No Security in Excessive Secrecy

The Iran-Contra affair is only the most recent example of the cost of secrecy in a democratic society. Excessive secrecy does not necessarily enhance national security. Indeed, at times it may actually reduce it.

Recently I had the opportunity to study the remarkable case of Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who worked on the atomic bomb from 1941 to 1949 and passed all the information that he could to the Soviets. British official secrecy failed to stop Fuchs, and even protected him.

The real secrets of the Fuchs case were political rather than scientific. Fuchs was an embarrassment in 1950 because he was controlled by a German communist spy ring operating under the very nose of the British government; he had worked for MI6 during the war, monitoring the German atomic-bomb project; he had been cleared six times by Roger Hollis, future director general of MI5, and could conceivably be linked to Soviet mole Kim Philby and to the Ultra secret--the decoding of German wartime wireless traffic.

From an American archive I was able to obtain a copy of Fuchs’ confession, which is still classified in Britain. The question became: Why was British secrecy so obsessive and British security so weak?

For George Orwell, Britain was like a family with the wrong members in control. Well-born traitors within the British Establishment rose to the very top of the foreign service and the intelligence community. At the same time, the Official Secrets Act prevented journalists or politicians from knowing anything about Britain’s own atom-bomb project, about the Ultra secret or about the real spies within. In the hermetic and clubby world of official secrecy, the inside was protected by secrecy.

It was a different world then. Subversion was motivated by ideology, not money. Fuchs truly sought to build a new communist Germany by aiding the Soviet Union at a time when the Anglo-Soviet agreement of 1942 mandated military technology exchange between the two governments. Fuchs spied for an ally, not an enemy. As a result of his experience at Los Alamos, Fuchs was more useful to the British because of his active work on their bomb project than he was to the Soviets, who only received occasional documents from him. This helps explain why the British were so slow to catch him. He seemed a security risk worth taking.

National security depends on a delicate balance between secrecy and openness. Science and technology depend on the open exchange of information and ideas. They are also funded by governments and corporations that must preserve secrets. Classification inhibits science, but federal funding supports it. It is a Faustian bargain.

Fuchs operated at a time when the British empire was in decline, American democracy was moving toward a national-security state, and Stalinist totalitarianism prevailed in the Soviet Union. If Peter Wright is correct in his book “Spycatcher,” MI5 was run for years by a Soviet mole--Hollis. As with many past Administrations, the restrictive classification policies and polygraph tests of the Reagan Administration have done little to stop the Walker family spy ring, Jonathan Pollard, Oliver North or the KGB. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s glasnost is trying to budge an enormous Soviet bureaucracy in the direction of economic reform and efficient productivity. What is going on?

The open exchange of information seems vital to international security in the nuclear age. Credible deterrence depends on knowing enemy forces, if not precise plans and locations. Arms-control agreements depend on mutual verification, a principle only recently accepted by the Soviets, and on mutual information exchange. This breeds understanding and lessens suspicion as each side builds confidence in the other in the common interest of avoiding nuclear war.

Gorbachev’s dilemma is that the erosion of age-old Russian secrecy is essential to economic reform, which will in turn erode the very autocracy on which Russian and Soviet political culture have been grounded. The same information technology designed for missile defense and economic planning will create political pressures for change and information flow. The same secrecy that retards economic growth remains essential to party political authority.

As the Western democracies struggle with necessary secrecy and the Soviet Union with necessary openness, we should remember that real security depends on information, not secrecy, regarding each other’s resources and intentions. We are adversaries in an age of instant annihilation. We must know as much as possible about each other. Secrecy breeds espionage as much as it prevents it. The case of Klaus Fuchs is history, but its lessons remain. Excessive secrecy does not guarantee security, and may protect those who want to divulge the secrets.