Today’s post was written by David Langbart, archivist in Research Services at the National Archives at College Park, MD.
In the early 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) undertook a covert operation, code-named AZORIAN, to raise a sunken Soviet submarine 16,500 feet from the floor of the Pacific Ocean using a commercial vessel known as the Glomar Explorer. The effort was only partially successful. When word of the mission eventually leaked out, the CIA formulated a new type of response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records about that operation. That reply rejected a request stating that the CIA could “neither confirm nor deny the existence of” relevant records and noting that if any did exist, they would be exempt from release. This became known as the “Glomar response.”
Since then, many requestors have received responses to their Freedom of Information Act requests with that “neither confirm nor deny” reply.
This type of response, however, was not new. Its first known use within the U.S. government came about ninety-eight years earlier. While the reason why is not clear, on June 25, 1878, Secretary of State William Evarts issued the following order to his department:
While differently worded, the phrase “neither affirmative or negative replies are to be made to inquiries outside of the Department, as to what has or has not been done, or what is or is not being done or proposed to be done in the Department” has the same meaning and intent as the Glomar response formulation of “neither confirm nor deny.”
Source: Secretary of State to Chiefs of Bureaux, Clerks, and Employees of the Department of State, June 23, 1878, Entry A1-720: Departmental Orders, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State.
For more information about the Glomar Explorer and the CIA, see NEITHER CONFIRM NOR DENY: HOW THE GLOMAR MISSION SHIELDED THE CIA FROM TRANSPARENCY by M. Todd Bennett (Columbia University Press, 2023).
For a declassified article from the journal STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE, see “Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer.”