Will Bunch has a tantalizing story up today: why did a team of CIA, Defense Department and Energy Department federal agents raid the archives of deceased Senator Scoop Jackson yesterday? A sudden research urge? A biographical itch? Bunch writes

Yesterday, a small paper out that way, the Everitt Daily-Herald, carried a blockbuster of a story. It reported that a team of five federal agents -- three from the CIA, and one each from the Department of Defense and the the U.S. Department of Engery -- showed up at the University of Washington to search through the archival papers of the late Washington Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. (We were alerted to the story off this posting on Daily Kos.) ...

The federal team apparently found what it was looking for, after culling through some 1,200 boxes of Jackson's papers over several days. A library official (who's probably in a heap o' trouble right now for spilling the beans) said that 10 documents were removed and classified as top secret.

Stay tuned!

Update: Reader S informs me, this was the most pre-publicized CIA raid since the Bay of Pigs: "Hi. I mentioned the Scoop Jackson items in another forum, and a friend who's a librarian at UW came back with this:

...it wasn't a secret that they were doing it. there was an announcement in the UW Daily, e-mail to all libraries staff, and I think there was a brief story in the Seattle papers. It happens every few years, either with donated papers or depository government documents, that they send something they didn't mean to send and need to take it back.

Posted by Laura at February 16, 2005 01:56 PM