By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON- Jan 2 (Reuter)- The Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday it had begun a declassification review of two vast bodies of documents that could shed new light on the Cold War and may open up many secrets.

The reviews involve all records that flowed in and out of the office of the director of central intelligence for the past 50 years, as well as all CIA studies on the former Soviet Union from the spy agency's inception in 1947.

The twin initiatives were being carried out by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, a kind of in-house think tank, at the urging of the director of central intelligence's historical review panel of outside historians, CIA spokesman David Christian said.

The CIA declined to cite a target for making public the eligible parts of this material, but said its long-delayed release of files from another major declassification project involving 11 key Cold War covert actions would begin in a matter of weeks, "subject to final review by senior officials."

The first of the declassified covert actions would concern the 1954 coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the elected president of Guatemala, Christian said. He said these documents were "on the verge of release."

He said that could be followed within weeks by release of records on the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Next up would be files on the 1953 coup that installed the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Christian said.

But alluding to chronic problems in meeting its own timetable for making such material public, the CIA spokesman declined to name a target for release of the Iran records or any of the other Cold War covert actions.

Christian said the CIA's plans to declassify its covert actions, first promised in 1992 by then-CIA Director Robert Gates, had been set back two years by the 1992 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Law under which the CIA made public more than 200,000 pages of records.

The declassification review of the files of the 17 men who have served as the nation's top spymaster would stretch back to 1946, when the office of director of central intelligence was created to manage the transition from the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the CIA.

Although not all reviewed material would necessarily be made public because of the need to protect intelligence sources and methods, the review would involve things like telephone logs, appointment books, memos written by the directors, and memos that they received, Christian said.

"This could be very interesting," he added.

The CIA studies on the former Soviet Union that are under declassification review are distinct from "national intelligence estimates" on the same subject, which are the work of the entire intelligence community. More than 450 of these have already been released in recent years.

Among the other Cold War actions due for declassification review are activities in support of democracy in France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s, insurgencies in Indonesia and Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s, secret operations against North Korea during the Korean War and against Communist forces in Laos during the Vietnam War.

John Lewis Gaddis, a leading Cold War historian who is a former member of the historical review panel, said he would not be satisfied with the CIA's declassification effort until he saw what they actually turned over to the National Archives, the independent agency that catalogues government documents.

"The proof is going to be in the pudding," he said in a telephone interview from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. "The real issue is when are actual documents going to show up at the National Archives, as opposed to the CIA's own highly selective publications of historical materials ... What a historian wants is to see the archives."

REUTER