United States V. Reynolds - Subsequent Declassification of Documents

Subsequent Declassification of Documents

The declassified accident report, released in 2000, is available online, and indicates that the B-29 crashed because a fire started in an engine. This document also reports that the plaintiffs received a settlement of $170,000. The settlement date was effective June 22, 1953, some three months after the Supreme Court ruling. In consideration for the money paid by the government, the case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning all future litigation on this case was forfeited. The radio program This American Life reported in 2009, that, contrary to claims made in US v Reynolds, the accident report contained no information on the secret equipment on the plane except to note that secret equipment was present, a fact which had been reported in the press at the time. The program interviewed the daughter of one of the crash victims who described the government's claims in US v Reynolds as fraudulent.

After release of the classified documents, new litigation was attempted, based in part, on a complaint that the classified material contained no secret information. Monetary damages were sought as a remedy. The initial new claim was to the Supreme Court for a writ of error in coram nobis, based on the claim that the use of the "secret" label in the original crash report was a fraud on the court. This was an attempt to overturn the settlement agreement of June 1953. This motion was denied on June 23, 2003 in In re Herring. The case was refiled as Herring v. United States in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on October 1, 2003. The trial court found no fraud in the government's claim of privilege in 1953. In 2005, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the decision in this new litigation, in which District Court determined "there was no fraud because the documents, read in their historical context, could have revealed secret information about the equipment being tested on the plane and, on a broader reading, the claim of privilege referred to both the mission and the workings of the B-29". Even without the broad reading that the claim included secrecy concerning the aircraft itself, the court found it possible that the documents' revelations "that the mission required an 'aircraft capable of dropping bombs' and that the mission required an airplane capable of 'operating at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above'" could have been "seemingly insignificant pieces of information would have been of keen interest to a Soviet spy fifty years ago."