President Jimmy Carter turns 100 today. A fitting birthday present would be for the CIA to fully declassify its records on the 1978 Camp David Accords.
Camp David, one of the highlights of the Carter administration, established the framework for a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. Releasing the full record would not only commemorate Carter’s foreign policy legacy, it would add important context for policymakers as escalation continues between Israel and its neighbors.
Yet many of these documents are still overclassified.
A February 1977 National Security Council memorandum on “Arab and Israeli Reactions to US Steps in the Middle East” is a prime example of ongoing, excessive, needless secrecy. Large portions of the text are redacted, and the exemptions used to hide the information — and which should be cited — are missing.
An October 1977 memorandum on “Peace Negotiations and Israeli Coalition Politics” is similarly overclassified, as are many of the other 250 records in the collection.
It is not possible that all of this information, now almost 50 years old, must still be secret. The passage of time and the public interest in the records clearly outweigh whatever meager arguments might still exist for secrecy.
The CIA’s secrecy is even more galling when other agencies have released important Carter-era records.
The State Department this spring finally published its Foreign Relations of the United States collection on national security policymaking during the Carter administration. The FRUS is arguably the United States’ largest ongoing transparency initiative and serves as the official record of U.S. foreign policy.
The State Department is congressionally mandated to publish FRUS volumes 30 years after the events they document take place, but is regularly unable to do so because the CIA and Defense Department drag their heels in releasing information — which is why it took over 40 years for the Carter set to be published.
Historians have also worked hard to get the government to declassify Carter-era records. The indefatigable archivists at the nonprofit National Security Archive (where I previously worked) recently published a collection of 2,500 declassified high-level Carter policymaking records, covering everything from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Iran hostage crisis.
The efforts of historians and journalists are hampered not only by the CIA’s classification decisions but also by the National Archives and Records Administration’s inability to provide digital access to the Carter Presidential Library records.
As of today, NARA has only digitized 0.063% of its entire collection of Carter documents. Some of this digitization delay could be solved by giving NARA more money and better technology, but the agency also needs to reassess its priorities. Otherwise, the records from the Carter Library will be lost to future generations.
President Carter has said he wants to live long enough to vote in the 2024 election. We should hope for that, but we should also demand that the CIA and other agencies make his administration’s records available to the public.
