CONTENTS
Authors’ Note
Introduction: Asleep under Fire
Chapter 1: Need to Know
Chapter 2: The Curious Case of Primoris Era
Chapter 3: From Inception to Eternity
Chapter 4: Fairly Modest
Chapter 5: Vital Information
Chapter 6: The Horrors Book
Chapter 7: Conspiracies
Chapter 8: Inside the Enclave
Chapter 9: The Tip of the Spear
Chapter 10: Necessary Secrets
Chapter 11: The Tools for the Job
Chapter 12: The Known Unknowns
Chapter 13: The Structure of Secrecy
Chapter 14: Partisan Transparency
Chapter 15: Open Source Strikes Back
Chapter 16: Resistance
Chapter 17: The Flicker of a Piercing Eye
Chapter 18: Olympic Games
Chapter 19: The Next Battlespace
Conclusion: Shooting at Ahmadinejad
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright © 2013 by Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady. All rights reserved
Cover Design: Wendy Mount
Cover Photograph: © Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Presidential seal © Sylvia Schug/iStockphoto
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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“Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
— John le Carré, A Perfect Spy
For Michael and Kelly
AUTHORS’ NOTE
This is a book about secrets, and the authors feel an obligation to be transparent about a few things.
During his time in the military, author D. B. Grady (which is a pseudonym for David Brown) held a security clearance. No sensitive information he came across while serving in Afghanistan or in the United States made it into this book.
In September 2012, author Marc Ambinder began consulting for Palantir Technologies LLC, an analytics company that does work for intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense, among other clients. He was brought in to work on a specific project that did not require access to secrets or to classified information. There was no cross-pollination; the manuscript had already been completed, and nothing in this book comes from any material gathered at Palantir.
Finally, both authors wrote extensively about secrecy while writing this book. We’ve written tens of thousands of words on the subject, and have collectively written more than 20,000 posts to Twitter. If one compares our body of work to this book, it is possible that we have reused phrases or metaphors to describe certain subjects. If that is the case, it is entirely unintentional. Our brains don’t compartmentalize the way that computers can. However, aside from some material about the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command that also appeared in The Command: Deep inside the President’s Secret Army, the book is an original work in its entirety, the reporting is fresh, and the conclusions, we hope, are original.
While researching this book we stumbled across many things that we won’t be able to write about. Though we have no legal obligation to submit our work to the government before publication, we have an ethical obligation as citizens to take extreme care when writing about sensitive subjects. We shared certain chapters with a number of former senior national security and intelligence officials, including several former directors of intelligence agencies. Our purpose was to learn if the publication of this book would truly jeopardize national security. After receiving the feedback, we asked ourselves whether there was a compelling reason to print the secrets in question anyway, and worked from there. We hope we’ve struck the proper balance.
INTRODUCTION
Asleep under Fire
On January 5, 2011, Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had dinner with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, in a dining room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After dinner, Panetta asked Rogers and his staff director, Michael Allen, to stop by his office. When they reached the seventh-floor office, Panetta shut the door. “We’ve got a bead on bin Laden,” he told the two men. The CIA had tracked down Osama bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and it turned out that the terrorist leader was holed up in an unusually constructed, well-crafted bunker-style house in a wealthy town in Pakistan just west of the Indian border. “Come back in a few weeks and we’ll give you the full brief,” he promised.
Panetta had divulged to the Republican chairman the nation’s most precious secret at that time—and did so informally, and with a promise to provide more information. He did so without formally consulting the National Security Council. Over the next few months, he would find a way to make sure that the entire Gang of Eight, a group of eight leaders in the House and Senate, knew about the operation, the intelligence behind it, and the range of options the administration was considering. Rogers and Allen returned to Langley in February and took in two hours of discussion with the CIA’s lead on the project. They pored over models of the compound and a variety of other intelligence, much of which remains classified. A few weeks later, Panetta called Rogers to let him know that the White House had chosen the most dangerous, most potentially valuable option: a U.S. Joint Special Operations Command SEAL team would storm the compound and kill or capture bin Laden. On the Friday before the raid, Panetta telephoned Rogers on a nonsecure phone line.
