Now you see it, now you don't: The Mystery of the Vanishing CIA Reports

The Great Vanishing File Mystery

According to academics and historians, an unknown quantity of documents relating to China - many of which have been publicly available for more than a decade - have now been secretly 'reclassified' as 'top-secret', and removed from public view.

Although a full inventory of the 'reclassified' documents is not available, they are known to include a famous intelligence report in which the CIA described the possibility of China entering into the Korean war, in the near future, as "not probable".

The report was presented on 12 October 1950. Two weeks later, China entered the war - Catching western forces in the Korean peninsular off guard, and throughly humiliating US intelligence services.

Another of the 'reclassified' documents is known to be an English translation of a Yugoslavia newspaper, provided by the US ambassador to Yugoslavia, in 1962, which described fringe elements of China's nuclear weapons program.

Tight Lipped

Although the Bush administration has yet to provide any direct explanation as to the reasons for these reclassifications, and is thought unlikely to be forthcoming with a list of the documents that it has withdrawn from circulation, it is known that they were 'reclassified' under a broader program which has seen 55,000 pages of previously public information, covering a wide variety of topics and countries, being withdrawn from view.

Much of the material that has been 'reclassified', including all of the material relating to China, is believed to have originally been declassified under "The 25 year rule". A piece of legislation that mandates that all records of a certain types be released to the public, 25 years after their production, unless there is a 'pressing need' to keep them secret.

It is thought that the 'reclassified' program began in 1999, after several branches of US the intelligence services criticized the declassification of certain documents as being a "hasty release", but was accelerated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.

The Perils of Public Release

While it is known that a number of the 'reclassified' records have been copied or used as the basis for other documents, since their initial release, it is not clear if writers and historians will be ordered to hand over any material that they have which was contained in the 'reclassified' documents, or if they will be barred from releasing books, or other historic accounts, based on the 'reclassified' documents.

Motives

While it is not clear why the documents relating to China were 'reclassified', the fact that a number of the other 'reclassified' reports detail tactics used, by the US, to encourage dissent, within Iran and the former Soviet Union, as a prelude to so-called 'Regime change', may be an indication of future trends in US thinking.

tags: bush  conspiracy  soviet union  threat  american  george bush  9 11  china  subversion  iran  cold war  imperialism  war  top secret  regime change  wmd  

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