Leonard Perroots and the CIA's War on a Public Record

By Harlan Pryce · September 14, 2026

The CIA erased text already published by the State Department to hide the contents of a 1989 report, scrubbing even the portions marked unclassified.

The ink was already dry, the book already printed, and the words already in the public domain, yet the CIA decided they had to be erased. For the author of the report, the cost was the erasure of his own professional record; for the public, it was the realization that Langley views the truth not as a fixed point, but as a variable they can overwrite at will.

What we have here is not the memorandum itself, but an archival description and a side-by-side comparison of that record's survival. This comparison shows a 1989 memorandum authored by Lt. Col. Leonard H. Perroots, a U.S. Air Force officer who had previously served as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the DoD’s primary arm for military intelligence. The document, titled "End of Tour Report Addendum," dated January 9, 1989, existed in two states: once as a published piece of history in a State Department series, and once as a redacted corpse in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

The Unclassified Void

The record shows a jarring contradiction in how the U.S. government defines a secret. The State Department, the agency responsible for the nation's foreign policy and diplomatic missions, had already seen fit to publish the Perroots memorandum in its history series. By doing so, the government had formally decided that the contents were safe for the world to see. Yet, when the same document was sought through FOIA litigation, the CIA stepped in to reverse that decision.

According to the record, "All the published text -- even the first paragraph specifically marked 'U' for unclassified -- is censored by CIA." The agency did not merely redact names or sources; it performed a total erasure. The CIA released only the cover page—a page the State Department had ignored—while blacking out everything else. The very text the government had already deemed unclassified was suddenly treated as a state secret of the highest order.

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

The Vector Connection

To understand why a mid-level memorandum from 1989 would trigger such a violent reaction from Langley, one must look at the trajectory of the man who wrote it. Leonard Perroots was not merely a USAF officer passing through the DIA; he had ascended to lead the agency from 1985 to 1988, during a period where he was credited with helping to avert a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Able Archer 83 scare.

But the line that matters is the one that leads away from government service. On January 1, 1989—just eight days before the date of this memorandum—Perroots retired from the Air Force. Almost immediately, he was hired by Donald Mayes, a businessman who brought Perroots on to become president of Vector Microwave Research Corporation. Vector was not a typical electronics firm; the public record establishes it as an enterprise performing tasks and dealings for the CIA and the U.S. military.

Here is the irony: the CIA spent years in court fighting to erase a report written by a man they subsequently paid to run a front company. The relationship between Perroots and the CIA evolved from an institutional friction—where his reports were seen as liabilities to be scrubbed—to a commercial partnership where his expertise was a commodity. The CIA’s insistence on censoring the "End of Tour Report Addendum" suggests that the report contained something that would have complicated the optics of Perroots' transition from the DIA to a CIA-linked contractor.

Originator Control

This conflict is a study in the friction between the DIA and the CIA. While the DIA specializes in military intelligence, the CIA manages the broader, often more clandestine, foreign intelligence apparatus. When the State Department published the Perroots memo, it was treating the document as a historical artifact. The CIA, however, asserted a power known as "Originator Control," arguing that because they were the source of the intelligence contained within the DIA's memo, they alone had the right to decide if it stayed secret.

This was not a standard security review. A standard review seeks to protect "sources and methods." This was a blanket erasure of text that had already been released. By overriding the State Department’s declassification, the CIA was not protecting a spy in the field or a technical secret; they were attempting to recapture a narrative that had already escaped. They were attempting to pull a public document back into the shadows.

The Desk's Reading

The pattern suggests that this censorship was never about national security. If the text were truly damaging, the State Department would have been reprimanded for publishing it in the first place. Instead, the CIA’s total redaction of previously public, unclassified text points to a legal containment strategy. The desk's reading is that the CIA was not fighting the public's right to know, but the document's entry into a judicial record. In a FOIA lawsuit, a document becomes evidence; it can be used by lawyers to establish patterns of misconduct or contradictions in government testimony. By scrubbing the memo, the CIA was ensuring that the "End of Tour Report Addendum" could not be used as a weapon in court.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the "Addendum" likely contained a candid assessment of CIA operational failure or misconduct that contradicted the sanitized version of events found in the State Department's history. An "End of Tour" report is the one moment in an officer's career where they are expected to tell the truth before they walk out the door. Perroots wrote his truth on January 9, 1989, and the CIA spent the next three decades trying to make sure that truth didn't exist in a legal capacity.

The desk's reading is that the CIA is asserting retrospective control to rewrite the liability of 1989. The redacted pages likely mask the identity of a third-party intelligence partner or a failed covert operation—something that was an open secret in the halls of Foggy Bottom but is a legal liability in a federal courtroom. The people who paid the price for this erasure are the historians and the public, who are left with a cover page and a void where the truth should be. The CIA didn't just redact a memo; they attempted to delete a piece of the government's own memory because they feared what a judge might do with it.

Leonard Perroots and the CIA's War on a Public Record

The Unclassified Void

The Vector Connection

Originator Control

The Desk's Reading

Sources