April 19, 2005 | 40 Years

Senator Kent Conrad started reminicising at a Congressional hearing in March and let slip that a relative of his had been a CIA station chief some 40 years ago.

He also said his name: Harden Smith.

Though it been biblical time since Smith worked in Libya, his name remains classified as the CIA considers station chiefs to be covert operatives.

John Donnelly of Congressional Quarterly has more on this and the later attempt to expunge the record here.

After the hearing, the Budget Committee got a call from the Pentagon requesting that the panel delete the line from its official transcript, which it did. On the committee’s Web site, most hearings are available on Real Video, but clicking on the link to watch the March 1 hearing brings up “file not found.”

Conrad was not the only one who was asked to delete the information. Congressional Quarterly, which posts transcripts of hearings on CQ.com, likewise was asked to remove this one. The request to CQ, like that to the Budget Committee, came not from the CIA but from the Pentagon’s Office of Legislative Affairs. It did not come until a month after the hearing, without explanation of the putative security risk. CQ declined.

There’s nothing wrong with the government asking news organizations to delete information that it deems to be classified, as long as there’s no explicit or implied threat of retaliation against the news outlet, said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. But in this case, he said, there does not appear to be a security imperative that justifies a deletion.

“This individual is retired,” Aftergood said of Smith. “The fact that in the past he may have served undercover is no longer national security information.”

Posted by Ryan Singel at April 19, 2005 10:02 AM

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