Meanwhile, the Intelligence Committees in the current Congress have drastically reduced the number of public interest witnesses that are invited to testify at hearings on intelligence policy, and have gone out of their way to impede declassification of current and past intelligence records. And though the interagency Security Policy Board has invited defense contractors to attend its meetings, in likely violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, it has specifically prohibited attendance by members of public interest groups. After five years, I believe we have demonstrated that public participation in the critique of secret government programs is not only possible, but desirable and even necessary. I can't say that we planned to do exactly what we have done. The Project has been decisively shaped by chance encounters, plain brown envelopes in the mail, and many other unpredictable turns of events, both fortunate and otherwise.
Several episodes stand out as evidence of that.
This was back in 1991 when we gained unauthorized access to an assortment of classified documents from the Timber Wind program, which was a misguided effort to develop a nuclear reactor-propelled rocket for Star Wars applications. Recognizing that national security secrecy was not entirely a game, we consulted a senior military officer at the Bush White House whom we knew to be an honest man and told him of our plans to expose Timber Wind. He did ask that we withhold certain technical innovations in the design of the nuclear fuel and we honored that request. We filed a complaint with the DoD Inspector General arguing that Timber Wind had been improperly classified as an unacknowledged special access program and after a year-long investigation, the IG confirmed that that was indeed the case. Thus, the public interest sector filled the void where internal Defense Department controls failed to function and where Congressional oversight was practically nonexistent.