of the entire executive branch. She predicted that, if “public criticism of the FRUS continue at the boisterous level it has already attained, . . . its target [could] shift to the Secretary in such a manner as to question his commitment (and that of the Administration’s [sic]) to provide accurate and complete information to the public.” In turning to Selin for high-level support for PA’s solution to the FRUS problem, Hoggard reported that “bureaucratic foot-dragging has impeded any hope of getting Department-approved proposed legislation to the Hill in the new year without your impetus.” In the previous year, she lamented, “the Department incorrectly thought that ‘if you ignore it, it will go away’” only to discover that “Congressional oversight . . . [and] the Historical Advisory Committee [are] fact[s] of life. The Department,” she argued, “must accept these realities and make them work to our advantage.”49

Hoggard offered a four-part strategy to neutralize the FRUS problem. First, Selin had to approve the long-delayed action plan. The Department should also propose a Presidential memorandum, which Senate staffers suggested “could” deflect congressional action, to “direct relevant agencies to cooperate with the Department in assembling, declassifying, and publishing” the series. To strengthen its leverage on the Hill, Selin should change tactics and “express support for the general objectives of the pending legislation, willingness to have some general legislative mandate for the . . . series, but offer the Department’s [FRUS modernization program] as the only appropriate and workable way of dealing with the operational aspects of assuring an accurate and complete published historical record.” Finally, the Department had to expedite additional clearances for the HAC so it could undertake its “heightened responsibilities to verify” the integrity of FRUS.50

The next day, Hoggard and Tutwiler met with the new HAC Chair, Warren Kimball, to inform the Advisory Committee of their strategy for resolving the FRUS problem. Kimball reported to the rest of the Committee that PA and Selin “believe that legislation is so likely that they want to work with Congress to improve the bill.” PA explained that it had designed its plan to “fit into a broader piece of legislation that could (should?) include in it a legislative mandate for (1) the FRUS series . . . , (2) the existence of our HAC, and (3) ‘automatic’ declassification of State Department documents after 30 years (always within the limitations established by other legislation).” Kimball responded that the HAC would likely support the formula of “legislation that established principles . . . combined with procedures and regulations developed internally by the Department to implement those principles.” He also clarified that the HAC intended to focus on “assuring the public of the integrity of the process” for FRUS production and the declassification and transfer of records to NARA rather than “provide any sort of ‘imprimatur’ for either the FRUS series or any specific volume.” To his colleagues on the HAC, Kimball observed “bureaucracies seem to have two speeds—all stop and all ahead flank. For the moment, this matter seems to have rung up the latter.”51

As PA moved to secure Selin’s support for its FRUS plan, FPC worked to convince Frank Sieverts that the proposed FRUS legislation was a mistake. Over lunch on December 20, several HDR reviewers explained the declassification process in greater detail. They emphasized the impossibility of “automatic” declassification and the relationship between declassification review for FRUS and the preparation of systematic review guidelines for use at NARA. Although William Hamilton expressed hope that Sieverts “might be a voice of moderation in Hill discussions if the House can be influenced toward modification [of the existing Senate language],” he judged that the Senate staffer “still believed that ‘historians’ are right to have greater say in what can properly be released—they are the source of Olympian judgments above partisan or bureaucratic constraints.” Charles Flowerree added that Sieverts had confided that “what the historians really wanted was access to the files at NARA at the 30 year line. The FRUS dust-up was just a convenient way of getting at the problem.”52

In January 1991, Selin directed Roger Gamble and Ambassador Barrington King, troubleshooters in FMP, to “forge a consensus on the FRUS plan and on how to deal with Capitol Hill.” In late January and early February, King narrowed the differences between HO and HDR so that the Department could begin “planning and executing a congressional strategy.” FMP finally recognized that the Department’s strategy “required “mend[ing] our fences with the Advisory Committee” and enlisting their support. With backing from the Committee, King hoped that the Department could persuade the Senate to “drop the two most objectionable features of the Pell legislation: a cumbersome statutory advisory committee and the requirement that the Department’s records be automatically declassified after thirty years.” Selin endorsed King’s strategy on January 22.53

