So Many Embarrassments Masquerade as Secrets

Never have we spent more money on creating and guarding secrets, yet sensational disclosures of successful espionage operations against the United States are becoming routine.

The most secrecy-obsessed Administration in history has been seriously wounded because it was unable to keep the embarrassing secret of the Iran arms deal from turning up in a small Lebanese newspaper. The world is becoming more porous and better wired, and it is now easier to steal or expose secrets than to keep them.

This is not all bad news if it causes a rethinking of the nation’s growing dependence on secrecy. Plainly the secrecy game has gotten out of hand.

Secrets differ widely in their character and importance, depending on who is to be kept in the dark.

Category I secrets are designed with other nations in mind. Under our system, these are the only legitimate government secrets. In peacetime such information usually concerns the identity of agents, the capabilities and design of weapon systems and how and where signal intelligence and eavesdropping operations are conducted. It is obviously damaging to the individuals concerned and, depending on what the agents and intelligence collectors are doing, damaging to the national interest when such secrets are compromised.

One way to reduce the risk of exposure is to have fewer secrets and to concentrate efforts to protect the relatively few that are really important. Every weapon project creates employment for spies and counterspies. Unnecessary weapons necessitate unnecessary spying. Too often spying is done just because the technical capabilities exist. But the damage to relations with adversaries, allies and nonaligned nations--all of which are targets at times--frequently outweighs the value of the information obtained.

Category II secrets have as their target the American people. Yet to stamp something secret only because the wielder of the stamp wants to keep it secret from the voters is quite contrary to the way in which the democratic system is supposed to work. All Category II secrets, therefore, masquerade as Category I secrets.

Clandestine military and paramilitary operations against countries with which the United States has ostensibly peaceful relations are almost never secrets from their targets. Nor are they meant to be. The overt “covert” war against Nicaragua is intended in fact to demonstrate the Administration’s determination to get rid of the Sandinistas; the details are secret from the American people because they are ugly. The Administration continually seeks to avoid a debate about why the national interest demands that American citizens fund the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the random placement of land mines and the mining of harbors in a desperately poor country of 3 million people.

In such cases secrecy serves a double purpose. While what is actually happening remains obscure, the Administration can practice the art of spin control, creating official truths by presidential authority. Thus, with an earnest look, President Reagan can turn thugs and murderers into the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers; meanwhile, the story of the contras ‘ past, the drug traffic, the mysterious financial dealings and their plans for their country once the United States gets it back for them are stamped “Top Secret.”

There is a second purpose in keeping something secret that thousands of people already know: The classification of information affords Presidents the opportunity to deny responsibility for policies that they cannot defend in open political debate. When the Chief Executive is called to account, secrecy permits “plausible deniability” or retreat into forgetfulness. Category II secrets are designed for the protection of the Administration in power, rather than national security. Of course every President assumes that the two are identical. But secrecy keeps from the people the information on which to decide whether he is right.

When highly vulnerable Category II secrets are blown, the consequences are especially serious. The compromise of Category I secrets may cut the time that it takes for the Soviets to copy a weapon system, but the exposure of Category II secrets, as Richard M. Nixon discovered in the Watergate affair and as Reagan is now finding out in the Iran scandal, can shake the presidency itself.

Category III secrets are growing the fastest of all. Here the target is neither the enemy nor the American voter, but competing branches and departments of government. The CIA kept the Iran arms deal secret from the Senate Intelligence Committee in violation of the law. Within the executive branch, more and more information about U.S. foreign operations is being classified to keep it away from skeptics, dissenters and bureaucratic rivals. The loonier the plan, the more highly classified it is likely to be--and the more probable it is that someday some outraged patriot will stumble on it and leak it.