Monday, February 1, 1999; Page A21
You won't find the answer here -- or anywhere, for that matter. The CIA won't say. Ours is a government with a highly developed taste for secrecy, and this is one of those secrets.
As it happens, you could find out the CIA's appropriation for intelligence for this fiscal year: $26.7 billion. You can find this figure because the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the CIA to disclose it. FAS now is suing to make the CIA release its requests as well as its appropriations.
In the meantime, every day, the federal government creates some 10,000 new secrets, according to Paul McMasters, who monitors this kind of thing as one of his duties as First Amendment ombudsman for the Freedom Forum. To maintain all this -- some 10 billion pages of secrets, many of which are 25 years old or older -- the government is spending more than $5 billion a year, says McMasters.
"Secrecy," the book published last year by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argues that this has done -- and continues to do -- a great deal of harm. Tracing America's culture of secrecy back to the beginning of this century, Moynihan blames it for much of what has ailed us, from McCarthyism to Richard Nixon's treachery.
"Secrecy" is especially interesting when it looks at our fanatic insistence on overestimating the might of the Soviet Union, from its inception to its stunning collapse. Moynihan quotes one general who, having for years pored over satellite photos and detailed classified reports, finally visits the faltering behemoth in 1988: "It all came crashing home to me that I really had been dealing with a caricature all those years."
"Why were so many of us insensitive to the inevitable?" Adm. Stansfield Turner, former CIA director, asks. Moynihan responds: "The answer has to be, at least in part, that too much of the information was secret, not sufficiently open to critique by persons outside government. Within the confines of the intelligence community, too great attention was paid to hoarding information, defending boundaries, securing budgets and other matters of corporate survival."
Moynihan also blames secrecy in turning the Iran-contra affair from a fairly standard covert operation to a pool of deception so deep that, as he put it, "I didn't believe the American republic had ever seen so massive a hemorrhaging of trust and integrity."
"Had it not been possible for those involved with Iran-contra to act under a vast umbrella of secrets, they would have been told to stop," he writes.
An important turn in these developments came in 1995, when Clinton issued an executive order providing for automatic declassification: Some documents, depending on age and subject matter, would be declassified with little or no review -- much more cheaply and quickly than previously, when individuals had to look over every page.
The results were dramatic. Some 400 million pages of documents were declassified in the past two years, according to Steven Aftergood, who directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.
But that now has come to a halt, at least temporarily. Concerns among some senators about the possible release of nuclear weapons information effectively has stalled declassification. This matter now awaits resolution in the Senate -- hardly a promising situation, given that body's current preoccupation.
Moynihan tells us, "The Cold War has bequeathed to us a vast secrecy system that shows no sign of receding. It has become our characteristic mode of governance in the executive branch."
Yet, curiously enough, the legislative branch is behaving more regressively than the executive. Former Energy secretary Hazel O'Leary, for one, undertook an "openness initiative" in 1993 that declassified some 70 categories of information previously restricted under the Atomic Energy Act. In the Justice Department, Roslyn Mazer chairs the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, the court of last resort for anyone trying to pry secrets from the intelligence community. In that panel's two years of existence, Mazer has usually stood up to bureaucratic secret-keepers and forced the release of thousands of valuable documents.
Moynihan makes a strong case that, as he puts it, "Secrecy is for losers." Here's hoping that his book, with its tales of secrecy leading us astray, can help people such as Aftergood and McMasters in the often lonely fight for openness.
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