[Letter to Kevin Klose from Jon Cohen]

Overt Inaction
The CIA's dirty little recycling secret.
By Jon Cohen
The Central Intelligence Agency would like you to believe that
its documents are none of your business. But if you've read
Environmental President George Bush's October 31, 1991 executive
order, you know better.
After yodeling about future generations of Americans and their
rightful share of our Nation's [his upper case] natural
resources, Bush orders the CIA and every other federal agency to
recycle ''reusable materials from wastes generated by Federal
Government activities.'' Yet CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield says
the CIA does not recycle a single shred of these documents, no
matter how small that shred is, and does not intend to.
''What I can tell you,'' says Mansfield, ''is that first of
all, it's fair to describe our recycling program as fairly new.''
That said, he insists that ''we've already done quite a bit in
this area.'' To wit: Since last September, Langley headquarters
in Mclean has collected 2.2 tons of polystyrene plates, cups,
forks, and lids. Plans to recycle newspapers, bottles, and
cardboard are in the works, Mansfield says. When it comes to
white paper, he says, ''We don't recycle our white paper trash.''
The CIA incinerates its non-classified white papers. ''You may
say it's not recycled,'' Mansfield says, ''but we recover energy
that helps heat our facility.'' What he can't tell us--despite
the CIA's recent proclamations of glasnost--is what type of power
plant Langley has, how much energy is recovered, why the press
cannot speak with the Agency's recycling coordinator, and why
this paper cannot be recycled the way paper typically is
recycled--by recycling it.
As far as classified material, the CIA puts these documents
through a SOMAT machine, which ''explodes'' paper into fluff and
then chemically treats it to annihilate every last pica of
information. The CIA trucks the mountains of this slop to
landfills.
At first blush, the CIA's insistence on trashing its own
classified documents might seem sensible, what with the top
secrets that fill those papers. But last fall, former CIA
Director George Bush and everyone else at the White House began
recycling all documents, including the kind that can only be read
by people who have first had their urine examined. To safely
divert this paper from ''the waste stream,'' the White House had
to purchase special double-cut shredders that mince paper into
one one-thirty-second of an inch specks--three times smaller than
required by Department of Defense regulations. The real feat,
though, was finding a paper manufacturer that wanted finely
shredded nuclear launch codes and the like.