Over the next three weeks, FPC continued its efforts to minimize the Department’s commitments under the FRUS plan. On February 4, William Hamilton met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Irvin Hicks, to cultivate support for FPC’s position in the geographic bureaus. Hicks offered to discuss the issue informally with Senator Boren over dinner and coordinate with INR to push back against the PA position.54 Even after revised “to the point where [FPC] reluctantly can recommend DS clearance,”55 declassification reviewers maintained that the FRUS plan posed unnecessary risks. They wanted the Department to prepare a “fall back position, including a recommended veto,” if the plan failed to satisfy FRUS’s critics and Congress passed legislation. They also warned about the vastly expanded declassification resources that would be required to declassify FRUS, let alone meet even a “generalized commitment to opening State records at a 30-year line.”56 Ambassador King found persuading DS and INR to accept the revised plan so difficult that he turned back to the earliest U.S. Government efforts to publish its diplomatic secrets, including “covert actions” to secure French aid during the Revolution, to demonstrate the republic’s resilience.57 PA and DS informed Selin that they had reached agreement on a FRUS action plan on February 15.58

Within two weeks, Selin implemented the Department’s congressional strategy. At a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee meeting on February 27, he argued that “the right thing on [resolving the FRUS controversy] was not what [the Senate] passed” but accepted that the “concern of the [Senate Foreign Relations] Committee was . . . completely justified.” Selin admitted the Department had “not [been] doing the right thing on all this” and embraced the HAC’s need to have access to withheld classified material to evaluate the integrity of the publishable record. He also assured the subcommittee that the Department was working “to speed up the process by which documents are declassified and to put a stronger onus on any agency that cares not to declassify a document.” Concluding his remarks on the Department’s FRUS plan, the Under Secretary reported that he “personally had been rather deeply involved in this question, because it struck me as a tempest in a teapot, and I couldn’t understand why, when it was such an obviously sensible position—I couldn’t understand why we didn’t get there. So I have spent a lot of time myself in being the catalyst to bring this to the place where it is now.”59 For the rest of 1991, the key issue facing the Department was how—not whether—Congress would legislate transparency.

Legislating Transparency: The FRUS Statute, March-October 1991

The enacted version of the FRUS statute took shape during the spring and summer of 1991. Despite PA and M acceptance of the inevitability of legislation, FPC sought support from bureaucratic allies elsewhere in the executive branch for a presidential veto of any FRUS statute that did not conform to the existing declassification regime. Despite NSC opposition to the proposed legislation, the Department moved on to quibbling over details in the House and Senate versions of the statute by the end of the summer. After Congress reconciled the House and Senate versions and passed the bill containing the FRUS statute in October, President Bush issued a signing statement asserting presidential authority over decisionmaking regarding national security secrecy. Although the FRUS statute offered a decisive rebuke to the previous decade’s erosion of openness, additional work had to be completed before responsible historical transparency could be fully restored.

In March, the Advisory Committee met to discuss the Department’s approved FRUS action plan. Although Hoggard reported to Selin that the Committee was “extremely pleased with and supportive of the steps taken by the Department . . . to remedy concerns regarding the Foreign Relations series,” HAC members actually spent most of the March 13 meeting asking tough questions about how the action plan could work without additional legislative endorsement.60 In FMP and FPC accounts of the meeting, the HAC dismissed the Department’s action plan. Kimball opened the meeting by saying that “part of the Department’s plan was window dressing and other parts did not interest the committee.” He reported that he “consulted five past chairmen of this committee and while they like the [Department] plan, they are skeptical about chances for its implementation.” Recalling how “previous Presidential memos . . . have been quickly discarded or forgotten,” Kimball regarded this approach as a “cliché.” Committee members suspected “that a Presidential memorandum will not have any effect on CIA or DOD.” They believed that legislation would compel interagency cooperation for FRUS more effectively than another round of carefully hedged Presidential exhortation. With fresh memories of the Department contemplating “abolishing the Committee,” HAC members also insisted that “their responsibilities must be established in law, lest . . . the current favorable environment shift in the future.” By the end of the meeting, “no one [on the Committee] opposed the view that some kind of basic legislation . . . was necessary to formally sanction the role of the FRUS and the mandate of the advisory committee and its members.” William Hamilton reflected that “the hole into which FPC has fallen seems deeper and without any firm bottom.”61

