[Letter to Kevin Klose from Jon Cohen]

1

Paper mills have about the same appetite for one one-thirtysecond of an inch morsels of paper that humans have for beef byproducts. Carol Kopelman of Lorton, Virginia's Document
Destructors says when paper is shredded that small, it becomes
powdery and there is not enough fiber left to recycle it. But
Kopelman, like many other industrial shredders and even recycling
gurus, had not heard the growling maw of Chesapeake Paperboard
Company.
For the past few months Chesapeake Paperboard of Baltimore,
Maryland, has been devouring five to six tons of shredded White
House words each week. ''We mix that in with longer fibers to
form a matrix and it does form a web,'' explain's Chesapeake's
Murrell Smith Jr.. The 200 tons of paperboard that Chesapeake
makes each day is sold to outfits that transform it into pizza
and laundry boxes, file folders, and Easter egg holders.
Smith offers a rhapsodic portrait of paper recycling and
''waste exchange.'' As for the common wisdom that finely shredded
paper can't be recycled, Smith says, ''I don't know that can't
and won't aren't used somewhat interchangeably. In a metaphysical
sense, when you keep shortening and shortening a fiber, you still
have a fiber.''
Smith charges the White House a $35-a-ton tipping fee, which
is $6.50 less than the local landfill's rate (though it is
pricier to cart the goods all the way to Baltimore) and would
welcome the CIA's business. ''Like the Marines, we're looking for
a few good suppliers,'' he says.
When told of Chesapeake's hunger for CIA trash, the Agency's
Mansfield says, ''Transporting classified trash would be
problematic in our view. We'd have legitimate security
concerns.''
The CIA invokes the phrase ''security concerns'' as though it
is some sort of Fifth Amendment designed to protect the Agency
from self-incriminating evidence. But maybe CIA classified
information is different from White House classified information.
Maybe the Langleyites communicate in a cipher that can be decoded
from microdots of paper that measure one one-thirty-second of an
inch.
Without getting Michael Poland too deeply involved with the
CIA, this president of Virginia's Environmental Recycling says
shredding to three thirty-seconds of an inch, the DoD standard,
''would destroy any possibility of recovering knowledge or
information.'
As of July 1, 1991, Fairfax County has required private and
government offices that employ more than 200 people to recycle.