Hillary Clinton Isn’t the First Government Official to Send Secret Messages

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/about-those-e-mails/

Clinton’s reliance on a private e-mail account ensured that, because her communications were not logged into the State Department’s records system, she alone could determine which of them would be destroyed and which would be saved. A further issue involves the inadvertent discovery of her actions—that is, as the by-product of Congress’s narrow inquiry into the Benghazi matter. This inadvertent revelation raises an additional query: Did other senior administration and intelligence officials, unwilling to rely solely on classification restrictions, devise special procedures to prevent the discovery of their actions? For, as we belatedly learned through the congressional investigations of the 1970s and ’80s and the release of records in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, senior intelligence officials involved in controversial and politically sensitive operations had purposely and covertly instituted a series of separate procedures to keep and destroy records.

Dating from the early 1940s, for example, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover maintained especially sensitive records in two secret office files that were separate from the FBI’s central records system. Those records documented the FBI’s illegal investigative techniques and the collection of derogatory information on prominent Americans. Hoover also instituted a series of special records and record-destruction policies (“Do Not File,” “June Mail,” and blue, pink, or informal memorandums), and he authorized senior FBI officials to regularly purge the contents of their own secret office files.

In 1973, responding to the creation of the Senate Watergate Committee, CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all the tapes and transcripts of his office and telephone conversations. CIA officials also authorized the use of “soft files” and “privacy channels” to send (and then destroy) sensitive communications—and specifically authorized the destruction of the agency’s records on its infamous drug program, MK-ULTRA; on Chile’s Manuel Contreras (head of the country’s murderous secret police under dictator Augusto Pinochet); and on the CIA-engineered 1953 coup that overthrew President Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran.