The volume of intelligence collected by the secrecy apparatus has grown exponentially, facilitated by the advances of the information age and driven by the threat of multinational terrorist networks. Because of the availability of sophisticated and once prohibitively expensive technologies, so too has the public’s ability to mine databases for patterns that suggest examples of government secrecy. For example, using such tools as Google Maps, a legion of amateur sleuths and gadflies has identified the location of virtually every classified government facility in the United States. Imagery intelligence that was once inconceivably precise is now readily available to anyone with a computer or a mobile device. Today, secrets are easier to collect but harder to keep.
It’s important to divide these leaks into good leaks and bad leaks, based on why the secret bearer let them out. It’s nearly impossible to imagine in advance what the results of any particular leak will be, making motivation the key distinction to draw. Whistleblowing is generally considered to be a “good leak.” It’s a way for members of the intelligence community and the secrecy apparatus to expose illegal or self-evidently immoral activities, usually at some risk to their own careers or livelihoods. The Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan is a fine example. “Bad leaks” are often done for some kind of gain—it could be money, but is usually something less tangible. For example, the brave Pakistani doctor who helped the United States find and kill bin Laden is now in prison. That’s a direct result of intelligence leaks. He did the world a service, and he’s suffering because a government functionary wanted to impress a reporter.
During the Obama administration, we’ve had special focus on what the White House and related political operatives might be leaking, and why. The executive branch can declassify and reclassify at will, often selectively and for maximum political advantage. It claims the right not only to confirm or deny the existence of a program, but also to, plainly stated, lie about it. Senior officials can sometimes leak with impunity; White House staffers often act as though they have declassification powers extending from the president’s penumbra. Meanwhile, when lower-level members of the bureaucracy have no recourse but to leak wrongdoings to the press, they are punished when caught, even though their leaks rarely, if ever, bring harm to national security. Somehow, even as leaking has become epidemic among the appointed political class, it’s not clear that it’s any safer to be a whistleblower among the rabble.
We will also explore just how much sensitive material gets out entirely by accident—through the necessary transparency of flight patterns, for example, or through online job postings or pictures of friends on military bases. We will also examine the ill-conceived, though increasingly used, government practice of declaring a leak “unleaked”—in other words, to officially reclaim information that’s already been declassified. For example, a soldier can have his memoir cleared for publication by Army officials, and only after it hits bookstores will the Defense Department find objectionable phrases in it that could “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security.” To solve this problem, the government buys back the remainder of the book’s first run, rescrubs the manuscript, and authorizes a subsequent release.4 The result: an inevitable comparison between the censored and uncensored versions, and a precise enumeration of those secrets that the Pentagon wanted to keep, now in the public record.
As an exercise in building trust in those who protect us, these practices leave much to be desired.
Journalists publish sensitive information every day, and the press is the primary vehicle through which leaks are conveyed to the public at large. Responsible reporting requires weighing the public benefit against possible harm to national security and providing accurate context in the form of a fully fleshed-out story. That is why there was such national outrage in 2010, when approximately 260,000 cables and 90,000 intelligence reports leaked. It was the largest such incident in the history of the world, and the public reacted with extreme and understandable hostility. It wasn’t the content, but the principle. Before anyone could cognitively process the sheer volume of classified information unlawfully revealed, there was a gut response of violation and outrage. A Washington Post–ABC News poll conducted two weeks after the release found 68 percent of Americans agreeing that the cable release harmed the public interest, with 59 percent eager to see Julian Assange, who facilitated the leak by way of the transparency activist site WikiLeaks, in an orange jumpsuit.5 Those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were slightly more sympathetic to Assange and WikiLeaks—a not unexpected result from those comfortable with the stones that get thrown in the glass house of social networking. Surprisingly, however, overall opposition to the intelligence breach crossed party lines, with Democrats and Republicans in a rare moment of political alignment.
To manage the crisis, the White House put Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on point. He offered daily briefings to interagency officials in government. He contextualized information, prepared leaders to deflect incoming arrows, and helped mitigate residual fallout as diplomatic cables were processed. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice faced the unenviable task of determining exactly which laws were broken by Assange and how best to prosecute. Assange, briefly a fugitive for personal issues unrelated to the diplomatic cables release, warned of an encrypted “doomsday file” of the complete, unredacted database. He stated that should he be imprisoned or assassinated, WikiLeaks would release the file and password, thereby exposing the most sensitive names, locations, and operations of the American deep state.6
The source of the cables, Private First Class Bradley Manning, was an active-duty member of the U.S. Army and fell under the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Initially, Manning was charged with violating Articles 92 and 134 of the UCMJ. The first deals with general dereliction of duty, the second with bringing discredit upon the armed forces. Both charges stemmed from improperly accessing and disseminating classified material. The list of charges would expand over the course of an Article 32 investigation—the military equivalent of a grand jury—to include aiding the enemy. Although it is a capital offense, prosecutors declined to seek the death penalty.
