Primary Sources

Dubious Secrets

The National Security Archive at George Washington University today released a collection of declassified documents showing the “arbitrary and capricious decision making that all too often characterizes the U.S. government’s national security secrecy system.” Among the stuff withheld from FOIA requests was a 25-year-old joke about a terrorism threat to Santa Claus and the North Pole. A 1997 CIA reviewer declassified the line about the “annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole” in a 1974 briefing to then-President Gerald Ford, while a 1999 agency reviewer excluded it from released material.