Shhh

“It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience,” the 94-year-old George Kennan wrote in a letter to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) last year, “that the need by our government for secret intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been vastly overrated.” In Kennan’s estimation “something upward to 95%” of that kind of secrecy has been unnecessary. “Let Kennan have the last word,” Moynihan writes on the last page of “Secrecy.” His own conclusion could not be more succinct: “[S]ecrecy is for losers. . . . The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in the mode of an age now past.”

“Secrecy” is marked by Moynihan’s ability to write directly and concisely about complicated political and governmental matters. His purpose is to call for a reduction in the secret classifications of an oceanic tide of government papers. But the exceptional importance of this book goes beyond--and beneath--its advocacy to reform. Its essence is historical. Moynihan’s understanding of bureaucracy and of politics is phenomenal, but this is not a work of political “science”; it rests on a very creditable knowledge of history. It contains startling and important revelations, without attempting to become sensation. It is the kind of history whose proper aim is the reduction of untruths.

As with so many questionable administrative regulations, the tendency to secrecy burgeoned in the era of Woodrow Wilson, a president who proclaimed, “Open covenants openly arrived at,” but who at the same time was extremely suspicious and narrow-minded. Yet the anti-German and anti-”subversive” hysteria of 1917-1921 did not last long. It was not repeated during World War II (except for the lamentable concentration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast). Then came the Cold War and the rapid inflation of the military and intelligence bureaucracy together with the excessive classification of materials. During the last 50 years, there were at least four crucial instances of grievous errors, committed in the name of secrecy, harming both the short-range and the long-range prospects of the nation.

Moynihan describes them tellingly. One of them was the--in hindsight, incredible--decision of military intelligence (including Gen. Omar Bradley) not to tell President Harry Truman that American cryptoanalytic specialists in 1946 had broken certain secret Soviet communications, including the names of pro-Soviet agents working in Washington and elsewhere. Had this information been given to Truman (or, even better, according to Moynihan, had it been made public), many of the damages of the McCarthy era could have been avoided. “Departments and agencies hoard information,” Moynihan concludes about the affair, “and the government becomes a kind of market. . . . But whatever the coinage, the system costs can be enormous.”

Another egregious and, alas, consequential instance of misreading documents was the so-called Gaither report in 1957, proclaiming the--nonexistent--”Missile Gap,” but also declaring (supported by Allen Dulles, head of the CIA) that by the 1990s, the Soviet Union would overtake the United States not only militarily but also economically. In the 1980s the Iran-Contra affair occurred, during which the then-head of the CIA, William J. Casey, actually lied to Sens. Moynihan and Barry Goldwater (the Arizona Republican) about the American government mining harbors in Nicaragua. That was of course part and parcel of the ideological fervor of the Reagan administration when, among other things, the crazed military spending from 1982 to 1988 “transformed the United States from the world’s greatest creditor into the leading debtor”--with consequences that, 10 years later, are still unforeseeable. Last, but surely not least, the crowning idiocy: the projections of the CIA (and also of other intelligence “studies”) in the 1980s, unable to see (and of course foresee) that the Soviet Union had entered a grave phase of decay with the hold of Communism collapsing not only within its satellites, but within the structure of that vast state itself.

As the author Richard Gid Powers writes in his substantial introduction: “The fissure in American culture that developed during the McCarthy period and the fathomless debts accumulated during the arms buildup during the Reagan years could have been avoided had it not been for the secrecy that concealed from the American people what the government knew and what it did not know.” Or: what the government thought it knew. Moynihan argues that the cultivation of secrecy is the product of the bureaucratic state of mind. He cites Max Weber about the proliferation and the inherent secretiveness of bureaucracy. This goes beyond intelligence operations, of course. The devolution of democratic institutions into multifaceted bureaucracies has been a worldwide phenomenon, the end of which is not yet. I must add, however (and I think that Moynihan would agree), that the above-listed nonsensical misperceptions of the Soviet Union were the results not only of a pervasive bureaucracy, but also of a pervasive ideology; or, rather, of the unwillingness of bureaucracies to depart on occasion from the dominant ideology (something that was true of the Third Reich as well as of the Soviet Union).

That the Soviet Union, under Stalin, was potentially (and, after 1946, actually) inimical to the United States needs no illustration. Nor does the fact that there was a small but influential Communist underground working in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, the psychology of anti-Communism (or, rather, its pervasive appeal--that is, the attribution of every kind of possible evil to Communist machinations) remains to be written by a master historian. This psychology’s American absurdities reach from Presidents Calvin Coolidge to Reagan. In 1927, Coolidge’s secretary of state declared that the Mexican revolution “fostered Bolshevik hegemony intervening between the United States and the Panama Canal.” In the 1980s, Reagan (who had Coolidge’s portrait put in the Oval Office) talked not only about the Evil Empire: His first reaction to the Argentines’ invasion of the Falklands was that the Soviets were behind it.

Then why did the enormous intelligence apparatus of Washington fail to foresee the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the 1980s? Bureaucracy and secrecy played their regrettable roles. Bureaucracy and secrecy contributed greatly to the inability of the muscle-bound apparatus to perceive the weakness of our adversaries, but the unwillingness, rather than the inability, to see and to express what one sees was even more important. “It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations,” Moynihan concludes. “It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.”