“You know that thing I’ve been talking about?” he asked. “Well, there’s going to be something on it soon.” Rogers knew exactly what the direc
tor meant.
Because the raid was successful, it is hard to determine what the reaction from Congress would have been had things gone south. On one hand, congressional partisanship had frozen the Senate in place. On the other, Rogers came to trust Panetta. And Panetta had not hidden a thing from him.
Allen would later tell Jeremy Bash, Panetta’s chief of staff, that Rogers was prepared to vocally defend the White House if the raid had gone bad. Even though the intelligence was equivocal, Panetta had the gumption and the foresight to share it with the Gang of Eight. A few weeks later, Rogers would get another call from Panetta, this one informing him about a more politically precarious secret: the United States had captured an al-Qaeda terrorist and was holding him on a U.S. ship in the Arabian Sea. Republicans refused to sanction any federal trial of terrorism suspects in the United States, but Panetta told Rogers that once the military and the intelligence community finished interrogating the suspect for knowledge about current al-Qaeda operations, he would be read his Miranda rights and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Department of Justice. Rogers could have squealed, or could have found some way to register his objections. But he did not. His interests and his institution’s interests had been satisfied. In extending the umbrella, which risked compromising the administration’s legal policy on terrorism, Panetta had instead depolarized the intelligence operation.
As a matter of course, the American government withholds information from the public. It’s been this way since the beginning, and there’s little likelihood that it will ever change. Accordingly, the public seeks to learn that information, both directly (through such mechanisms as the Freedom of Information Act) and indirectly (by purchasing newspapers with sensationalized details). The resulting tension is healthy and is essential to keeping the government honest in its classification authority. For example, in the 1940s, the United States began research into a secret “silent flashless weapon.”1 When this research began, someone recognized the danger of it falling into enemy hands, and classifying the material made it a criminal act to reveal any details. Today we know the truth. But if not for the continuing struggle between those who create secrets and those who expose them, we might never have learned about the “silent flashless weapon” of World War II—the bow and arrow.2
Few dispute that certain secrets are necessary to defend the Republic, but many secrets, like that one, are not. The line separating the two has never been clearly defined. In fact, there is no real agreement as to who, exactly, gets to draw that line. However, we can judge the quality of a democracy by the kinds of secrets it keeps. As long as there is debate on foreign policy, civil liberties, the national identity, and the morality of war, so too will there be a corresponding debate about the secrets generated by the national security establishment.
This book is about these government secrets—how they are created, why they get leaked, and what the government is currently hiding. We will delve into the key elements of the American secrecy apparatus, based on research and unprecedented access to lawmakers, intelligence agency heads, White House officials, and program managers, as well as thousands of recently declassified documents and interviews with more than one hundred authorities on the matter. Many of these interviews are on the record, remarkably candid, and thoroughly insightful. Whether driven by politics, paranoia, or cynicism, every citizen has wondered at some point, what terrible thing is the government hiding from us today?
Secrets are legion—impossible to count, challenging to oversee, and difficult to administer. They exist because the American people entered into an implicit bargain at the Republic’s founding. The executive branch is permitted to protect its power and do things we don’t know about, in exchange for keeping us safe and acting in a way that preserves our shared values while advancing our interests. As executive power has expanded, so have the mechanisms designed to protect it. At no time in American history has there been a proper set of checks and balances on secrecy powers, because Congress (especially since the Civil War) has been loath to limit the authority of the president as commander in chief. Indeed, much of the modern secret state is a creation of congressional legislation. The National Security Act of 1947 codified and upgraded the president’s covert arsenal. It made “national security” a useful catchphrase for pretty much everything related to safeguarding the country from enemies foreign and domestic. In the process, it extended the secrecy umbrella to cover uncomfortable truths unrelated to our protection but politically untenable or simply embarrassing to make public.
There is no single unified intelligence budget, and Congress funds and oversees intelligence activities by way of an array of committees across an alphabet soup of budgets and agencies.∗ Once the intelligence budget is authorized, appropriated, and signed into law, most of the money is hidden from the public by way of a dense forest of line items in the annual defense budget, and further tucked away behind a series of programs with vague names.
