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From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week's revelation in the New York Times marked an escalation in the ongoing struggle over government secrecy. It reported that more than 55,000 pages of declassified documents stretching back decades had simply disappeared from public view, reclassified, despite the fact that many of the documents had been for years publicly accessible, copied, and widely disseminated.

The reclassification of these documents is in some ways the latest pull in a tug of war that began when then-President Clinton signed a 1995 executive order expediting the release of

massive amounts of Cold War Pentagon and Intelligence Agency documents.

Matthew Aide is the historian who inadvertently discovered the missing documents and the program

that disappeared them.

He joins us now.

Matthew, welcome to the show. Great to be here. Thank you.

So how did you discover that these documents were missing? Purely by accident. While doing research for my book,

I submitted a request to see some State Department documents, which I had examined some nine years ago

and got the response back that the documents had been withdrawn from the public record in late 1999.

I basically interrogated a series of National Archives staff members and asked them why the documents had been withdrawn.

...