Washington Decoded

Unwarranted Claims and False News in The New York Times

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

 

    After we had been advised that the nation first [having the A-bomb] would be able to terminate the war at once . . . , I was convinced that we should proceed with all possible speed to develop and use the all powerful weapon. . . I was confident that the [secret] securing of the funds . . . would not present a difficult problem.

                               Senator Elmer Thomas (D-Oklahoma)[1]

 

    In January 2024, a Washington-based New York Times reporter, Catie Edmondson, landed a journalistic plum: a “Reporter’s Notebook” article on the front-page of the newspaper, complete with a two-page spread inside the paper, with illustrations. She presented the story as a pioneering article that allegedly uncovered a hitherto unknown, or little known, secret: precisely how the US government funded the atomic bomb during World War 2. The Times underscored the seeming importance of the article by featuring, above the fold, a picture of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of Los Alamos and “father of the A-bomb,” along with Army General Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Other photos inside further emphasized what the editors apparently deemed as her article’s significance.[2]

    A 2018 Barnard graduate, and former editor-in-chief of the Columbia University Daily Spectator, Edmondson has been with the Times for almost six years. She has covered congressional matters since 2018, although in 2023 she also wrote some articles about Germany. Edmondson, who started at the Times on a James Reston Reporting Fellowship, could fairly be described as a rising star at the newspaper.

    Her “Reporter’s Notebook” article was ostensibly about history, but also concerned an issue of great continuing import. That secret wartime funding may reasonably be considered the precedent for postwar “black budget” financing in various parts of the US military and intelligence budgets. It is a subject that, despite many publications over the years, still invites more research, and more analysis.[3]

    Edmondson, by her own admission, was initially ignorant about secret wartime A-bomb funding, and it may well be commendable that she sought to learn about it. Given that hers was not just another article, but prominently displayed on the newspaper of record’s front page, it is important to understand how she went about researching the matter, what she learned, and what, if anything, she contributed to general knowledge.

    Lamentably, Edmondson’s self-celebrated research did not advance understanding of the subject in any significant way. She discovered and reported what has mostly been long known, though she did not present it as such. At the same time, she made a number of errors, and ignored or omitted much important information and context. Notably, she failed to consult many monographs, memoirs, and biographies published in the last several decades covering the events she claimed to examine afresh, and thus displayed an ignorance of the extensive scholarship by historians deeply familiar with the archival records. Ultimately, the prominence of her article, juxtaposed with its significant faults, constitutes a troubling failure in meeting the standards of journalistic responsibility. The Times ill-served its readers.

    Had Edmondson’s subject been obscure history, her article, with all its faults, might not warrant sustained attention. But since it concerns a subject of continuing importance, and because the article seems to have served as a springboard to an increasingly frequent and prominent role for Edmondson at the newspaper of record, it would seem the article deserves critical discussion and analysis. This is particularly true, moreover, since the Times has not deigned to issue even modest corrections or disclaimers. The Times’s response to public and private criticisms that have been leveled so far has basically been a non-response. The Times, put simply, has stonewalled.[4]

Boosterism and the Article

    Edmondson’s enthusiastic, and apparently self-pleased, 19 January article was soon followed by a Times podcast, conducted by Sabrina Tavernise. The podcast consisted of a friendly interview with Edmondson about her research and findings, which were admiringly and uncritically treated as important and revealing, almost a celebration of her resourcefulness, prowess, and seeming discoveries. Reference to the podcast appeared on page 2 of the print edition (“Inside the Times: The Story Behind the Story”), and was entitled, “Once the Credits Roll, Reporting Begins.” In sum, Edmondson’s article received about as much play and attention as the Times can lavish on an article nowadays, short of nominating it for a Pulitzer Prize.

    Instead of being handled with such self-regard, Edmondson’s article should have been fact-checked, and then modestly presented, and explicitly treated, as a useful but severely limited, and rather selective, summary of what had been largely known for more than a half century about the secret A-bomb financing, with some candid acknowledgment of what, though very limited, was added and thus new. Admittedly, to place in the Times a restatement, at some length, of essentially known matters might be useful to many readers, but that should have been stated up front in the article and the podcast. The implication in both was very different: Edmondson’s report, and findings, were portrayed as startling, revealing, and remarkably new.

