The Perils of Concealment
MARWICK, CHRISTINE M.
The Perils of Concealment Secrecy: The American Experience By Daniel Patrick Moynihan Yale. 265 pp. $22.50. Reviewed by Christine M. Marwick Author, "Your Right to Government...
...Recent events such as the Indian government's unexpected nuclear tests do not inspire confidence that our intelligence community has corrected its faults...
...Congress and the American people were denied the truth...
...As a result, filmmakers, clergymen and a rival Presidential candidate were imprisoned for such "treasonous" deeds as advocating pacifism...
...How will Washington handle its decision making, and what percentage of Americans will trust what they are being told...
...Secrecy," he concludes, "is for losers...
...They are made higher by the fact that secrecy, particularly in the form of covert operations, has repeatedly put the Presidency, and the Constitution, at risk...
...Officials under President Ronald Reagan illegally sold weapons to the Iranian government in order to raise money, without Congressional approval, to finance paramilitary action against the Leftist government in Nicaragua...
...The USSR is gone, but there are lots of threats that are far more plausible than space aliens—like wars among any of the proliferating nuclear powers...
...The Soviet Union is a despotism that works," said Robert Gates, the CIA's chief for Soviet analysis in the late 1980s...
...In 1920, one of Warren G. Harding's Presidential campaign promises was a "return to normalcy," and his election brought the repeal of Wilson's unconstitutional Sedition Act as well as the release of those imprisoned under it...
...Moreover, after surveying the history of government secrecy from a postCold War vantage point, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y...
...The most serious of these was the complete inability of our intelligence community to see that the Soviet Union was dying from an advanced case of ideological fatigue, economic collapse and age-old ethnic tensions...
...intelligence succeeded in decoding 2,900 cables between the Soviet government and its Embassy and consulates in this country...
...Robert Gates, for example, was promoted to Director of Central Intelligence...
...The CIA's conclusions credulously mirrored this bureaucratic defect...
...Indiscriminate sweeps and incarcerations were never again repeated even during the turbulent McCarthy era...
...The decrypted texts were codenamed Venona...
...In 1946, U.S...
...coauthor, "The Lawless State" Classified information and covert operations may seem as much a part of the American psyche as baseball and apple pie, but it has not always been that way...
...concludes that we could do without most of it...
...Currently, 75 percent of Americans believe that...
...With World War II and then the start of the Cold War, official secrecy once again became a growth industry...
...Consider the Venonaintercepts...
...The CIA and other agencies, it appears, had long before made up their minds about the strength of the Soviet Union...
...How successful was this approach to gathering and analyzing information...
...In 1964, he notes, 50 per cent of the public believed President Kennedy's death involved a conspiracy...
...It expanded in a manner that was quite unintended, yet was probably an inevitable consequence of virtually unregulated power to classify and thereby conceal...
...The next logical question is left unstated: What will happen when the United States finds itself facing a new crisis...
...It was able to do so because secrecy vastly increases the power of any one part of the government to escape control by other parts, let alone the public...
...More extraordinary, 80 per cent of the public is convinced the government is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life forms...
...only the U.S...
...Secrecy, he argues, "prevented American government from accurately assessing the enemy and then dealing rationally with them [sic...
...Secrecy's fallout also compromised our domestic political health...
...But apparently the CIA, no less than the USSR, had its own party line and rewarded "correct" analyses...
...The Iran-contra Affair was another illegal covert operation that went wrong and threatened a Presidency...
...knew, obviating the need for continued secrecy...
...Both the Iranians and the Nicaraguans knew what was going on...
...The stakes are high...
...Instead, Venona evidence continued to be concealed from the American public, even after it was learned that a Soviet agent among the codebreakers had kept the Russians informed of what the U.S...
...Blunders of that kind were possible because they were based on the Soviet government's own internal propaganda...
...Classifying material "Confidential," "Secret" and "Top Secret" dates back only to World War I, and is based on a British model...
