National Archives Gone Missing: Lincoln Civil War Telegraphs, Photos Of The Moon, And More

WASHINGTON — National Archives visitors know they'll find the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the main building's magnificent rotunda in Washington. But they won't find the patent file for the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine or the maps for the first atomic bomb missions anywhere in the Archives inventory.

Many historical items the Archives once possessed are missing, including:

_Civil War telegrams from Abraham Lincoln.

_Original signatures of Andrew Jackson.

_Presidential portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

_NASA photographs from space and on the moon.

_Presidential pardons.

Some were stolen by researchers or Archives employees. Others simply disappeared without a trace.

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And there's more gone from the nation's record keeper.

The Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, is conducting a criminal investigation into a missing external hard drive with copies of sensitive records from the Clinton administration. On the hard drive were Social Security numbers, including one for one of former Vice President Al Gore's daughters.

Because the equipment also may include classified information, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, calls it a a major national security breach.

Brachfeld has documented thousands of electronic storage devices, including computers and servers, that have gone missing over the past decade from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Grassley, who has demanded an accounting of all missing items, said the loss of historical documents "robs our nation of its history and is completely unacceptable."

The Archives' stewardship of the nation's records has been questioned before. In a well-publicized incident, former President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, took documents from the Archives in the fall of 2003 while preparing, along with other ex-Clinton administration officials, for testimony to the Sept. 11 commission.

In September 2005, Berger was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, a $50,000 fine and loss of his security clearance for three years.

Some records have been missing for decades from the Archives' 44 facilities in 20 states and the capital, including 13 presidential libraries.

"When I came here nine years ago, there was no acknowledgment that we had a problem," Brachfeld said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Since then, he has started a recovery team that attends trade shows and Civil War re-enactments, and enlists the help of dealers and researchers to recover historical items that belong to the government.

The agency has two missions that sometimes are in conflict: preserving documents and making them available to the public in monitored research rooms with surveillance cameras.

"We do not have item-by-item control," said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. "We can't. We have 9 billion documents. We don't know exactly what's in each of those boxes. There's no point in preserving materials that cannot be used."

Each missing historical item has its own story.

_From 1969 to 1980, the patent file for the Wright Brothers Flyer was passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. It was returned to the Archives in 1979, and was last seen in 1980.

_In 1962, military representatives checked out the target maps for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The maps have been missing ever since.

_In May 2004, one of FDR's grandsons asked to see a portrait of his grandfather at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. It couldn't be found, and hasn't been seen since 2001.

_Shaun Aubitz, a former employee at the Archives' facility in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2002 for stealing _ among other items _ 71 pardons signed by Presidents James Madison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Lincoln. The Archives recovered 59 records. They had been sold to manuscript dealers and collectors.

_In 2005, researcher Howard Harner was sentenced to two years in prison, two years probation, and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to stealing more than 100 Civil War-era documents from the Archives between 1996 and 2002. Fewer than half were recovered.

_A 40-year-old National Archives intern in Philadelphia stole 160 Civil War documents. About half were sold on eBay. The documents included telegrams about the troops' weaponry, the War Department's announcement of Lincoln's death sent to soldiers, and a letter from famed Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart.

A financially strapped Denning McTague was sentenced in the case to 15 months in prison in 2007. He had told a psychiatrist that he was angry that his internship was unpaid.

___

On the Web:

List of missing items: http://tinyurl.com/kvmmd2

Archives home page: http://www.archives.gov

Comments

[LeeCalif]

No meaningful sentencing like most white collar crime.

[GardenerNorCal]

How sad. But after what happenned to Iraq's libraries and museums during our occupation I am not surprised.

It's time all these documents were converted to a form of digital archive and access to the originals is cut off completely, an audited physical inventory should be performed periodically on a regular unannounced basis. The positions of those appointed and employed to safeguard these materials should be contingent on the effective performance of those duties and immediate termination and financial liability should be the result of any failure.

[WilliamGossett]

I hope to God that at least copies were made of all these historical documents

[ebanks84]

It just goes to prove that so much of our history has been manipulated by the powers that USED to be!

[ebanks84]

I'm not at all surprised that anything dealing with the Clintons have disappeared because they totally expected to be in control once again and when that failed, their secret database had to finally be exposed of. I trust it will NEVER be seen or heard of again.