During the spring and summer of 1991, the House and Senate proposed different versions of the FRUS statute as part of the Department of State’s basic authorization bill. The Senate version, while revised since 1990, retained the thrust of the Pell Amendment. For example, although the HAC would not be empowered to overrule Department decisions to deny declassification of documents selected for FRUS, it could refer such disputes directly to the Secretary of State for resolution. The language also restricted the access requirement for FRUS historians to records that were at least 26 years old.62 The Senate set 60-day declassification review deadlines for FRUS referrals and defined specific criteria—based upon, but not identical to, existing standards—for continued classification of documents over 30 years old.63 Finally, the Senate established a 5-year deadline for bringing FRUS to the 30-year line and a 2-year deadline to comply with the systematic declassification review requirement.64 Pell and Boren endorsed the Senate version of the FRUS statute on July 29.65

The House proposed legislation marginally more appealing to FRUS’s critics. In response to “Administration concerns” echoing two centuries of debate over “constitutional issues relating to the exercise of executive functions, protection of national security, and potential claims of executive privilege,” the House added a “Presidential privilege” to its version of FRUS legislation that could be used in “exceptional circumstances” to “preserve the integrity of the . . . deliberative process.” The House also affirmed that the declassification procedures of the legislation would be “subject to existing legal standards for the protection of classified information. Thus, records selected for inclusion in the series should be declassified unless existing law requires that they remain classified.” Although the HAC would receive security clearances needed to make a “valid judgment about what should be included in the publication,” it would not serve as the declassification appeals body envisioned by the Pell Amendment. The House imposed a reporting requirement for improving the Department’s existing systematic declassification program, an important difference from the Senate’s more assertive stance of defining exemption criteria and mandating deadlines.66

Once the Department finally accepted that it was “clearly too late to delay or derail the legislation,” security-minded officials continued to insist on revisions in its language. Although the Senate “responded to most of the Department’s main concerns about automatic declassification of Department records and the role of the Advisory Committee,” L and FPC sought changes to incorporate existing statutory and regulatory declassification standards, reduce the authority of the HAC, streamline FRUS appeal procedures, “maintain flexibility in the prescribed 30-year timeline” for publication,67 and eliminate the mandate to declassify and release Department records after 30 years.68 In May, the NSC proposed similar revisions to the House version of the legislation.69

In the summer, the Department worked to convince Congress and the HAC that implementation of the action plan made statutory micromanagement of FRUS unnecessary. The June 18 meeting of the Advisory Committee, whose members now possessed upgraded Top Secret clearances, offered a test of whether the Department’s response to the FRUS problem provided the academic community with sufficient capacity to assure the integrity of the Foreign Relations series and provide advice about the opening of Department records at the National Archives. In April and May, HO worked with FPC to plan detailed briefings centered on the Department’s systematic review declassification guidelines.70 In the days before the meeting, FPC also coordinated Departmental and interagency clearances to confirm the HAC’s “need to know” information withheld from FRUS volumes. The NSC denied clearance to some Presidential records and EAP refused to share classified documents concerning Japan, 1958–1960 with the HAC, but the requested clearances were granted in most other cases.71 HO also prepared sample summaries of the declassification review process for specific volumes to model refinements envisioned for prefaces in future volumes.72

