Nicholson Baker - My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act

Fiction

The Mezzanine

Room Temperature

Vox

The Fermata

The Everlasting Story of Nory

A Box of Matches

Checkpoint

The Anthologist

House of Holes

Traveling Sprinkler

Nonfiction

U and I

The Size of Thoughts

Double Fold

Human Smoke

The Way the World Works

Substitute

This book, which I began working on about ten years ago, grew out of a seemingly simple question. Did the United States use biological weapons during the early 1950s? Use them, I mean, not in laboratories in Frederick, Maryland, or in the deserts of Utah, but in foreign countries, on people whom the United States government viewed as enemies? I had a suspicion, back in 2009, that the answer was yes, but I wanted to know for sure.

So I did what one does when one wants to find out more about any episode of history: I read books and research papers, following their endnotes to available government documents, and I interviewed people. As I got in deeper, fascinated, sometimes horrified, I scrolled through Air Force microfilms, read oral histories, collected Chinese propaganda pamphlets, visited academic libraries that held manuscript collections, and spent weeksno, actually months, all togetherat the National Archives, the Truman Library, the Eisenhower Library, the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Library of Congress. Because I carried around with me one unanswered question, all these repositories came alive. Newspaper collections spoke to me in a new way. I loved the quest, at firstthe endlessness of the quest, the infinitude of names and dates and plans and scientific research programs. One question broke open and led to another and another, and formerly dull-seeming tidbits of history glowed like fresh cherry tomatoes in the picnic salad of the twentieth century.

Eventually, in 2012, I made some requests under the Freedom of Information Act for Air Force documents that I knew existed but were inaccessible to regular people, people without a security clearance. And I waited. I got nothing. Really, nothing. I wrote a novel about a poet, a sex novel, a book of essays, and a book about being a substitute teacher. Presidents came and went. And still I waited. This was disheartening. I made more requestsfrom the CIA, the Air Force, and the Army. Still got nothing. I began to suspect that although Id learned a fair amount by then about the Cold Warin fact, I knew some possibly startling things that nobody else knewI might grow old and die without seeing extant memos and plans that were material to the basic question I was trying to answer.

I tried to write the book anyway. It grew and grew. I produced thousands of pages of notes and chronologies. The increasing prospect tired my wandering eyes, as Alexander Pope said of research: Hills peep oer hills, and Alps on Alps arise. You can spend a lifetimesome havecomparing and contrasting partially censored CIA plans for sabotage and subversion, or studying germ-warfare programs in Japan, in Britain, in Canada, and in the United States during the Second World War, which was the seedbed of many of the biomedical extravagancies of the Cold War. Wherever I startedsay, in February 1952there was always something before that moment that needed to be explained, and that something led to another perplexity that had preceded the one that I was trying to understand, so that I kept being pushed backward in time when I was trying to go forward. The boxes of documents crumpled; the book piles toppled; the Post-it notes that fringed them turned pale in the sun. What I knew was getting old.

Because I didnt want to go around forever with this mass of silently rotting knowledge in my head, I got the idea of writing a somewhat different, although related, book: one about life under the Freedom of Information Act, using my own unfinished quest for Cold War truth as a point of departure. After several false starts, in March 2019, I abandoned chronological succession and just wrote, every day, about what I knew, and didnt know, and what I needed to know, concerning a now remote but still crucially important stretch of American history. The result is a sort of case history, or diary, or daily meditation, on the pathology of government secrecy.

This is a book about waitingwaiting for responses from the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency and other places. Its about my own not entirely successful efforts to squeeze germs of truth from the sanitized documentary record of the U.S. government. Its about the exquisite pain of whited-out or blacked-out sentences and paragraphsalways the ones you want most to seeand the costs to national self-understanding of delayed disclosure. Its about the frustration of knowing that a document exists just steps away, on the other side of a wall in the National Archives, and yet you cant see it because its supposedly so sensitive that its release would rend the flaggy fabric of national security. Its about the tick of time going by, as old secrets snicker in their file boxes. The seeming uselessness and toothlessness of the Freedom of Information Act. The redactionsthat awful word. The blotted-out key phrase in a paragraph that turns it from something with meaning to something that means nothing. The back-and-forth of politely exasperated correspondence.

Since its a diary, Ive allowed into this book some of what traditional histories leave out: the writers daily chairbound scene, the flummoxing overload of specificity, dreams, the weather, dogs, food. Ive written about the work of some of the lawyers and journalists and assorted unsung heroes who have devoted their lives to hunting and gathering and forcing disclosures in governmental repositories. And Ive included much of the germ-war story, too, because I cant not include it: Americas disease-dispersing biobureaucracy is what Ive been studying, on and off, for a decade, and by now Ive reached certain conclusions, despite the incompleteness of the paper record. Every so often, as youll see, I submit a new Freedom of Information Act request, or a new Mandatory Declassification Review request, and explain why it might be helpful to be able to read a certain document. Whether or not you agree with my account of what happened, Im hoping that you will be shocked and revoltedand sometimes inspiredby some of the activities I describe in this book. I hope youll read it and say, No, thats not acceptable. That cant be allowed to happen ever again.