When Is the News Media Going to Catch On?

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The National Archives keeps releasing assassination-related records, and the press keeps getting the story wrong.

 

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    Now that we are roughly mid-way between the last release of JFK assassination records from the National Archives, and the next round, scheduled for December 2022, it seems a good time to take stock of the news coverage we have gotten so far.

    The good news: the fiasco that marred coverage of releases in 2017-2018 was not repeated. The bad news: coverage was still an embarrassing failure.[1]

    Virtually none of the stories this time around accurately conveyed the small amount of new information that was released in December 2021. Instead, story after story about the release of records from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC) featured long summaries of documents previously described in newspapers and government reports from the 1990s, the 1970s, even the 1960s. These summaries were presented as if they were news. This spectacle occurred in publications ranging from the New York Post to The Washington Post, from the Daily Mail to the Daily Beast. Even the venerable AP and that supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times, were not immune.

    Not every outlet faltered, to be sure. Author Gus Russo, writing for the website SpyTalk, observed that “there doesn’t seem to be a truly new document in the batch, just cleaner, transparent versions of previous releases.” Substitute “open in full” for “transparent” and Russo was correct. Meanwhile, Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, told CNN the same thing during an interview, provoking host Michael Smerconish into calling him a “buzzkill.” CNN seems to have listened to Posner, broadcasting fewer decades-old news stories than other outlets.

    After eight rounds of releases from the ARC since July 2017, however, the question remains: why did so many news outlets still get the story so wrong, publishing “olds” instead of “news”? The fundamental reason is that they didn’t understand what was new in the releases. Instead, they thought these “secret” documents were all new information.

    An old saw in journalism, however, is that a story is no better than its sources. Without excusing the reporters who wrote and the editors who published, a major part of the responsibility for the latest misleading news quotient must rest with the sources reporters depended upon—the authors and researchers who actually delve through the assassination-related and cold war documents that constitute the collection. They are one of the primary reasons why so many news organizations do such a poor job of explaining what the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is actually doing.

Once More ‘Round the Plaza

 

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By Robert Reynolds

 

    Once again the National Archives is preparing to release previously redacted documents from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK ARC). And once again the idea is becoming rampant that significant and newsworthy information on the assassination of President Kennedy 58 years ago will soon be revealed.

    News coverage of the coming releases started out muted this time around compared to the last big releases, which occurred from July 2017 to April 2018. It picked up markedly, however, when President Biden released a memo on October 22 that spelled out short- to long-range plans for the collection.

    The memo called for a first release of redacted documents that agencies no longer wish to withhold in mid-December, then another, larger, release by December next year. The memo also mandated a boat-load of paperwork for agencies to fill out if they want to postpone anything past that date. A longer-range element of the plan calls for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the federal agency that houses assassination-related materials, to scan the entire collection and put it on-line. How long that will take is not spelled out in the memo.

    Reaction to Biden’s memo ranged from yawns to apoplectic complaints that Biden has sold out to pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and is suppressing incriminating documents.

    That a collection of mostly paper documents can stimulate such passions is a tribute to the depth of the national trauma inflicted by the assassination. Given the confusing result of the last releases, it is also understandable that people might think there are still important documents left unreleased. A closer look at NARA’s latest data on the ARC, however, reveals just how unlikely this is.

 

The JFK Database

    The 2017-2018 releases from NARA were confusing, first, because it was unclear how much material was from documents previously withheld in full, and second, because it was equally unclear how much was from documents that had been previously released in part. This should not have been the case.[1]

    The primary reason for the uncertainty was outdated information in the JFK database, the computer listing of metadata for most records in the collection. The creation of the database had been mandated by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the 1992 public law that established the JFK archival collection in the first place. The purpose of the database was to provide a detailed index to the contents of the collection, including basic information for every record, such as the title and date of the document, the agency that generated the record, number of pages, and so on.

