Author: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, introduction by Richard Gid Powers
Publisher: Anchor (September 9, 2003)
ISBN: 0300080794 (available at amazon.com)

“A case can be made….that secrecy is for losers.”

Redefine Mission of Intelligence Community
Senator Moynihan wrote the book following his work as chairman on the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. He argued that we are not going to put an end to secrecy, nor should we. But there was a serious need to redefine the mission of the intelligence community, and the manner in which it operates, following the cold war.

Secrecy and bureaucracy became enmeshed – “too great attention was paid to hoarding information, defending boundaries, securing budgets, and other matters of corporate survival.”

(Note: Information Security Oversight Office: Publishes annual report on number of secrets created by any government organization.)

Analysis Far More Than Secrecy Is The Key To Security
Senator Moynihan believed that too much of the the large intelligence bureaucracy operates out of public view, and recommended radical change in the way the intelligence community operates. Through more openness to public critique, “it is possible to conceive that a competing culture of openness might develop and that it could assert and demonstrate greater efficiency? Analysis far more than secrecy is the key to security.?
Lessons of Pentagon Papers

• No law preventing the publication. Unauthorized disclosure of classified material is not subject to criminal sanctions w/o consideration of the intent of the communicator. This is very difficult to prove because the defense would be that the public had the right to know.
• Espionage Act of 1917 (most recent amendment 1951). Much of the secrecy now in place
• “Pentagon Papers were kept secret no so much to prevent harm to national security but to prevent ‘governmental embarrassment of on sort or another’

Government Secrecy In Essence

• (P. 73) “Departments and agencies hoard information, and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization’s assets. Sometime the exchange is in kind: I exchange my secret for your secret. Sometimes the exchange resembles barter: I trade my willingness to share certain secrets for your help in accomplishing my purposes. But whatever the coinage, the system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decision are either made poorly or not made at all.” 

Examples of how government bureaucracies used secrecy to avoid public scrutiny 

• Venona Secrets never passed on to President Truman
• Bay of Pigs
• Watergate
• Iran-Contra
  Executive kept quiet about its activies. Although it was supposed to inform the intelligence committees of Congress. “A case of seriously misguided people violating seriously ineffective national security laws.”(Harold Koh “National Security Constitution: Sharing Power After the Iran Contra Affair)
• Failure to forecast the collapes of the Soviet Union
   

Current Crisis: Culture of Secrecy

• Not going to put and end to secrecy, nor should we. But there is an ongoing crisis, according to Koh, “American government has not found a stable mode of national security decision making’ .
• Only secrecy allows a constitutionally weak executive to bypass the legislature in making decision that the legislature will not support when things go wrong.
• CIA - failure to redefine mission of the intelligence community following the Cold War. Operation displaced intelligence and in fact became according to James Q. Wilson the “culture defining task of the CIA.”Mission should resemble - provide political economic and military intelligence on countries hostile to the US so we can help to stop crises and conflicts before they start.
• Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy recommended restraining the current culture of secrecy by statute. Key elements include providing clear definitions of three level classification system (Confidential, Secret, Top Secret); and a framework for a balancing test between public’s right to know and government’s’ need to protect national security. (p. 217)
• Paul McMasters “The Government’s obsession with secrecy creates a citizens obsession with conspiracy”
• Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
  “measure of a severity hardly contemplated and certainly never enacted during earlier crises now became statute with minimum objection”

Secret Intelligence Vastly Overrated
The book concludes with an extensive quote from George Kennan:

“It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience, first as a government official and then in the past 45 years as a historian, that the need by our government for secret intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been vastly over-rated. “I would say that something upwards of 95% of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country.”(italics added) “There may still be areas, very small areas really, in which there is a real need to penetrate someone else’s curtain of secrecy. All right. But then please, without the erection of false pretenses and elaborate efforts to deceive, and without, to the extent possible- the attempt to maintain “spies” on the adversary’s territory.We easily become ourselves, the sufferers from these methods of deception. For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the inter-relationship, in what they are doing, of ends and means.”