It’s safe to assume that most Americans are just fine with secret counternarcotics missions in Venezuela. But what about when the nexus of “traditional military activities” includes the possibility that a U.S. citizen will be killed? Indeed, can a “traditional military activity” be directly targeted at an American overseas? In the system of secrets, would it be more palatable for any such action to be classified as a “covert action” and thus more accountable to Congress? Here the executive branch is on shaky ground. In 2012, news leaked that President Obama was consolidating the various permission structures across government that allowed drone-based missile strikes outside of declared war zones. This was greeted with some dismay but was arguably a necessary development. When the ultimate executive power is used, it ought to be the executive himself who is held accountable to the public—not some midlevel functionary at the CIA’s counterterrorist center. At least now we know exactly who’s to blame when civilians or noncombatants are slain in America’s secret wars.
In no way are the moral objections to drone warfare answered by such post facto accountability, and there is no moral doctrine that justifies the accidental killing of an American juvenile. On October 14, 2011—a few weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in the Yemeni desert—sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was blown to bits by an American strike while he was eating lunch along with (we are told) some of his father’s friends. The younger al-Awlaki did not choose a life of terrorism; he was born into it. He did not renounce his American citizenship. He did not encourage, as his father had, terrorism against the United States. He was simply there. The Obama administration will not acknowledge his death formally, even though his blood is on their hands. The administration believes they are constrained by the secrecy of the drone program, but they also know that they cannot justify or even explain al-Awlaki’s death without referring to the fog of small wars. Attorney General Eric Holder has insinuated that the elder al-Awlaki got his constitutional due process because the executive branch had internal deliberations before deciding to kill him. Because Congress has authorized the executive to kill terrorists generally, that would suffice.
And as thin as it seems, that may be the best legal argument for a national security program that many Americans defend as legitimate. Still, while obscuring the technical details of a program, secrecy also stifles robust debate about its fundamental morality. It would seem that most Americans do not object to the drone war, but it’s unlikely that a majority know about Abdulrahman’s inglorious death either.
Notes
1. Joint Special Operations Command, “United States Special Operations Command,” http://www.socom.mil/Pages/JointSpecialOperationsCommand.aspx.
2. Congressional modification of 1991 to Section 503(e) of the National Security Act of 1947.
CHAPTER 10
Necessary Secrets
Most Americans, though they might disagree with the morality of nuclear weapons, would agree that the United States is within its rights to use secrecy to preserve the security and integrity of the nuclear arsenal. The U.S. Air Force protects three resources in the continental United States with no-notice, lethal force at all times. These assets, designated Protection Level One, include Air Force One; one-of-a-kind aircraft (the stealth helicopters used in the Osama bin Laden raid, for example); and nuclear weapons. In 2006, an Internet video portraying Air Force One being vandalized by a graffiti artist went viral. Those in the know immediately recognized it as a hoax. It had to be: security around the president’s aircraft is as hardened as the White House itself. A staff of armed personnel known as Ravens stand watch 24/7, backed up by heavier assets nearby. Unauthorized personnel who get too close to Air Force One will not be handcuffed. They will be shot.∗
The Posse Comitatus Act ostensibly prevents military forces from engaging in law enforcement operations on U.S. soil. Yet Congress may expressly permit the military to conduct activities deemed necessary. Conspiracy theorists have long argued that there is a body of secret exemptions to the act that give the military license to detain and even kill Americans during national emergencies. This is false, though commanders can use lethal force to secure critical infrastructure and property and save the lives of others if they arrive at the scene of a disaster before civilian law enforcement. Indeed, Posse Comitatus does not address a wide range of military activities on American soil, from commando training missions in the middle of busy cities to operating military-grade equipment at the request of the FBI. During some National Special Security Events, for example, the Predator drone that hovers above the event site is not piloted by civilians, although civilians process whatever intelligence it gathers. These powers are not claimed in secret, though they certainly exist in secrecy’s penumbra, and the deep penetration of military power remains a very sensitive subject for the civilian politicians elected to run the government.
Wherever a nuclear weapon is transported on the ground, convoy commanders have exclusive jurisdiction over its defense. In a nuclear National Defense Area, as its legal umbrella is called, the use of force is not only authorized, it is de facto. One JAG (Judge Advocate General) officer told us, “Nothing impedes the transport of a Protection Level One resource.” When a nuke is rolling, anything and anyone in its path can and will be fired upon. If a nuclear weapons convoy is ambushed, the National Defense Area can expand or contract, and the full might of the American military is then brought to bear. Stand in front of a nuclear weapons convoy, and one is unlikely to live to tell the story.∗
It should be self-evident that details of a nuclear weapon in the wild are a necessary secret. Other such necessary secrets include things like: our global contingency plans (such as one to try and seize control of Pakistan in the event of a coup, a protective measure to defend its nuclear arsenal from extremists); the location of fiber optic lines carrying high-grade government traffic inside the United States; the logistical details of missions by the Department of Energy to reclaim highly enriched uranium; and all information related to the protection of the president of the United States. (Indeed, for years the Secret Service refused to tell Congress how many agents accompanied the president on foreign visits, claiming that the information was too sensitive to trust with oversight committees. The April 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, put an end to that tradition of silence. In order to convince Congress that the agency was able to hold itself accountable, the Service revealed that 175 special agents made the trip. Nine of those agents violated agency regulations. Now that the secret is out, could a would-be assassin benefit from such information? Maybe. But complacency is the enemy of security. The number of agents traveling with the president will probably change as a result.)
