WASHINGTON -- His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency's historical files.
It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.
To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act -- a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.
His request set in motion a harrowing sequence.
Scudder, 51, cast his ordeal as a struggle against "mindless" bureaucracy but acknowledged that it was hard to see any winners in a case that derailed his CIA career, produced no criminal charges from the FBI and ended with no guarantee that many of the articles he sought will be in the public domain anytime soon.
"I submitted an FOIA, and it basically destroyed my entire career," Scudder said. "What was this whole exercise for?"
The CIA declined to comment on Scudder's case, citing privacy restrictions and litigation related to his records request. CIA personnel files obtained by The Washington Post accuse Scudder of having classified materials on his home computer and "a history of difficulty in protecting classified information."
"The CIA does not retaliate or take any personnel action against employees for submitting [records] requests or pursuing them in litigation," said CIA spokesman Dean Boyd. "Of course, officers at CIA must also exercise their rights consistent with their obligation to protect classified material."
Scudder's attorney, Mark Zaid, described the case as an example of "aggressive retaliation against employees who seek to act in the public's interest and challenge perceived poor managerial decisions... . The system is really broken."
The documents sought by Scudder amount to a catalog of a bygone era of espionage. Among them are articles with the titles "Intelligence Lessons from Pearl Harbor" and "Soviet Television -- a New Asset for Kremlin Watchers."
Scudder said he discovered them after he took an assignment in 2007 as a project manager for the CIA's Historical Collections Division, an office set up to comb the agency's archives for materials -- often decades old -- that can be released without posing any security risk. In the process, he said, he discovered about 1,600 articles that were listed as released to the public but could not be found at the National Archives. Further searching turned up hundreds more that seemed harmless but were stuck in various stages of declassification review.
Scudder said he made numerous attempts to get the trove released but was repeatedly blocked by the Information Review and Release Group, the office in charge of clearing materials for the public. In 2010, Scudder took a new assignment in the CIA's Counterintelligence Center but couldn't forget his unfinished historical collections business. Filing a records request, he thought, might force the agency's hand.
Six months after submitting his request, Scudder was summoned to a meeting with Counterintelligence Center investigators and asked to surrender his personal computer. He was placed on administrative leave, instructed not to travel overseas and was questioned by the FBI.
As his trouble deepened, Scudder and Zaid filed a lawsuit seeking to prove the materials he had taken weren't classified.
At 6 a.m. on Nov. 27, 2012, a stream of black cars pulled up in front of Scudder's home in Ashburn, Va., and FBI agents seized every computer in the house. They took cellphones, storage devices, DVDs, a Nintendo Game Boy and a journal kept by his wife.
In January, Scudder was told he wouldn't face criminal charges. By then, his CIA career was over. The agency had mounted an internal investigation that determined that Scudder's request "contained classified titles" of CIA articles, and that he had deleted a "top secret" label from one document, according to a memo from an agency personnel board.
Last summer, the board recommended that Scudder be fired. He agreed to retire instead.
His requests have succeeded, at least in part. Last year, the CIA delivered to the National Archives more than 1,400 articles that Scudder had identified as missing despite being cleared for release.
But other developments are seen as setbacks. The CIA disbanded the Historical Collections Division last year, citing budget cuts, though officials said its declassification work is being handled by another office.
Scudder landed a job as a manager at a consulting firm. He and Zaid have written dozens of emails and letters seeking to recover the devices seized by the FBI. The bureau returned his daughter's laptop but has not given back two computers that Scudder said hold personal information, including tax returns and family photos.
"As I reflect," Scudder said, "I am hit again by the absurdity of it all."
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Tate of The Washington Post.
A Section on 07/06/2014