The Arrogance of Those Who Know Secrets : Inman: Access to inside information can create delusions of grandeur and omniscience.

“Information is always better than ignorance.” That was the explanation offered to me by academic friends who took assignments for American intelligence operations in the 1960s.

The intelligence community, both ours and Britain’s, learned during World War II how useful professors could be: mathematicians to break enemy codes and devise unbreakable codes for Our Side, practitioners of the “hard” sciences who could analyze collections of disparate bits of information, even medievalists to interpret hidden information in damaged documents.

But the CIA was never popular on campuses, even when its representatives appeared as recruiters, so those academics whose CIA connections were known found themselves pressed to explain that connection. Thanks to the student activism that ended the decade, the CIA lost much of its interest in the professoriate, and of course vice versa.

But from those halcyon days I remember an augmentation of the hired academics different from the bank accounts enlarged by consulting fees. They displayed the kind of glee that accompanies knowing important secrets, whether on a playground or in the upper reaches of policy-making. And I remember, in even dear and trusted friends, the increase in arrogance.

Knowing secrets is, in the current cliche, “empowering,” no question about it. Knowledge is not only better than ignorance. It’s more powerful. For those academics, even the mode in which they learned secrets added to their feelings of importance: passed through guarded entrances, listened to respectfully by people with swollen self-importance, made aware of their own distinction from their colleagues--they would have to have been superhuman to avoid having swelled heads. But having a swelled head is just another name for arrogance.

To their credit, most of the academics co-opted by the intelligence community retired to the campuses where they were quickly cut down to size by colleagues with their own weapons of professional arrogance. And they came to view the use to which their skills had been put with some degree of skepticism as they readapted to campus life. They were like straying husbands happy to be welcomed back after extramarital affairs.

But intelligence is a much more impregnable ivory tower than academia ever could be. Paranoia--delusions of grandeur and omniscience--was a kind of occupational hazard for many of those whose careers lay there. Think of William Casey, the Irangate principal, and his leading disciple Oliver North. Think even of the otherwise sane members of the Reagan Cabinet who treated the members of Congress as their inferiors, unworthy of sharing the power of important secrets.

So Bobby Ray Inman’s hallucinatory press conference should have come as no surprise. He was, after all, a card-carrying member of that elite corps, believing his knowledge of insider secrets put him above the rules that govern the lives of other people. For such a bred-in-the-bone believer, it would be unreasonable to submit to an examination of his career by those so clearly his inferiors. After all, how many of them would ever be entrusted with important secrets?

Whew! That was a narrow escape!