Frivolous secrets, meanwhile, are often generated as a result of being “caught in the wash” of the necessary. A document’s overall classification level is dictated by the highest classification level of any of its components.1 That is to say, a fifty-page record with a discreet state secret in a single sentence on a single page is so classified in its entirety, with the tops and bottoms of each page conspicuously marked Secret. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn,” he might as well have been describing classification policy. Regulations dictate that unclassified sections of the document are to be marked as such, and Executive Order 13526 states that agencies should “use a classified addendum whenever classified information constitutes a small portion of an otherwise unclassified document.”2 Because of the sheer amount of paperwork produced by the bureaucracy, however, this rule is not universally followed, and once a document passes through the secrecy membrane it takes a very long time for the mundane to emerge.
There is also a less generous explanation for frivolous secrets. They have become negotiable currency printed by an exclusive mint, or what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called a market. As he writes in his book Secrecy:
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. Sometimes the exchange is in kind: I exchange my secret for your secret. Sometimes the exchange resembles a barter: I trade my willingness to share certain secrets for your help in accomplishing my purposes.3
More coarsely, one current senior director on the National Security Staff likened a staff meeting about some piece of secret information to “a contest where everyone, when they come in, unzips their pants and lays their dicks on the table.”
Covert programs often measure their import by the degree to which their existence and operations are kept under wraps. This helps ensure future contracts and funding. Reams of unnecessarily classified material are the by-products of this mentality, with increased budgets and decreased oversight as the result.
But beyond the president, the bomb, and the troops, where does one draw the line of absolute necessary secrecy when the implications of sunlight aren’t self-evident? And at what point does a leak become treason? This is perhaps the essential question in any discussion of national security, state diplomacy, the press, or the sprawling secrecy apparatus.
Secrets exist because we live in a world where not everyone gets along, and on certain occasions the United States is forced to take aggressive actions against other countries as a means of maintaining its own interests. There is, therefore, a direct correlation between secrecy and geopolitical power. Valid secrets in practice are an aggressive action undertaken on behalf of the president of the United States or the National Command Authority (that is, the lawful source of military orders) in the name of furthering American security interests, using tactics most reasonable Americans would consider acceptable when they eventually come to light. With regard to military operational matters, Mark Bowden most effectively described the tip of this spear in Black Hawk Down, writing about Delta Force, a known but unacknowledged U.S. Army unit:
Secrecy, or at least the show of it, was essential to their purpose. It allowed the dreamers and the politicians to have it both ways. They could stay on the high road while the dirty work happened offstage. If some Third World terrorist or Colombian drug lord needed to die, and then suddenly just turned up dead, why, what a happy coincidence! The dark soldiers would melt back into the shadow. If you asked them about how they made it happen, they wouldn’t tell. They didn’t even exist, see?4
Since the execution of Operation Neptune’s Spear, special operations forces no longer operate exclusively in the shadows. That is a meal uneasily digested by longtime Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) team members; once the curtains have been opened, it is hard to draw them back shut. In fact, since being promoted to commander of U.S. Special Operations Command in 2008, Admiral William McRaven has spoken openly about the increased need for transparency regarding the nation’s counterterrorism forces. McRaven, according to people who have spoken with him, would rather JSOC spend less time creating layers of myth around itself and more time thinking about how to protect its core assets at a time when, as one senior administration official who works with McRaven said, “every time there is an explosion in the world, everyone knows about it within minutes.”
Shortly after the killing of Osama bin Laden, and detailed information about the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by DEVGRU shooters showed up in the mainstream media, retired colonel Roland Guidry, one of JSOC’s founding members, took the rare step of contacting journalists to complain about the sunlight bathing the SEALs. “The pre-mission Operational Security was superb, but the postmission OPSEC stinks,” he said. “When all the hullabaloo settles down, JSOC and [the SEALs] will have to get back to business as usual, keeping the troops operationally ready and getting set for the next mission; the visibility the administration has allowed to be focused on JSOC and [the SEALs] will make their job now more difficult.”5
Guidry said that the “administration’s bragging” about details such as the existence of the bin Laden courier network and efforts to eavesdrop on cell phones would encourage the enemy to adapt by changing their cell phones, email addresses, websites, safe houses, and couriers. He also thinks the administration should not have disclosed precisely what types of equipment it found in bin Laden’s compound, such as the terrorist’s use of thumb drives to communicate. “Why did the administration not respond like we were trained to do thirty years ago in early JSOC by uttering two simple words: ‘no comment’?” he asked.