The American deep state is not easily laid out on any organizational chart. It encompasses agencies you think you know about, like the CIA and the FBI, but also includes ones you likely do not, like the Defense Programs Activity Office, the Navy Systems Management Activity, the OSD’s Special Capabilities Office or Special Collection Service. With the increase in terrorist threats, it’s gotten harder to divide it into foreign and domestic operations. We can still divide secrets into four categories, however: what we’ve learned about enemies of the state, how we learned it, what we plan to do about it, and what new capabilities we’ve developed to manage any of these. Perhaps the most important distinction, the one people in Washington care most about these days, is: which secrets can be used for political gains, and which cannot?
In his touchstone text on this subject, Secrecy, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. senator from New York and chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, wrote, “Eighty years from the onset of secrecy as an instrument of national policy, now is the time for a measure of definition and restraint.”3 Three years after the publication of Moynihan’s book, however, terrorists hijacked four airliners and killed three thousand Americans. The restraints recommended by Senator Moynihan were quietly disregarded by the White House, which kept—and continues to keep—more secrets from Congress and from the public than anyone else had ever thought necessary, or even possible.
We know this because with all those secrets came an awful lot of leaks.
When asked whether the secrecy regime over which he now presides actually works, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, sat back in his chair and stared off for a moment. An Air Force lieutenant general, Clapper has worked in intelligence at various levels since 1963. In that time, he has had access to practically all of the nation’s secrets.
“I suppose,” he answered, “it has to work.”
Clapper calls himself “genetically antithetical” to the media, with which he works only under protest. He does not like testifying on Capitol Hill because his answers almost always drive the day’s news agenda in a way they should not, and because to him, to speak of intelligence matters in an open forum is an oxymoron.
But eventually all secrets leak. They develop a motive force of their own.
The American people have an impoverished understanding of the state of secrecy and the implicit bargain. Misinformation is layered on top of myths and misunderstanding, and that’s before you even get to the conspiracy theories about Area 51, or whether former vice president Dick Cheney ran a secret assassination ring. It takes a gross misunderstanding of the incentives in play to imagine the government could have had a hand, for example, in the assassination of John F. Kennedy without it leaking by now. In this book, we’ll look more closely at a number of conspiracy theories; in most cases, it’s clear that the original cover-up was of bungling and idiocy, the truth only revealed when it was in some insider’s interest to let it out. Still, the impulse to believe that the government is up to no good has its roots in the r
eal and terrible things have been done in the name of national security.
Last century, the government covered up assassination plots, secret coups, illegal acts, arms sales, and any number of activities that embarrassed the nation when revealed. In the interview with Clapper, which took place in a large conference room on the top floor of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence complex near Tysons Corner, Virginia, he allowed that the “record of the community isn’t all that good” when it comes to the question of whether or not the government has shown itself capable of properly protecting secrets and not abusing its authority. Skepticism will always be warranted. “Our history is regretfully replete with abuse. There is some substantial basis for people to be suspicious,” he said.
At the same time, Clapper and other members of the national security establishment contend that an unprecedented counterpressure has risen in tandem with the so-called American deep state. A lot of people see secrets. Clapper listed a few of the oversight mechanisms. “Congress. The PIAB [President’s Intelligence Advisory Board], the GAO [Government Accountability Office], the IGs [inspectors general]—it’s kind of endless.”
Looked at a different way, there are more people with security clearances than ever before. Consequently, the political and temperamental demography of secret keepers more closely approximates the American mean. With the hundreds of thousands of new secret keepers come hundreds of thousands of new potential secret leakers. As Michael Morrell, the deputy director of the CIA, tells us, the gestation period between the time that a secret is established and the time that it is disclosed has narrowed significantly during his thirty-plus years of service.
Secrets tend to get out more quickly than ever before. The ability of those in power to wade only in the recondite waters of black budgets and black programs has degraded. As we will argue, this trend will eventually be the undoing of the deep state.
Deep State Page 1