CIA Official Fought FOIA to Hide 600-Pound Uranium Loss

By Desmond Okafor · August 9, 2026

Unwitting LSD subjects and a 600-pound uranium loss were treated as brand threats by an official seeking to limit public access to Agency records.

The file's catalogue entry records an internal CIA memorandum dated January 16, 1978. In it, Herbert E. Hetu, the Assistant for Public Affairs, writes to George Cary of the Office of General Counsel. The subject is not a specific operation or a foreign target, but a request for "relief" from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Hetu was not arguing that the information being requested was too dangerous for the public to know in a strategic sense. Instead, he was concerned with the Agency's brand. He suggests that the CIA's image had suffered "unnecessary damage" and that the public had been "misled" specifically because the law required the government to release "bits and pieces of information."

"Bits and Pieces"

To the CIA's public affairs office, the danger of transparency was not the truth itself, but the fragmentation of that truth. When a citizen or a journalist uses FOIA to pull a single memo or a redacted report from the archives, they are seeing a sliver of a larger, hidden whole. Hetu viewed this as a liability. To him, the "bits and pieces" were a source of misunderstanding, a way for the public to misinterpret the Agency's actions because they lacked the full, curated context that only the CIA could provide.

Hetu identifies three examples where this process had already caused damage: MKUltra, the Glomar response, and the Israeli firing on the USS Liberty.

For anyone who has spent years helping families navigate the wreckage of the MKUltra files, the word "damage" in this context is galling. The damage was not the public's reaction to the disclosure; the damage was the experimentation itself—the administration of LSD to unwitting subjects, the psychological torture, the absolute erasure of informed consent. Yet, in the eyes of the CIA's public affairs office, the primary crisis was the "unnecessary damage" to the Agency's image caused by the release of these records. The crime was not the experiment, but the fact that the records of the experiment were being released in fragments.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

January 16, 1978

At the time Hetu wrote this memo, the Agency was looking forward with anxiety. He lists several pending FOIA requests and appeals that he believes have the "potential for similar damage." These include the Berlin Tunnel operation, the Kennedy assassination, and NUMEC.

By grouping the disappearance of nuclear material with the assassination of a president and a Cold War spy tunnel, Hetu reveals the CIA's internal hierarchy of anxiety. These were not viewed as matters of public safety or historical accountability, but as PR threats. The goal was to obtain "relief"—a legal shield that would allow the Agency to stop the slow leak of its secrets and return to a state of total narrative control.

We know from other archival holdings that the CIA's anxiety over these topics was not unfounded. The National Security Archive holds various reports and letters regarding "DIVERT" interviews and investigations into the obstruction of justice related to the Atomic Energy Act. The records suggest a sprawling effort to manage the fallout of these operations, often through the very redactions and gaps that FOIA requests attempt to bridge.

The Uranium in Apollo

Among the "potential" threats listed by Hetu was NUMEC. According to the public record, the Apollo affair involved the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Apollo and Parks Township, Pennsylvania. The company was investigated for the loss of 200 to 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium, with lingering suspicions that the material had been diverted to Israel's nuclear weapons program.

The catalogue entry for the Hetu memo explicitly notes that during January 1978, NUMEC was a "priority concern" for two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives. While the legislators were attempting to track down missing nuclear material, the CIA's public affairs office was focused on how to prevent the "bits and pieces" of that investigation from reaching the public.

There is a profound irony in the Agency's plea for relief from FOIA. The law was designed precisely to prevent the government from deciding which parts of the truth were "misleading" and which were acceptable. By arguing that fragmented disclosure damages the public's understanding, Hetu was essentially arguing that the government should be the sole author of its own history.

The record leaves it open as to whether the House committees ever fully accounted for the missing uranium, or if the "damage" Hetu feared was simply the public learning that hundreds of pounds of enriched material had vanished from a Pennsylvania suburb.