Assange, meanwhile, became a target for politicians and political columnists in the literal sense. There were calls for his assassination. One prominent U.S. political figure deemed Assange’s actions “treasonous,” though because he is a citizen of Australia, it’s unclear how such a charge might apply. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went so far as to state, “Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”7 But according to Wendy Morigi, former spokesperson for the DNI, “It was much more of an embarrassment than a national security exposé.” She adds, “Once you actually get into these things, so much of what is secret is already out there.” With that in mind, tens of thousands of unreleased documents remain in wait.
The case of Bradley Manning is an inflection point for secrecy in the information age. Regardless of one’s opinion of Manning (traitor or hero, disturbed or determined, ideological or idiotic), he put the entire apparatus to the test. A folder wasn’t lifted from a locked filing cabinet in a subcontractor’s office and passed to foreign intelligence for synthesis. Rather, Manning downloaded a perfect geologic slice of what we don’t know—not merely from one office, but from a massive cross section of civilian and military agencies—and presented it to the world. He took the catastrophic loss of strategic information out of the theoretical and into the real world. He initiated the worst-case scenario.
We will examine the results and how the government managed the situation. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to consider the larger nature of leaking state secrets. Manning now faces life in prison for his alleged crimes. But catastrophic leaks happen all the time. Days after the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the Top Se
cret flight manifest of the mission’s Black Hawks leaked to the press, which uniformly refused to run it. The leaker had nothing to gain by exposing the names of American commandos who were on the mission. (Indeed, no one had anything to gain, and the very idea of such an act is reprehensible.) Yet it was leaked all the same. Why? For what reason do secret keepers feel compelled to talk? Bradley Manning’s lawyers credibly argue that their client suffers from psychological problems. That is not the case for everyone who goes to the press, even as they too risk arrest and imprisonment. Some leak to blow the whistle on immoral, unethical, or illegal behavior. Some leak for attention. Some leak to impress. The collective inability of the human species to keep secrets is hardly a modern phenomenon. Yet somehow enough secrets were held long enough for the American deep state to establish a nucleus, and then grow by orders of magnitude.
Those in power are often compelled to make political decisions about secrets, and these decisions are often choices between “very bad” and “even worse.” The most obvious example is revelations of detainee abuse by members of the U.S. Army in Iraq. To press forward with a full accounting and admission of guilt puts the United States on the side of transparency and marks the first step in reconciliation with an abused people. On the other hand, full disclosure inflames otherwise dispassionate Iraqis and serves to recruit insurgents seeking retribution.
Many wonderful books have been written about Delta Force, Seal Team Six, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and even Area 51—agencies and organizations that live and die by the secrets they create. We owe those books and their authors a debt. We will look at the machinery of secrecy as a whole and how it’s changed over the past century, especially in the last decade. It’s time to assess the formal and informal mechanisms designed to protect Americans from abuses by the American deep state—and how they might be reformed.
David Foster Wallace puts the matter most succinctly in his book Infinite Jest: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”8
∗The planning for the 2013 budget started in early 2011, when the director of national intelligence (DNI) began asking program managers and agency directors for guidance and input, to defend their programs and projects to him. In early to midsummer, the Office of Management and Budget and the DNI issue broad planning guidance, which specify top-line numbers and include “wish list” programs from the White House and others. The office of the DNI then presents the adjusted budget to the rest of the intelligence community. After another round of reviews involving program managers defending their programs, the DNI issues “Director’s Decision Documents”—his own version of the line-item veto—to the proposed budget. There is a lot of internal gamesmanship here, with contractors and agencies lobbying to get their favorite projects restored. This entire process is opaque to the oversight committees.
Notes
1. Kenneth R. Mayer, With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146.
2. Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, Hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 105th Congress, First Session, May 7, 1997, p. 20, Testimony of David Wise, Washington, DC.
3. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 216–217.
4. Chris Lawrence and Padma Rama, “Pentagon Destroys Thousands of Copies of Army Officer’s Memoir,” CNN, September 28, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/25/books.destroyed/index.html.
5. Meredith Chaiken, “Poll: Americans Say WikiLeaks Harmed Public Interest; Most Want Assange Arrested,” Washington Post, December 14, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121401650.html.
6. Michael Sheridan, “Julian Assange: WikiLeaks ‘Insurance’ File Could Unleash Secrets Should Website Get Taken Down,” New York Daily News, December 5, 2010, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-12-05/news/27083351_1_wikileaks-new-servers-fox-news.
7. Adam Levine, “Top Military Official: WikiLeaks Founder May Have ‘Blood’ on His Hands,” CNN, July 29, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-29/us/wikileaks.mullen.gates_1_julian-assange-leak-defense-robert-gates?_s=PM:US.
8. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: A Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 478.