The meeting did not have the impact that the Department hoped. According to the meeting minutes, the Committee divided its attention between the dueling FRUS statutes in Congress and declassification questions. After Kimball promised that the HAC would play an active role in channeling academic views of FRUS legislation to Congress, Frank Machak noted that the NSC remained “concerned with protecting the President’s constitutional prerogatives.”73 Although Committee members were disappointed by continuing restrictions in their access to classified documents withheld from FRUS, they deferred making a formal protest after learning of the tight time constraints involved in securing the necessary Departmental and NSC clearances for this meeting. Despite the Committee’s inability to review documents withheld from the Japan, 1958–1960 compilation, HO and FPC alerted the Committee that even clearing a substantive disclaimer for the volume would be difficult. Morefield confided that “the Department would not be able to print this volume for the foreseeable future” owing to “concern” that publishing material about “nuclear weapons and status of forces” might “damage current relations.” Bradford Perkins defended this decision, agreeing that “this type of information had been legitimately withheld.” Kimball, too, accepted the validity of continued secrecy for these Japan documents. The Committee, however, criticized virtually all of the excisions and denials proposed for the Italy, 1955–1957 and the Indonesia, 1958–1960 compilations.74 Although the HAC employed its hard-won access to argue against secrecy that it deemed excessive, it also accepted excisions justified by clear national security imperatives. While the HAC displayed a willingness to compromise, Tait feared “its aspirations” to dictate declassification policy threatened to make “this mismanaged committee . . . an embarrassment to the entire Department.”75

After the meeting, the HAC moved to address the NSC’s concerns about the pending FRUS legislation. On July 9, Kimball met with NSC Deputy Legal Adviser Stephen Rademaker to discuss the NSC’s three constitutional concerns. First, the provisions guaranteeing HAC access to “any documentation it may wish to see” flouted Presidential authority over national security and the Secretary of State’s ability to conduct foreign relations. Second, the reporting requirements in the draft legislation “obliged” the Secretary of State and other agency directors to “take various steps” without regard for their (or the President’s) discretion. Finally, Rademaker rejected the proposed legislation’s defined exemptions for systematic declassification as “different from and at variance with standards established by the President for all other declassification.” Agreeing that “a vetoed bill was something that the administration” and the academic community “would prefer to avoid,” Kimball and Rademaker devised a compromise to the access and reporting requirements that recognized the discretion of the Secretary of State to accept or reject the Committee’s requests, “provided the Secretary informed the Committee in writing” why any of their requests were denied.76

As the Department grappled with the competing FRUS statutes, FPC focused its efforts on avoiding a legal mandate for systematic review that it lacked the resources to satisfy. FPC estimated that the proposed requirement to systematically review 30-year old records for declassification within 3 years would require 50 additional declassification reviewers at a cost of $4–5 million.77 Citing these figures, Morefield urged the Department to threaten to recommend a veto of the Senate version of the FRUS statute. “If legislation is inevitable,” he concluded, “the House committee version is far preferable.”78 On September 12, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger informed the House and Senate conferees who would reconcile the two versions of the legislation that “we continue to think legislation is unnecessary with respect to the Foreign Relations of the United States historical series . . . , but prefer the House version.”79

Instead of amending the House language, the conferees blended the House and Senate versions of the FRUS legislation in October. To the chagrin of FPC, the compromise language incorporated the Senate provision mandating systematic review at a 30-year line. The final FRUS statute retained Pell’s May 1990 charter for the series, including multiple deployments of the directive verb “shall”:

Congress also gave the HAC a statutory mandate to: and to

Congress ordered “other departments, agencies, and other entities of the United States Government . . . [to] cooperate with the Office of the Historian by providing full and complete access to the records pertinent to United States foreign policy decisions and actions and by providing copies of selected records” that were 26 years old or older. The statute established 120-day deadlines for agency declassification review “in accordance with that agency’s procedures for such review” and 60-day appeal deadlines. It also required the Department of State to declassify its records after 30 years unless exempted by one of four criteria (weapons systems, intelligence sources, “would demonstrably impede current diplomatic negotiations or other ongoing official activities of the United States Government or would demonstrably impair the national security of the United States,” and personal privacy) and to report on its progress in meeting this requirement in 180 days. Finally, the statute provided for quarterly, rather than annual, meetings of the Advisory Committee.81

