Where are the Original Seized Grenada Documents?

Two interesting new developments related to documents seized by U.S. forces in Grenada in 1983 during Operation Urgent Fury - one is a fully declassified National Security Directive newly available online and the second are meeting notes recently obtained via FOIA that indicate that at least some original documents from Grenada remain at the U.S. National Archives.  But first a quick administrative note: beginning with this post I am experimenting with enabling comments at the bottom of the post after receiving requests from some readers.

(1) Reagan's Fully Declassified National Security Decision Directive No. 112 Now Available Online

A big thanks to Steven Aftergood who alerted me to a new, fully declassified version of a November 1983 National Security Decision Directive signed by President Ronald Reagan called "Processing and Disposition of Documents Acquired by US Forces in Grenada" that is now available online from the Federation of American Scientists here.

An earlier redacted version that has been online for years (available here) already provided an interesting illustration of the breadth of issues for which the captured documents from Grenada were thought to be relevant.  The three paragraphs that were redacted in the earlier version, but which are available now, relate to the following issues:

First, is the issue of U.S. classified documents found among the documents captured in Grenada:

This may have been redacted given that such documents could present special sensitivities as they could be relevant to counterintelligence investigations, including the possibility that someone within the U.S. government had provided access to them.  A related issue came up when the interagency intelligence exploitation team -- assembled pursuant to Reagan's directive -- submitted its initial evaluation of the captured documents in December 1983.  In the last paragraph of a cover memo (available here) from Robert Gates, then Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, to Robert MacFarlane, then Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Gates noted:

Mr. Roy Godson of your staff informed us that there was great interest in the "American" connection to the documents. We have discussed this with the FBI liaison contact and propose that you task the Attorney General directly with pursuing this issue. We do not think a discussion of the involvement of US citizens in Grenada should be included in any paper prepared by the Intelligence Community.

The initial version of the "Interagency Intelligence Assessment" enclosed with that memo entitled "Grenada: A First Look at Mechanisms of Control and Foreign Involvement" is here and a later updated version from August 1984 is here (both courtesy of the CIA FOIA reading room).

Second, there is a previously redacted paragraph dealing with the interesting topic of forensic examination of the captured documents including even the type of paper and ink used:

This provides another example of a situation in which copies of captured documents are inadequate substitutes for originals. As discussed in an earlier post, the forensic exploitation of captured documents and media has been increasing in importance over time.  See, as an example, this FBI  Laboratory report from 2008 about documents seized from Afghanistan.

Third, the final, previously-redacted paragraph relates to the question of returning the documents:

The issue of the return of the documents leads to the second development . . .

(2) Original Seized Grenada Documents Still at U.S. National Archives?

The original documents seized in Grenada were, according to everything I had ever seen, returned to Grenada long ago.  No less than The Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States expressly states in a note in RG 373: "The original Grenada documents have been returned to the Grenadan government" (microfiche copies are in RG 242).  There has been a bit of a mystery about what happened to them upon their return - see, for example, the Grenada Revolution Online's informative page on the documents here which states: 

Rumor at one point put the original Grenada documents in Grenada around August 1985 and housed at Police Headquarters. Since that time was the damaging passing over Grenada of Hurricane Ivan, 7 September 2004. The location, condition and accession of the original Grenada Documents remains obscured, to say the least.

Given this, it came as quite a surprise when I recently received some documents via FOIA that included notes from recent meetings involving the National Archives that contained notations such as this:

and this:

which appear to indicate that there are original Grenada records at Archives II in College Park.  The note "why are the originals here" even suggests some surprise on behalf of the undisclosed notetaker.

To be clear, this is not necessarily inconsistent with the return of most, if not almost all, of the originals to Grenada. The notes above could perhaps be referring to a small number of documents that may have been withheld from the original return -- possibly for some of the same reasons the passages in Reagan's directive had been redacted or based on other "national security" concerns.  There is also a State Department records schedule, N1-353-90-3 (available here), related to a "Grenada Task Force" that identifies "3-4 feet" of captured documents (perhaps original) that were transferred to NARA, which could provide another explanation:

Despite these possible explanations, the notes nevertheless raise some interesting questions that would profit from clarification. If anyone has additional information about original Grenada documents in the U.S. or the fate of those returned to Grenada, I'd be grateful to hear from you.

DIA's New RFI for "Technical Exploitation Support"

Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room has a post called "SpyPhone: Pentagon Spooks Want New Tools for Mobile 'Exploitation'" (available here) that focuses on an interesting new Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Request for Information (RFI) up on the Federal Business Opportunities website called "Technical Exploitation Support."

Ackerman's discussion of the RFI begins:

The Pentagon wants to upgrade its spy corps. And one of its first jobs will be finding out what’s on your iPhone.

If the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) gets its way, it’ll send an expanded cadre of spies around the world to scope out threats to the U.S. military. And it won’t just be a larger spy team, it’ll be a geekier one. The DIA wants “technical exploitation” tools that can efficiently access the data of people the military believes to be dangerous once their spies collect it.

