SpyTalk

The Archives needs to hire more specialists to work on the remaining documents, she added. The funding spigot will supposedly be turned off on Sept. 30, 2010.

Legislation establishing the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, or IWP, was passed in late 1998 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on Jan. 11, 1999.

The law required U.S. government agencies to release all records related to their involvement with German scientists and intelligence officers after World War II ended. A requirement for records on Japanese war criminals was added later.

In 2004, the group published a book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis." A smaller book on Japanese war criminals was published in 2006.

Steven Aftergood, the longtime editor of "Secrecy News," published by the Federation of American Scientists, was surprised to learn the project was still going.

"I thought this was concluded years ago," he wrote in an e-mail. "$650k is a good chunk of money in the declassification world. At roughly $1 per page declassified -- it could be $0.50 or as much as $3.00 per page declassified, depending on the need for multiple reviews or for detailed redaction of individual pages -- that would pay for more than half a million pages that could be declassified.  At this point, the Nazi and Japanese Imperial (Government) records should be completed, and other initiatives funded."

Kleiman, the NARA spokeswoman, said it wasn't the Archives' fault that it was taking so long.
"It's because the documents were released to us in drips and drabs from agencies" that were reluctant to reveal the extent of their relations with German and Japanese war criminals, she said in a brief interview.
 
"Since 1999, the IWG has declassified and opened to the public an estimated 8 million pages of documents, including 1.2 million pages of OSS records ; 74,000 pages of CIA name and subject files; more than 350,000 pages of FBI subject files; and nearly 300,000 pages of Army intelligence files," according to the group's Web site.

"The once secret records are helping to shape our understanding of the Holocaust, war crimes, World War II and postwar activities of U.S. and Allied intelligence agencies," it said.

Lest one think there's nothing new, the Britain's MI5 intelligence agency just released records revealing how it snatched a Nazi spy from a boat on the high seas before he could warn Germany that an Allied convoy was en route to invade North Africa.
  
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com