D. Glomar Response

Producing evidence of official acknowledgement of information may be sufficient to overcome an agency’s Glomar response to your FOIA request.⁶⁶ As discussed in the section on appealing Exemption 1 withholdings, a Glomar response is an agency’s refusal to confirm or deny the existence of records responsive to your request.

As one court has explained, “[a]n agency . . . loses its ability to provide a Glomar response when the existence or nonexistence of the particular records covered by the Glomar response has been officially and publicly disclosed.”⁶⁷ Therefore, you should provide evidence that the existence of the specific records you seek has been officially acknowledged by an agency official.

A requester successfully did so in a 2007 case in which a court held that the CIA officially acknowledged the existence of records relating to a former Colombian politician when then-CIA director R. K. Hillenkoetter read portions of official CIA dispatches referencing that politician while testifying before Congress in 1948.⁶⁸ Since the existence of the specific information sought by the requester was confirmed during the testimony, the court ruled that the agency had waived its right to invoke the Glomar response with respect to such records.⁶⁹

In contrast, a court held that the CIA did not officially acknowledge the existence of records related to a man named “Sveinn B. Valfells” who was allegedly tied to the Iceland Communist Party, even though the agency stated in court documents that it redacted certain “CIA-originated information” from an FBI report entitled “Sveinn B. Valfells.”⁷⁰ Since the agency’s court documents did not “identify specific records or dispatches matching” the request and, due to the CIA’s redactions, the requester could not demonstrate that the redacted information related to Valfells, the court ruled that the CIA properly issued a Glomar response.⁷¹ For more information on this point, see Exemption 1.