The science fiction writer FOIA request is the personal example John Kiriakou uses when asked how much of the CIA’s record remains secret. He offers it as the smallest possible test of the declassification system, and reports that the system failed it.
The request
Kiriakou wanted to write an article about a man from the 1950s who was a popular science fiction writer of the period, and about whom there had always been rumours that he was secretly a CIA officer under some kind of deep cover, roughly between 1952 and 1958.[1] The man then killed himself.[2]
Kiriakou filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA. The agency wrote back saying that the law required it to respond within ninety days, but that it would not be able to do so because it did not have enough manpower.[2] That, he says, was fifteen years before the telling, and he is still waiting for the response.[2]
The backlog behind it
Asked how many CIA documents remain classified, Kiriakou answers: several billion, with a b.[3] He describes this as another of his standing complaints against the agency and the broader federal government.[3]
American law, in his account, calls for mandatory declassification once a document is thirty-five years old, unless release would expose sources and methods, sensitive liaison relationships, or operations still under way.[4] Kiriakou’s estimate is that more than ninety-five per cent of those documents should be declassified and have not been, and he attributes the failure to a single strategic decision: the CIA simply chose not to hire people to do the declassification work.[5]
He says the position is worse at other repositories. The National Archives also holds classified documents going back to the origins of classification, and he puts the current wait on a Freedom of Information Act request filed there at six hundred years.[5][1] Elsewhere he has given the figure as a five-hundred-year backlog, and the thirty-year rule rather than thirty-five.
His conclusion is unqualified: all of this material is supposed to be declassified, almost none of it is, and there is no good reason, no legitimate reason and no legal reason for withholding it.[6]