Secrets and Lies

Secrecy is necessary in the battle against terrorism. But a little transparency about secrecy ought to be possible.

Sitting in his office in Rawalpindi one day last fall, General Athar Abbas, the military spokesman for the Pakistani Army, told me how fed up he was with American officials talking to the press about security issues. “If the statements were to be given in private, they would be just as loud and clear,” Abbas said of the information that was being shared. But with their instinctive tendency toward openness, Americans were making negotiations over security issues harder by being so forthcoming to journalists. Pakistani officials got even angrier when Admiral Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in September that the Pakistani military had been linked to a terrorist attack, apparently to force them into severing their ties with militants. They derided his statement, making it clear that they intended to maintain their ties with leaders of certain terrorist groups, and underscored Abbas’s point that these discussions are most effective when they take place behind closed doors.

Like any tool, secrecy can be used for good or evil. Officials have to keep some activities under wraps in order to protect the lives of Americans and others who are involved in risky operations abroad. Unfortunately, officials also use secrecy and its corollary, the selective release of classified information, in a destructive way—as a cudgel to beat others into submission, the way that Mullen tried (and failed) to do to the Pakistani officials, or as a way to cover up incompetent or even criminal acts.

Two new books, Top Secret America and Fixing the Facts, examine the subjects of secrecy and transparency, issues that have vexed Abbas and other officials in Rawalpindi and that have also been a source of tremendous and ongoing tension in Washington. Abbas may have found Americans too willing to be open, but standard operating procedure for the American security apparatus is not too far from what the Pakistanis prefer: Secrecy is, in fact, our norm. President George W. Bush was notoriously secretive while he was in the White House, hiding information about the harsh treatment of detainees, CIA-run black sites, and other shameful government acts.

Barack Obama ran on a platform of transparency and promised to pull back the curtains on the government. As it turns out, promising to be open is easier than carrying out that mandate when you’re President, and Obama, like those who served in the White House before him, has discovered that secrecy is a powerful weapon. He has arguably been more focused on maintaining discretion in his Administration than his predecessor was, bludgeoning dissenters for speaking to the press with legal threats and prosecuting more people for leaks than any President before him. President Bush began inquiries into the case of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency official who had contacted a Baltimore Sun reporter about his efforts to reduce government waste, but President Obama decided to prosecute. In addition, other officials, including an FBI translator, have been punished for leaking documents to the press in Obama’s aggressive campaign to keep secrets from journalists.

Nobody expects the President to reveal everything that he is doing; still, Obama has ramped up the number of covert operations that the CIA conducts to an unprecedented degree, already authorizing more than four times as many drone strikes in Pakistan, for example, as Bush did during his entire two terms in office. The secrecy surrounding these operations has made it difficult for journalists to cover the story and also for Americans to evaluate whether or not this strategy is worthwhile. Taken on an individual basis, these operations should naturally remain secret in order to protect the Americans who are involved in them. But when covert operations are conducted for years, and are administered on a scale this vast, the President should make an attempt to clarify their legal foundation and to provide this information to the media; Americans could then make an informed decision about the extent of their use and whether or not these kinds of operations are consistent with the principles and values of the United States.

In Fixing the Facts, Joshua Rovner, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, lands squarely on the side of the Pakistani general, at least when it comes to discretion. Rovner states that American officials should take greater care to keep quiet about security and intelligence issues because if these matters are discussed only privately, as Abbas has requested, ordinary people will not have a chance to squabble over them. The President and his deputies thus will be able to manage delicate issues in a way that serves the long-term interests of the country and not the short-term goals of domestic politics. In contrast, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin warn against the dangers of this kind of approach to national security in Top Secret America. They argue that there has been entirely too much secrecy in Washington in recent years and that this new, turbo-charged subterfuge has led to a bloated bureaucracy, overspending, and ineffective governance.

Government secrecy is an important and urgent topic. To be completely open and transparent about the subject at hand, however, neither book is much fun to read. Top Secret America has a staccato style and is woven around data points rather than characters or scenes; it reads like newspaper articles that have been cobbled together (indeed, the book is based on an award-winning Post series) and never coheres into an engaging narrative. Meanwhile, Fixing the Facts is dense and punishing, like the prose in a lumbering college textbook. Despite their stylistic weaknesses, though, both of these books make valuable contributions to the field of secrecy and are worth the slog.

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