He wasn’t alone in his criticism. Retired lieutenant general James Vaught, a former Delta Force commander, confronted Admiral McRaven directly:
Since the time when your wonderful team went and drug bin Laden out and got rid of him, and more recently when you went down and rescued the group in Somalia, or wherever the hell they were, they’ve been splashing all of this all over the media. Now back when my [Delta] special operators extracted Saddam [Hussein] from the hole, we didn’t say one damn word about it. We turned him over to the local commander and told him to claim that his forces drug him out of the hole, and he did so. And we just faded away and kept our mouth shut.
Now I’m going to tell you, one of these days, if you keep publishing how you do this, the other guy’s going to be there ready for you, and you’re going to fly in and he’s going to shoot down every damn helicopter and kill every one of your SEALs. Now, watch it happen. Mark my words. Get the hell out of the media.6
To be sure, the administration—construed broadly—did not intend for too many specifics to get out. The National Security Council (NSC) wrestled with the dilemma early on, knowing as soon as bin Laden was engaged that the demand for information would be intense. Though no strategic communications expert had been read in to the op before it was executed, the White House and the Pentagon hastily prepared a strategy. Mike Vickers and deputy CIA director Mike Morrell would brief reporters on a conference call the night of the capture, after President Barack Obama finished speaking. The White House would issue some details about the time line by having John Brennan, the respected deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, brief the press corps. And then everyone would shut up.
Because the SEALs themselves were not debriefed until after the White House had released its initial timeline, bad information got out. Bin Laden had pointed a gun at the SEALs, reporters were told, and used his wife as a human shield. Neither was true—but both were conveyed in good faith. Reporters, sensitive to the way the administration would try to use the bin Laden capture to boost the president’s image, were relentless in their efforts to pinpoint precise details. Intelligence agencies, seeking their share of credit, offered unsolicited interviews with analysts who had participated in the hunt. Maybe it was simply the pent-up tension caused by keeping the secret so long, but in the days after the raid, “the national security establishment barfed,” is how Denis McDonough, another deputy national security adviser, put it to a colleague.7
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had four secrets he did not want published at all. One was the stealth technology used on the Black Hawk, but there was nothing he could do once it crashed. Another was the presence on the ground of CIA operatives—it took less than a week for a detailed story to be published in the Washington Post about the CIA renting a house near Osama bin Laden’s compound. (It later emerged that the CIA had had a station in Abbottabad for quite a while and had enlisted an unwitting local doctor to run a vaccination campaign to try to get blood samples from the bin Laden compound. The doctor and others suspected of helping the CIA were taken into custody by the Pakistani intelligence service and would later be released only after much begging on the CIA’s behalf.)
Secret three was the type of drones that hovered above the raid: RQ-170 Sentinels, which operated out of Tonopah Test Range near Area 51 in Nevada, capable of jamming Pakistani radar with one pod and transmitting real-time video to commanders with another. A message posted to Twitter by one of the authors on the night of the raid and a subsequent comprehensive Washington
Post story broke that secret. (In early December 2011, an RQ-170 gathering intelligence on possible insurgent training camps inside Iran lost contact with ground controllers and subsequently floated down deep inside the country. Briefly, a JSOC recovery operation was considered, but that was before the Iranians discovered it. At that point, a mission would be tantamount to war. The United States had to adapt to the possible compromise of Top Secret cryptographic devices and stealth material.)
Secret four was the identity of the SEAL unit that had taken the mission and, in particular, the identities of the operatives. The unit name was revealed the night of the raid, but the intelligence community and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) were horrified a month later when several reporters asked them to verify a list of names and ranks that had been distributed to them by sources unknown. Someone had leaked the names of some of the SEALs on the helicopters.
Military officials begged the reporters not to publish the names or even reveal that the list existed. The reporters acquiesced. A Department of Defense agency—most likely, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—began to work quietly with the FBI to see who might have possibly leaked such protected information. Inside SOCOM, suspicions were directed at the White House, which, some believed, was availing itself of every opportunity to highlight Obama’s decision to approve the raid. (White House officials insist that no one there would be so stupid as to leak the names of Tier One operatives to reporters, and SOCOM’s Ken McGraw said he was not aware of the incident.)
Inside JSOC, the Delta guys blamed the larger SEAL community for inviting the attention. Whoever leaked the names might have taken a lesson from the SEALs themselves: when Obama met with them several days after the raid, he was told not to ask the men who actually killed bin Laden because they wouldn’t tell even the commander in chief. Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, asked anyway and was told by the squadron leader, “Sir, we all did.”
Deep State Page 16