The Central Intelligence Agency declassified 5 million documents in fiscal year 2000, the most the agency has released since President Clinton issued a 1995 executive order calling for the declassification of all documents 25 years and older, CIA officials announced this week.
"This is the largest release of formerly classified CIA documents ever," said CIA Director George J. Tenet.
In 1999, the agency released 3 million documents. It released 1 million in 1998. That leaves the CIA with 56 million documents to declassify under the order. The CIA forwards the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) when they have been declassified.
"This is a step in the right direction for the CIA," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "But it is far less than they are obliged to declassify under [the] executive order." The order requires agencies to declassify 15 percent of their holdings each year.
The CIA has a declassification "factory" in which pages are scanned into computers and electronic copies are redacted, or blacked-out. The agency has several hundred people working at the facility, sifting through years of documents and searching for information that is still classified, such as intelligence sources and methods. This year, the CIA released more than 2.2 million electronic pages to NARA.
According to the CIA, the documents include intelligence reports from 1947 to the 1970s and memoranda relating to the CIA's creation and its federal government role. The CIA also released photographs and motion picture films on world affairs, training topics and intelligence.
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