    The main problem that led to the confusion was a failure to update the release status of each record. Why was this data field not better maintained? During the five years the database was being assembled, 1993 to 1998, there were frequent changes in the status of records. Agencies argued with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), the limited-term panel created to oversee the assembly and release of the JFK records, about which documents counted as assassination-related records, and what standards should apply for withholding documents in full or redacting portions of their text. These status changes were not always recorded in the database. With more than three hundred thousand records in the database, that should not be surprising.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

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By Max Holland

   Newspapers constantly make mistakes.[1]

   Anyone who works on an issue that makes news knows this. Reporters, in their haste to convey the gist, invariably gloss over nuances that mean everything to the people who follow an issue closely. Complexities are reduced to inaccurate simplicities, that is, when there is any kind of effort to describe them at all.

    Yet sometimes it is not reporters’ fault. A case in point was the recent release of tens of thousands of historical records from the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library. The release was portrayed as if it were the Nixon Library’s initiative, when in fact, the most arresting documents only came to light because of the diligence of individual requesters and independent institutions, like the National Security Archive.

    The November 28 release totaled approximately 122,800 pages of records, which were made publicly available for the first time at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.[2] The Nixon presidential records have been the subject of contentious litigation for decades (lawsuits were filed by parties ranging from Professor Stanley Kutler to Nixon himself), and documents that otherwise might have been released years ago are only now being opened to the public and garnering the attention they deserve.

    This cache of documents covered a variety of newsworthy topics, ranging from the White House’s file on W. Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” to National Security Council (NSC) memos about US policy toward Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Soviet Union, and Salvador Allende’s Chile. Some issues have changed so little in 35 years that many of the documents read like they had been ripped from today’s headlines. Consequently, major news organizations, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Associated Press prepared good-sized stories about the documents.

    The caveat to the release was that its most interesting portion by far — some 10,000 pages — was not initiated by the Nixon Library, but came about solely because of requests submitted by researchers under the mandatory declassification provision of the Executive Order governing classification of federal documents. This provision permits individual requesters to press the government to review classified documents to see if they merit continued secrecy.

     With the exception of the AP, which ran a story about FBI agents’ campaigning to have Mark Felt appointed as director, the news organizations zeroed in on the NSC documents relating to the Middle East, all of which were released because of mandatory review requests. The lede from The Washington Post’s story concerned messages between Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal and the US government about terrorism and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Articles in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, meanwhile, focused on another issue that still reverberates: Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which ran counter to established US policy on weapons proliferation during the Nixon administration, and complicates US diplomacy in the region to this day.

    What these stories all had in common, though, was that they suggested the impetus for release came from the Nixon Library or National Archives, when in fact the documents were only disclosed because of the initiative of requesters.[3] As the director of the National Security Archive, Tom Blanton, later noted, “Without those requests, which compelled the government’s review, the documents could have remained secret indefinitely.” Analysts working at the National Security Archive had submitted about half of all the mandatory requests reflected in the November 28 release, and still had many more requests pending — approximately 75 — that had yet to be processed by the Nixon Library. Some of the requests dated as far back as 1993!

    Who or what was responsible for incompletely informing the reporters? The National Archives and Nixon Library were apparently so eager to claim credit for the releases’s most interesting portion that both agencies, in their respective press releases, glossed over the instrumental role played by requesters.[4] This self-congratulatory posture was underscored during the November 28 press conference held to publicize the documents’ availability.

    The sole speaker, Tim Naftali, executive director of the Nixon Library since 2006, effusively complimented the archives and library staff for making the once-classified documents available. Indeed, Naftali seemed to be praising everyone in sight except the requesters who had actually initiated the mandatory review requests — that is, until he was reminded of that fact by one of the requesters, who was in attendance.

 

[1] Michael Bugeja and Jane Peterson, “How Complete Are Newspaper Corrections?: An Analysis of the 2005 ’Regret the Error’ Compilation,” Media Ethics, Spring 2007.

[2] The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, which became part of the federal presidential library system only this past July, is undergoing an expansion so that it may accommodate the enormous trove of documents generated during Nixon’s six-year presidency. Previously, the privately-operated Nixon Library housed only a small portion of the total volume of Nixon papers, some 6.2 million pages of pre- and post-presidential records. Incorporating the presidential records alone will add 42 million pages to the previous collection, not to mention an enormous quantity of still photographs, film, video, and audio recordings. For an account of the Nixon Library’s unusual history, see James Worsham,  “Nixon’s Library Now a Part of NARA: California Facility Will Hold All Documents and Tapes from a Half-Century Career in Politics,” Prologue, Fall 2007, Vol. 39, No. 3.