[GGinCA]

Secret database?

[Dystopic]

the secret database of clinton's meetng with satan, and his deal with Pan to inject a little mischief in the world ... you know, the secret database

[nellie]

Some were stolen by researchers or Archives employees. Others simply disappeared without a trace.

=================

I doubt anything simply disappeared.

Gee—if you can't trust a history specialist to preserve history, who can you trust?

[ebanks84]

Nobody in the government, that's for sure. There are too many things that can prove our "known" history to be a lie and of course, it had to go in light of our country's eagerness to know the TRUTH of past governments.

[nellie]

Well, I'm not that down on "government workers" as a group, seeing as both my parents had positions in the government, and both worked harder than any other two individuals I ever knew—with more integrity than anyone I ever worked with in the private sector.

[gbrooks]

And this is the sort of incompetence we can expect to increase as our government keeps bloating out of control.

How wonderful.

[nellie]

I doubt theft has anything to do with the size of government. It has to do with the character of people hired to fill the positions.

[nevergiveup]

Absolutely. Notice the stuff went missing during the Bush Times. Oh, those were some pretty crappy times, with him illegally invading countries, driving the country into bankruptcy with an out-of-control war and out-of-control military subcontracting, pallets of US currency being shipped to the Middle East.

What's a few missing historical documents. Bet they're hanging at his house in Dallas. Or maybe Scull and Bones Society brings them out to piss on them when they do their devil worship.

[KCFreedom]

How about how much they pay those people, too? I would imagine those jobs don't pay very well, so you only can get who is willing to work for peanuts.

[ClevelandTom]

As disappointing as it is that archives have been stolen, those crimes pale next to those that have been exposed in the private financial sector just in the past year.

[ResistanceisFutile]

The size of government has decreased since Bush Sr. was President.

[KCFreedom]

You're joking, right?

[Mavky]

This is a pretty common problem in archives. I was working in the Public Records Office in London one summer, and two researchers who were standing in front of me in the line for the copy machine were going through a list of documents that had disappeared since they'd last been in the archive--important WWII documents. It may not be money. Bibliophiliacs covet books just to have them. I've always thought the archivists were very conscientious about checking whether documents had come back, but it probably would take a lot of time to check every document or image in a fat file. In any event, it's really wounding to us historians when documents are kept permanently secret or just disappear.

[henrypapillon]

Anybody running a place like that should know enough to not just let someone rifle through things in custody of the national archives, especially sensitive things or things like Lincoln's signature, of obvious high value. The FBi should keep this on a watcg list and wait, if it takes a hundred years , to recover it. Anyone getting access to anything should be required to pay for a chaperon for those materials , post bond money for damages and be required to go in an isolation room to pore over the materials. This is important stuff. They could ask for copies also for research rather than actually handling all these archives. This is inexcusable.
On the other hand, I have been to the Smithsonian, which is part of the National Archives and they have so much stuff that they may have it stored in some room that they don't even know about. Remember , all of this stuff is of a date that is precomputer, where it was not scanned onto a computer and the locations of storage was not on a computer. I worked in a 4 acre warehouse for Dow Corning in the 80's. Locations then were on computer. We lost stuff all the time. In a mountain of stuff , it could be right next to that location , or someone may have put it back to 8439 instead of 8934.

[Sally Williams 1]

"A financially strapped Denning McTague was sentenced in the case to 15 months in prison in 2007. He had told a psychiatrist that he was angry that his internship was unpaid."

What a pathetic attempt at an excuse. He knew on the front end that the internship was unpaid yet that was supposed to justify his theft?

[Grant Morrison]

..

WTF.

Money, money, money.

Is there ANY other animal that destroys itself for MONEY?

.

[Jesusland]

Animals have no use for money.

[MikeRdg]

American honesty, never fails.

[Jesusland]

You must be a Liberal.

[instagladiator]

Makes no difference.

[Jesusland]

Has anybody checked Sandy Burglar's socks lately?

[totaldisbelief]

the Looting of America takes on a new chapter.

[harloquinn]

I read a fascinating book studying this kind of crime. It's entitled, 'The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime' by Miles Harvey.

[MichB1]

This is an excellent book!