 Ackerman notes that one of the areas stressed in the RFI is

“captured/seized media.” Think, for instance, of all the flash drives, hard drives and CDs that Navy SEALs seized during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Flynn wants to understand both the text they’d contain, through “automation support to enable rapid triage,” and their subtexts or metadata, using “steganography” tools to decipher coded messages and “deep analysis of malicious code/executables.” And that’s on top of “deep hardware exploitation of complex media with storage capacity” and reverse-engineering tools “to discover firmware artifacts.”

The RFI's own summary notes:

The broad objective of this requirement is to provide exploitation capabilities and technical support services to Document and Media Exploitation (DOMEX) programs for the collection and dissemination of intelligence. This objective is completed by acquiring electronic media devices; conduct screening and exploitation of these devices, in addition to translate, analyze, and report on the information/intelligence derived from these devices. Finally reports must be created and database records ingested into local and national databases; both and made readily available to analysts from the tactical to national levels.

The full RFI is available from the FedBizOpps.gov website, but as it will eventually disappear from there, I have re-posted it here. Responses are due by January 4, 2013.

Conference at Columbia: "Local Memory, Global Ethics, Justice"

The Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA), part of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University is holding a four-day conference from Dec. 11-14, 2012 entitled "Local Memory, Global Ethics, Justice: The Politics of Historical Dialogue in Contemporary Society."  The website for the conference (including registration, which is free) is here and the full schedule, which includes a wide variety of interesting topics, is here.  From the conference announcement:

Historical dialogue and accountability is a growing field of advocacy and scholarship that encompasses the efforts in conflict, post-conflict, and post-dictatorial societies to come to terms with their pasts. In contesting nationalist myths and identities; in examining official historical narratives; and in opening them to competing narratives, historical dialogue seeks to provide analysis of past violence grounded in empirical research; to acknowledge the victims of past violence and human rights abuses; to challenge and deconstruct national, religious, or ethnic memories of heroism and/or victimhood; to foster shared work between interlocutors of two or more sides of a conflict; to identify and monitor how history is misused to divide society and perpetuate conflict; and to enhance public discussion about the past.

This conference seeks to consider related questions, in addition to discussing the state of the relatively new field of historical dialogue and its relationship to other discourses such as transitional justice, memory studies, oral history, historical redress and religious studies. We will address the possibilities and limits of these concepts and methods, searching for unexplored connections and elaborating upon how historical analysis can be used to resolve long-standing sectarian conflicts. 

I will be on a panel on the first day called "Sequestered History, Public History" and will be giving a presentation called "Captured Documents, Sequestered History and Displaced Memory."

New Details from Iraqi National Archives

Leonard Kniffel has a piece in American Libraries magazine on continuing security problems at the Iraq National Library and Archives called "Terror Has Not Withdrawn: Daily Life for Librarians in Iraq" available here.  Near the end of the piece there are a couple of new details about the issue of seized records and Ba'ath party materials and information from the Director of the National Archives Saad Eskander.

Regarding negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq over the possible return of seized records (see some earlier coverage here), Kniffel notes:

The Iraqi government recently formed an intergovernmental committee to look into the issue of the records seized by the US government. The committee is headed by the deputy minister of foreign affairs, and its members include representatives from the Ministry of Culture (including Eskander), the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers. The committee has formed a three-member team that will negotiate with the US government. Eskander is also a member of that negotiation team.

Kniffel also notes that despite budget cuts and "amid the terror and turmoil," the archival collections at the National Archives have grown by 25%.  He quotes Eskander stating, "This is due to the fact I managed to persuade some Iraqi political parties to hand over to us the library of the Baath Party's training school" which "includes publications in Arabic, English, and French."

"Lost to History: Missing War Records" - ProPublica & Seattle Times

In case you missed it, Peter Sleeth from ProPublica and Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times have an important two-part piece on the U.S. military's failure to create or maintain adequate records of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the consequences, both personal and historical, of that failure. The first part (available here) is called "Lost to History: Missing War Records Complicate Benefit Claims by Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans" and the second part (here) is "A Son Lost in Iraq, but Where is the Casualty Report?"

The reporting relies, in part, on some fascinating government documents and reports including this brief on a "GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] Archive Project" and this 2009 Army "information paper" on "Army Operational Records" that begins by noting that the "long-term ability of an Army to learn from its experiences, prepare effective doctrine, adequately train and care for its Soldiers, and generate an able and ready force requires that it develop methods and procedures to capture its own operational data" and later states that between 2004 and 2007 "very few Operation ENDURING FREEDOM records were saved anywhere, either for historian's use or for the services documentary needs for unit heritage or for the increasing challenge with documenting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)."

The pieces provide a powerful example of the too-often-ignored importance of recordkeeping.