Stephen Aftergood’s Secrecy News commends SECDEF nominee Bob Gates on his record regarding openness, oversight:
ROBERT GATES ON OPENNESS, OVERSIGHT
As Director of Central Intelligence from 1991-1993, Robert M. Gates, the nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense, grappled with questions of government secrecy more than almost any other agency head and helped to inaugurate a decade of increasing openness in intelligence and elsewhere.
[snip]
He undertook several initiatives to increase openness in U.S. intelligence, some of which did not fail.
He directed the publication of unclassified and declassified articles from the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence; he began the process of declassifying records concerning major U.S. covert actions during the cold war; he signaled the CIA’s willingness to cooperate in a government-wide program of declassifying records pertaining to the assassination of President Kennedy; and he initiated a program of declassification of National Intelligence Estimates on the former Soviet Union.
I never got around to reading Gates’ memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War—guess I know what I am reading on the plane to Beijing.
In the meantime, Raymond Garthoff had a critical yet warm review in the Political Science Quarterly (subscription required).