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Like many genealogists, historians and other researchers, Howard Harner was a regular visitor at the U.S. National Archives in downtown Washington, D.C. He spent hundreds of hours there from 1996 through 2002. However, he wasn't simply seeking information. He was stealing. Harner was "researching" letters from military officers and government officials involved in directing both the Civil War and the westward expansion of the United States, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Among the documents that Harner stole were letters from famous historical figures such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Generals Lewis Armistead and George Pickett. When nobody...

A Virginia man was sentenced yesterday to two years in prison for stealing more than 100 Civil War-era documents from the National Archives, including some he tried to sell on eBay. Howard Harner, 68, took letters authored by Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other historical figures. Federal prosecutors sought a lengthy sentence to help discourage trafficking in stolen American history. Harner, of Staunton, pleaded guilty in March to hiding the documents in his clothing and smuggling them out of a National Archives research room from 1996 to 2002. Prosecutors said he made $47,314 by selling the documents to a...

Allen Weinstein, a historian of Cold War espionage whose 1978 book, “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” marshaled a mountain of new evidence to argue that Alger Hiss was guilty as charged in one of the most famous spy trials of the postwar era, and who served as the ninth national archivist of the United States, died on Thursday at a nursing home in Gaithersburg, Md. He was 77. The cause was pneumonia, his son Andrew said. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years. Making use of newly available F.B.I. documents totaling tens of thousands of pages, Mr. Weinstein...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...

National Archives Vowed Silence Associated Press | April 18, 2006 WASHINGTON - The National Archives promised to avoid drawing "unnecessary public attention" to its efforts to remove declassified CIA documents from public view after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to a once-secret agreement with the spy agency. The agreement was made public Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press. It provided new details on the efforts of the nation's chief historical repository to hide the fact that U.S. intelligence was secretly trying to reclassify approximately 55,500 pages of previously public documents. Documents...

WASHINGTON - Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s, according to Jason Baron of the Archives' Office of General Counsel, in...