[3] The initial New York Times story on its website dated November 28 stated the “documents . . . were released today by the National Archives.” A subsequent version (and the version published in the newspaper on November 29) was amended to read “ . . . released today by the National Archives under an executive order that requires that classified documents be reviewed and possibly declassified after 25 years. The latter explanation was an improvement, but still neglected to mentioned that mandatory review requests must be initiated by outsiders. To its credit, on December 7 the newspaper of record published a clarification, which stated that the release of previously classified documents was “the result of declassification requests by researchers at the National Security Archive . . . and elsewhere.” David Stout, “Nixon Papers Recall Concerns on Israel’s Weapons,” NYT, 28 November 2007; David Stout, “Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal Vexed Nixon,” NYT, 29 November 2007; For the Record, NYT, 7 December 2007. Accounts of the records’ release in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and by AP were virtually identical to the initial NYT story, describing only that historical materials were released by the National Archives. Theo Milonopoulos, “Nixon White House Opposed Israeli Nuclear Efforts,” LAT, 29 November 2007; AP, “Nixon Papers Illuminate Deep Throat Link,” CBS News, 28 November 2007; Walter Pincus, “1973 US Cable on Mideast Mirrors Current Events,” WP, 29 November 2007.

[4]  Media Alert, “Nixon Presidential Library to Release New Materials at the National Archives,” National Archives & Records Administration, 21 November 2007; “Mandatory Review Documents,” Nixon Presidential Library & Museum, 28 November 2007.

© 2007 by Max Holland

The Making of a Washington Expert

See also: “The Politics (and Profits) of Information: The 9/11 Commission”

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By Max Holland

   

    Designating W.W. Norton as the publisher of the 9/11 Report was not the only plum handed out during Philip Zelikow’s tenure as director of the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow engaged in some blatant cronyism when he arranged for a colleague from the University of Virginia, Tim Naftali, to write a history of US counterterrorism policy from the Johnson to the Clinton administrations.

    The commission’s prime directive was to investigate the 9/11 attacks, of course, but a historical account of counterterrorism policy is the kind of ancillary study that comparable commissions have published. As part of its final report, the Church Committee, which investigated activities of US intelligence agencies, included an invaluable 106-page study of the CIA that was based upon access to classified internal histories.

    But like other aspects of the commission’s work, the Naftali study was not published as part of the commission’s output; it was not even deemed fit for posting on the Internet. Why was it commissioned in  the first place? Naftali, a Canadian citizen at the time, could not review classified materials. His study would have to depend entirely on open sources, meaning that at best it would represent a marginal addition to public knowledge. Naftali was not even a noted expert on the subject.

    Naftali’s unfamiliarity with the topic probably contributed to what happened next: he belatedly turned in a work that was way too long. Indeed, because of its tone and perspective it was quickly deemed unusable, according to sources on the commission. Since there was no time left to edit it, the commissioners would not even agree to have it posted on-line as a monograph.

    There’s an interesting coda to this story, too. Months before the commission closed its doors, in August 2004, some staff members found it odd that Naftali was engaged in research that clearly seemed tangential to his assignment. Sure enough, once the commissioners decided to “pass” on Naftali’s history and gave him permission to use the study any way he liked, he took his manuscript—which had cost US taxpayers at least $15,000—and nine months later published Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

    Naftali advertises the book as having been written partly “at the request of the 9/11 Commission,” and markets himself as “the official historian” of the commission, as this description from the CI Centre website reveals. The commissioners reportedly have gagged over this self-aggrandizement, brazen even by Washington standards. They are nonplussed that someone should have secured work from the commission through a personal favor, produced work of no usefulness to the commission, yet managed to exploit the opportunity for his own professional and financial gain.

     Postscript: One of the reviewers who noticed that Naftali’s history of counterterrorism was slap-dash, and bordering on laughable, was Hayden B. Peake, who reviews books for Studies in Intelligence. Writing in the March 2006 of Studies, Peake noted Naftali’s “curious interpretation of intelligence history.” Peake’s review can be read in full here.

