The FBI’s “special file room” in the bureau’s Washington, D.C., headquarters holds some of the government’s most secret information, too secret even for some officials at the agency with the highest levels of clearance. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI is now releasing hundreds of pages of memos outlining why some files were classified top secret and stored in the special room, according to a Boston Globe piece published Monday.
The memos, which cover files from the 1950s to the 1980s, were obtained by the Globe from a researcher outside the FBI.
The room, established by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1948 and still used today, is home to case files on high-profile mob figures and their politician friends and documents detail the U.S. government’s surveillance of gay rights groups and “black nationalist extremists.’’
The newspaper reports that the documents are housed separately from the FBI’s central filing system in order to restrict access to the room. And some speculate that the separation was intended to keep the documents from becoming public
“It was a pretty efficient system Hoover devised,’’ Athan G. Theoharis, a former professor at Marquette University and a specialist on the reign of Hoover, said. “If you can minimize who knew what the bureau is doing, you can minimize any legal action’’ against the bureau if it operated outside of the law.
Although the room was originally housed at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., it was eventually moved, as the room on several occasions became so overcrowded that officials were concerned that the building could not withstand the weight.
Many of the files had “cryptic titles” and most files remain secret if they haven’t been destroyed, a former FBI official told The Globe.
Looks like the FOIA request here: http://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/FBI-CFR-With-Appx.pdf