Upon signing the Foreign Relations Authorization Act on October 28, President George H. W. Bush asserted “fundamental constitutional principles” that would guide the executive branch’s implementation of the law. Responding to the FRUS statute, Bush insisted that the law must be interpreted in conformity with my constitutional responsibility and authority to protect the national security of the United States by preventing the disclosure of state secrets and to protect deliberative communications within the executive branch. To the extent that [the FRUS statute] addressed the standards for declassification of national security information, it will be interpreted to effect no change in the standards set forth in the existing Executive order on national security information. Further, [the FRUS statute] will be implemented in a manner and on a schedule that will not risk ill-considered release of protected information.82

Although its language was flexible enough to allow for the continued protection of classified information and its ultimate significance depended upon the manner of its implementation by a divided executive branch, the FRUS statute staked a potent marker that the era of eroding transparency had ended. Even so, in subsequent years, security-minded officials continued to rely upon competing statutory, regulatory, and administrative authorities to moderate the FRUS statute’s promotion of openness. Even as the Department embraced greater transparency, other U.S. Government agencies retained—and used—substantial leverage to influence the contents of FRUS. Advocates of openness hailed the FRUS statute, but acknowledged that hard work still lay ahead before the series could resume its traditional role as a leading vehicle of responsible historical transparency for U.S. foreign and national security policies. This prospect would ultimately prove even more daunting that expected because maintaining “traditional” levels of comprehensiveness required the series to incorporate entirely unprecedented types of documentation, especially with regard to intelligence activities and covert operations abroad.

In the media and to academic constituencies, transparency advocates hailed the FRUS statute as a significant measure promoting U.S. Government openness. On September 25, Warren Kimball wrote to the New York Times to laud the pending FRUS statute as a “step in the right direction.”83 On October 31, Slany “praised the new law” in the Washington Post, “calling it ‘the greatest step forward” since the 1925 Kellog Order. Page Putnam Miller was also “extremely pleased” even as she expressed “concern . . . that some agencies and departments might try to expand specific exemptions from disclosure into major loopholes.” Miller hoped that “the new provisions for cooperation and outside oversight may restrict potential abuses of the exemptions.”84 To the readers of the SHAFR Newsletter, she noted that the FRUS statute “marked the first time that Congress has legislated on the matter of systematic declassification, a policy that has previously been governed by executive orders.” In the same issue of the Newsletter, Kimball reported that “this legislation, together with a State Department ‘Plan’ written . . . earlier this year, should go a long way toward making the historical record of American foreign policy and diplomacy, whether published or in open archives, complete and free of the distortion created by the misuse of classification so as to hide from view documents that are only politically embarrassing or awkward.” He closed his report by recognizing the contributions made by Warren Cohen, Frank Sieverts, Jim Curr[ie], Page Miller, Brad Perkins, “and three others who are best left with the code names X, Y, and Z” to secure passage of the FRUS statute.85

When FPC received this issue of the SHAFR Newsletter, the new head of HDR, Joe Chaddic, asked “should I ask HO who X, Y, & Z are?” Dwight Ambach replied that “HO’s response would be quite predictable. But what if a journalist were to ask Ms. Tutwiler at a noon briefing for an explanation of this new ‘treason’ within the Department, especially concerning an office under her control? Is Felix Bloch back on the payroll? Has the staff in [the Office of Eastern European Affairs] defected, following recent examples in the USSR and Yugoslavia, etc? The possibilities are limitless.”86 Despite the passage of the FRUS statute, guardians of security continued to demand restrictions upon the U.S. Government’s official acknowledgement of its historical foreign policy decisions and actions.