In the fall of 2006, Naftali became the director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 1 November 2005
© 2005 by Max Holland

Erasing History at the National Archives

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By Max Holland   

 

    In December 20, 1960, representatives from U.S. corporations with business interests in Cuba—including Exxon, ITT and Domino Sugar—met with then-CIA director Allen Dulles. The meeting was called, according to an agency history written in the late 1970s, so that Dulles could hear the executives’ grievances about Fidel Castro’s regime. Without hinting that the CIA was at that moment training a small army of exiles, Dulles listened as the corporate chieftains suggested ways to sabotage Cuba’s economy and precipitate military intervention. Their message was simple: “It was time for the U[nited] S[tates] to get off of dead center and take some direct action against Castro.”

    Without such documents as this partly declassified CIA history, the American public would have been left in the dark about the “sometimes overactive” role corporate interests played in Washington’s anti-Castro efforts in the 1960s. Yet if some elements of the federal government now have their way at the National Archives, such blank spots in the archival record will become increasingly common.

    The tampering with history has been documented most extensively by Matthew Aid, a scholar writing what promises to be a definitive history of the National Security Agency. Aid, who has been conducting extensive research into intelligence-related holdings at the National Archives since 1979, began noticing something strange in the summer of 2005. Individual documents, and sometimes entire files, that he had read in full 10 years ago were mysteriously disappearing from the open shelves. Eventually, and despite a virtual gag order imposed on archivists familiar with the withdrawals, Aid was able to piece together the story about a secret reclassification program in existence since 1999. Several agencies, most prominently the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the U.S. Air Force (USAF), have been conducting a broad effort in total secrecy to prevent public access to previously released government documents.

    The roots of this issue go back to a reform promulgated by President Clinton in 1995 to break the logjam over classified records from the Cold War. Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 represented an ambitious effort to force federal agencies to disgorge vast amounts of records while keeping a limited number secret that fell into specific categories. It mandated that within five years, all records 25 years or older would automatically be declassified, regardless of whether they had been reviewed. Inevitably, the effort ran into some hurdles. A document from the State Department, for instance, might also contain sensitive information from the CIA. Often the CIA’s “equity” in the document would be obvious, but sometimes not. To be declassified “under the proper authority,” both agencies had to review the document.

    Within three years, a significant problem cropped up with respect to the inadvertent release of information about nuclear weapons in open archival records. One category of information, known as “restricted data,” is considered so sensitive it is “born classified.” To its credit, the Department of Energy (DOE) openly sought a modification of Clinton’s EO, which had banned the reclassification of documents once they became public. In late 1998 Congress authorized the DOE to scour the records of other agencies under stringent conditions, which included the filing of regular reports about documents the DOE had reclassified.

    So far, so good. But in 1999, other federal agencies found instances of unrecognized “equities” in State Department documents, and by 2001 these agencies were insisting on the right to re-review, in secret, any records that had been declassified if they contained defense, foreign affairs, or intelligence information. After The New York Times broke the news on February 21 about Aid’s discovery of this secret reclassification program, an embarrassed National Archives declared an instant moratorium on the process. By that time, however, 9,500 documents, totaling 55,500 pages, had been surreptitiously reclassified. Because the CIA, DIA, and USAF have operated, unlike the DOE, under a shroud of secrecy, their efforts have resulted in dozens of absurdities, all of which make a mockery of EO 12958, which was modified but not rescinded by the Bush administration in 2003.   

    One ridiculous outcome is the attempt, apparently by the CIA, to reclassify documents that were not only declassified years ago but published (with CIA consent!) in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series. These volumes are available on-line, and hard copies are held by libraries all over the world, including the National Archives’ own library. Now the original documents have been deemed too secret to read. Not to be outdone, overzealous USAF reviewers have reclassified intelligence, and policy papers, and reportedly even newspaper clippings, about the strategic bombing of Japan during World War II.

    The Information Security Oversight Office, which was established at the National Archives under the 1995 executive order, is currently conducting an audit of all the withdrawn documents. When those findings are released as scheduled in late April, more egregious examples of reclassification-run-amok are bound to surface. The question then will be, What were these reclassifiers thinking? And why were tax dollars used to have them think it?

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 April 2006
© 2006 by Max Holland