...In 1977, following his election to the Senate, he requested his own FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act...
...The Nixon White House overreacted disastrously, creating a group of White House investigators, the socalled Plumbers, to plug the leaks...
...Moynihan has held senior posts in the administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, including that of U.S...
...By far the most frightening fact concerning the Venona intercepts, however, is that President Harry S.Truman was not informed of either their existence or their contents, so tightly were Cold War secrets held by the institutions that compiled them...
...Moynihan attributes much of America's current obsession with conspiracy theory to the hoarding of information...
...When secrecy and covert operations put our institutions in conflict and at risk, when so much of our intelligence is less accurate than information from openly available sources, is it really wise to continue with our present system...
...Moynihan reminds us that the Watergate crisis began with the unauthorized publication of the Pentagon Papers, which happened to carry a "Top Secret" stamp but were merely a dry and lengthy history of the Vietnam War...
...The system was introduced on the initiative of President Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his publicly stated desire to make the world "safe for democracy," successfully lobbied for the Espionage Act of 1917 and— apparently failing to see the irony—for a revised Sedition Act designed to limit public debate...
...Our intelligence specialists ignored firsthand reports from nonclassified sources, like tourists, who invariably reported that nothing in the USSR worked, everything was in short supply and people were not happy...
...They demonstrate, rather, that agencies functioning in secret are not going to be self-correcting...
...He received all 561 pages, and among them found a report going back to 1952 indicating that he might have "Communist tendencies...
...In the years to come, who will be told what...
...The public had not cared for the excesses of the period...
...The implications for decision making are obvious...
...The committee soon realized it was merely duplicating the work of other departments...
...When no one knows what you are doing, you can try anything, or fail utterly, without being held accountable...
...Reviewed by Christine M. Marwick Author, "Your Right to Government information...
...Secrecy mentions no successes but examines many failures...
...Ambassador to India and to the United Nations...
...Moynihan lays the blame, in large part, on the fact that intelligence was "not sufficiently open to critique by persons outside government...
...Moynihan, one of his generation's most durable insiders, thinks not...
...To establish a mission of its own, the CIA went beyond the job of analysis and created for itself a covert operations function...
...He does draw on his experience with the agencies responsible for secrecy, though, and is well aware of what can lie buried in Washington's file cabinets...
...What else have Presidents not been told...
...America's first effort to control public opinion, in short, did not get off to a good start...
...That "secret" information was inherently flawed: No Soviet official could expect career advancement by cautioning, however accurately, that the Communist system was in trouble...
...This was the first step in a chain of exaggerated responses that led eventually to the President's resignation and disgrace...
...As a Senator, he was for many years a member of the Senate Oversight Committee on Intelligence, and most recently he was Chairman of a bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy...
...Had this been reported when it was learned, years of bitter domestic political controversy would have been avoided...
...Another product of the Wilson Administration's efforts was the Palmer Raids, in which some 3,000 "subversive" aliens were rounded up for deportation, although just a fraction of that number were actually forced to leave the United States...
...According to Senator Moynihan, it was an impeachable offense, but Congress lacked the stomach for a second constitutional crisis so soon after Watergate...
...The Central Intelligence Agency, Moynihan points out, was initially set up as a committee to correlate and analyze the information collected by a variety of Federal bodies that had national security functions...
...In his book Moynihan scarcely mentions the prestigious positions he has held during a long and varied government career...
...Admiral Stansfield Turner, President Jimmy Carter's Director of Central Intelligence, lamented, "[W]hy were so many of us so insensitive to the inevitable...
...Few of us remember anymore that official secrecy is a relatively new phenomenon in our country...
...Their declassification in 1995 finally revealed, among other things, that by 1946 the Soviets had already collected considerable information about the development of the atomic bomb, and that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were indeed Soviet agents as claimed, not martyrs of a new Red Scare...
Vol. 82 • January 1999 • No. 1
