The top-secret joke the CIA didn't want you to hear
David Pugliese
The Ottawa Citizen
Monday, June 30, 2003
One of the CIA's deepest and darkest secrets -- a classified report about a plot by the "Ebenezer Scrooge" terrorist group to attack Santa Claus and his reindeer -- has finally been revealed after almost 30 years.
Researchers who recently uncovered the report say the joke memo warning about a potential terror attack on the North Pole, which had been classified "secret" for decades, speaks more about the U.S. government's obsession with keeping information from the public than it does of the black humour of the spies who wrote it.
The saga of the top-secret Santa file began in 1974, when international terrorism was prevalent. Planes were being hijacked and bombs detonated. As Christmas approached, intelligence analysts thought they would have a chuckle and liven up their report on global terrorism they regularly sent to the White House. They decided to raise the alarm about an attack that would come some time Dec. 24 or Dec. 25.
"A new organization of uncertain makeup using the name 'Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge' plans to sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole," top U.S. decision-makers were warned. "Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus has been notified and security precautions are being co-ordinated worldwide."
The report was stamped "secret" and put away in the deep confines of the CIA.
Fast-forward to 1999, when the CIA and other U.S. government agencies were being forced by then-president Bill Clinton's administration to declassify millions of pages of records. Among the documents the CIA reluctantly agreed to make public was its December 1974 report on international terrorism.
But even with Mr. Clinton's decree, the CIA declared that most of the report was still too sensitive to be revealed to the public. Instead it declassified only a few sentences of the five-page document, mainly references to a car bombing in Argentina and a private plane being hijacked to Cuba.
But what the U.S.'s top spies didn't know was that the same report had already been sent over to the Gerald Ford Presidential Library for safekeeping. More importantly, the version the Gerald Ford library had in its possession didn't censor the supposedly top-secret details.
Details of the memo were only recently revealed after historians compared the censored and uncensored versions of the document and realized the CIA considered a decades-old joke about Santa Claus as a matter of the utmost national security.
"This shows that the system is not about protecting real security issues," said Thomas Blanton, director of the U.S.-based National Security Archive, which made the Santa records public. "The bulk of what government keeps secret is to avoid embarrassment."
The National Security Archive compiles U.S. government records and makes them available for historians and researchers. It is a staunch opponent of government secrecy and has sued various U.S. administrations to force the release of information.
Mr. Blanton said he can understand the need to continue to keep secret details about the designs of chemical or nuclear weapons. But classifying Santa jokes goes well beyond any legitimate security need, he said with slight understatement.
The archive is still being blocked by the U.S. government from obtaining a variety of Cold War records. Mr. Blanton said among the more-dubious secrets still kept under wraps is the budget for intelligence spending in 1947. As well, the locations of U.S. nuclear missiles in Italy, which were removed decades ago, is still considered a matter of national security and off-limits to the public.
Mr. Blanton also noted that the CIA has refused to release its official history of the agency's role in a 1953 coup against Iran's government. The spy organization's involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected regime is well-known and documented by other government and historical records. But Mr. Blanton's organization believes that in light of the turbulent U.S.-Iranian relationship these days, the CIA has, so far, found it convenient to keep details of the 1953 coup locked up.
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