THE RELEASE of important US State Department documents on Cyprus, Greece and Turkey for the period 1964 to 1968 is being halted by the CIA, the Washington Post has revealed.
On Friday, the George Washington University’s National Security Archive posted on the Internet one of two State Department documentary histories whose release the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was stalling, even though the documents included in the volumes were officially declassified in 1998 and 1999.
The two disputed State Department volumes cover Indonesia-Malaysia-Philippines in the years 1964-68 and Greece-Turkey-Cyprus in the same period.
The CIA, as well as action officers at the State Department, had prevented the official release of both volumes, which were already printed and bound by the Government Printing Office. The National Security Archive obtained the Indonesia volume when the GPO, apparently by mistake, shipped copies to various GPO bookstores; but the Cyprus-Greece-Turkey volume is still locked up in GPO warehouses.
US officials are now trying to recall the official records of the US’s dealings with Indonesia that documents some American responsibility for the killing of thousands of Indonesian communists in the mid-1960s, including a cable recommending payments to army-backed death squads, the newspaper said.
“They’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a non-profit research group at George Washington University. His group bought a copy of the 830-page Indonesian archive last Thursday and put it on its website on Friday.
Blanton accused the CIA of trying to suppress the evidence covering the two sensitive regions, even though the documents were declassified two to three years ago.
The State Department Historical Advisory Committee’s summary as of September 1, 1999 shows that the Panel decided on April 20, 1998 to acknowledge covert action in Indonesia, that the CIA completed review of the documents on August 28, 1998, and that the volume then went into page proofs, “however, publication has been delayed.”
The summary also shows that CIA completed its review of the Cyprus-Greece-Turkey volume on May 14, 1999, that the volume was in revised page proofs as of September 1 and was expected to be published by December 1999.
The documentary history dealing with Greece, Cyprus and Turkey was printed in February 2000, but is locked up at GPO under the label: “Embargo: This publication cannot be released.” Officials declined to say why, the Washington Post reported.
A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, denied sole responsibility.
“The notion that the CIA has unilaterally blocked the release of these histories is simply not the case,” he said. “We work closely with the State Department on these matters. All of us are intent on complying with the law, while at the same time protecting classified information that if disclosed could be damaging to us.”
The CIA’s intervention in the State Department publication is only the latest in a series of such controversies, dating back to 1990 when the CIA censored a State volume on Iran in the early 1950s to leave out any reference to a CIA-backed coup in 1953.
But Congress passed a law in 1991 requiring the State Department volumes to include covert operations as well as overt diplomacy, so as to provide an accurate historical picture of US foreign policy, 30 years after the events.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
