CIA: 'HOLDING HISTORY HOSTAGE'

CIA SUED FOR 'HOLDING HISTORY HOSTAGE' ON BAY OF PIGS INVASION
National Security Archive files FOIA lawsuit to Force Release of
"Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation" on 50th Anniversary
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 341 Posted - April 14, 2011

The Houston, a supply ship for the CIA's invasion force, was sunk by Cuban T-33s on the morning of April 17, 1961 (CIA photo)

Washington, D.C., April 14, 2011 - Fifty years after the failed CIA-led assault on Cuba, the National Security Archive today filed a FOIA lawsuit to compel the Agency to release its “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.” The suit charges that the CIA has “wrongfully withheld” the multi-volume study, which the Archive requested under the FOIA in 2005. As the “official history,” the court filing noted, the document “is, by definition, the most important and substantive CIA-produced study of this episode.”

The Top Secret report, researched and written by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, is based on dozens of interviews with key operatives and officials and a review of hundreds of CIA documents and was compiled over the course of nine years that Pfeiffer served as the CIA’s in-house historian. Pfeiffer’s internal study is divided into five volumes: I, Air Operations; II, Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy; III, Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961; IV, The Taylor Committee Report; and V, Internal Investigation Report. (In 1998 the CIA released Vol. III under the Kennedy Assassination Records Act.)

In 1987, Pfeiffer himself filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking the release of Vol 5; the CIA successfully convinced the court that it could not be declassified.

“The CIA is holding history hostage,” according to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project. Kornbluh called on the CIA to release the report under President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 on Classified National Security Information which states that “no information may remain classified indefinitely.” He noted that “fifty years after the invasion, it is well past time for the official history to be declassified and studied for the lessons it contains for the future of U.S.-Cuban relations.” {continued}