CHAPTER 1
Need to Know
In 1912, the Department of State employed Herbert O. Yardley as a telegrapher, where he transmitted diplomatic cables to and from Washington, D.C. Infatuated with the methods of cryptography, he took it as a personal intellectual challenge to decipher the material crossing his desk every day. According to Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of Necessary Secrets, the defining moment of Yardley’s life (and a pivotal moment in U.S. code breaking) would come when he deciphered a telegram sent from Germany to President Woodrow Wilson—in only two hours.1 Yardley presented the findings to his paymasters at State, who were astonished and impressed. With the onset of World War I, Yardley was placed in charge of Military Intelligence, Section Number 8—the cryptography arm of the Department of War. Under Yardley’s deft hand, MI-8 broke the codes of eight foreign governments.2
Interest in cryptography only heightened after World War I. Yardley, a genuine hero, was named chief of a new State Department agency responsible for codes and codebreaking. He called his new unit the American Black Chamber, after a secret program created by French royalty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for snooping on the correspondence of their subjects.
The target of the new unit was Japan, a rising empire with ambitions for the conquest of Asia. The cryptography challenge was beyond anything Yardley had anticipated, but the Black Chamber found only success. By 1920, through genius and diligence, Yardley had broken the Ja, the Japanese encryption. General Marlborough Churchill, head of Military Intelligence, called it “the most remarkable accomplishment in the history of code and cipher work in the United States.”3
The Black Chamber stacked triumph upon triumph, formulating new methodologies for American encryption and deciphering even the most complex and impenetrable codes of the Japanese. In every instance, Yardley’s work gave the United States an inestimable diplomatic advantage over Japan and an unobstructed view of their military objectives.
In his lifetime, Colonel Yardley earned two Distinguished Service Medals and upon his death, a plot at Arlington National Cemetery, induction into the National Security Agency Hall of Honor, and membership in the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
It would be great—for Herbert Yardley and for the United States as a whole—if that was the end of his story, but it is not.
President Herbert Hoover was no fan of clandestine operations. Henry Stimson, the incoming secretary of state, defunded and disavowed all actions of the Black Chamber. “Gentlemen,” said Stimson, “do not read each other’s mail.”4 This was in many ways a sentiment of the times and an echo of the British admirals who argued against establishing the Secret Intelligence Service (of James Bond fame), and who later spent decades fighting against its existence during peacetime.5
The most closely held secrets by the United States are what we know about everyone else’s secrets and how we came to know them. The collection of communications between persons is called signals intelligence, or SIGINT, whether physically (communications intelligence, or COMINT) or electronically (ELINT).
By World War II, the U.S. Army and the Navy had reestablished fully staffed and highly effective interception capabilities. Like Hoover, President Harry Truman would later gut the intelligence community, reducing SIGINT by 80 percent. Listening posts were abandoned, as there was nobody left to listen, and in Truman’s opinion, nobody left to listen to. As a result, cryptographers had no codes to crack.
This was a nontrivial problem. Cryptography is a cumulative science and a perishable skill. As a game of cat and mouse, it is imperative that codebreakers actively keep pace with codemakers, and vice versa. Historically, skilled cryptographers have
enduring careers, and just as telegraphers once developed a knack for identifying their counterparts on the other side of the wire based solely on tapping style and cadence, so too do cryptographers crawl into the minds of their opposition. As a branch of academia, these techniques and methods are passed from one “generation” of cryptanalysts to the next.
At the same time, a counterintelligence strategy is employed in determining what decrypted information is acted upon, for fear of revealing what exactly codebreakers know. You never want your enemy to realize you’ve broken their codes.
For example, J. Edgar Hoover knowingly risked the acquittal of communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg rather than reveal the existence of secretly intercepted and decoded Soviet files known as VENONA. The files contained information conclusively proving Julius Rosenberg’s guilt and Ethel Rosenberg’s complicity. At the time, however, it was more important to keep the Soviets from knowing that we had penetrated their cryptography.6
On October 29, 1948, the worst fears of the U.S. intelligence community were realized: the Soviet Union disappeared. As America dismantled its signals intelligence and cryptanalysis capabilities, the Russians were doubling down, and on that fateful Friday the Soviets implemented an entirely new communications grid and encryption methodology. Radio interceptions proved impossible, and what little remained was indecipherable.
In response, the secretary of defense ordered the creation of a Top Secret department known as the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA). Undermanned and underfunded, it suffered from early leadership woes, with the added stress of internal rivalries among its constituent branches in the U.S. military (almost to the point of a complete uncoupling) and an impossible mission of cracking a highly advanced Soviet system.
In this task, AFSA failed almost by design. But it did have some early success in monitoring plaintext, or unencrypted, low-level radio communications by the Soviets. It also established a respectable traffic analysis capability. While transmissions were indecipherable, their origins and urgency often painted a kind of residual image of Soviet activity (much in the same way one might monitor a nation’s flight patterns to discover no-fly zones). This early form of Kremlinology wasn’t much, but it was something, and the American intelligence and military communities leveraged it to the fullest.
Deep State Page 2