Our Top Secret World

The ongoing sagas of whistle blowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have brought to the public eye the astonishing extent of secret programs run by branches of the United States government. Just the number of people cleared for Top Secret information and its more specialized, still more secret sub-compartments is mind-boggling:  since 2010, government agencies have  been required to report the number of persons holding security clearances. By 2012 the number had risen to over 4 million, nearly 1.5 million of whom were cleared for Top Secret.

But that’s only part of the story. Top Secret clearance alone will allow authorized personnel access to a large body of classified information, but there are clearances beyond Top Secret provided only to people involved with specific intelligence and other national security programs. The number of people with such special clearances has not  been made public, but it too may number in the tens – maybe even hundreds --  of thousands. And people cleared for some of these programs might not be cleared for others, thereby adding yet another element of confusion to an intelligence system already bogged down with more secret information than humans are able to handle.

I lived in this bizarre world for a  few years. In the mid-1950s I was an infantry officer stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. When my tour there was up, I was sent, to my surprise, to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD, to learn to be a photo interpreter. After six months of training, I reported with a few other graduates to the Pentagon, where we were informed that we had been selected to study aerial photos taken by the then-secret U-2 high altitude spy plane. We were all cleared for Top Secret, but also for a special subcategory of Top Secret reserved for people working with the U-2 photos. A special codeword was assigned to the program, and another codeword to the photographs and the reports we wrote about the installations we analyzed. But even we were not supposed to know how the pictures were taken or what aircraft was involved. For that you needed another special clearance and codeword.

When satellite photography came into service in 1961, there was yet another new family of  special clearances and code names for the various kinds of satellites and the film and digital imagery they produced.

And another to work with so-called “Special intelligence (“SI”) gleaned from communications intelligence (COMINT), and still another (“Q” clearance) if you were working on issues related to nuclear weapons design and performance. And there was yet another for intelligence derived by secret submarine missions inside Soviet or Communist Chinese waters. And those were only the ones my job required me to know about in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today there are reportedly hundreds of special access intelligence programs, each with its own code name.

An inevitable result of all this complex compartmentalization, codeword clearances, need-to-know requirements and other restrictions was to reinforce an already entrenched cult of security surrounding the users of classified intelligence: the more information to which the system granted you access, the more important you were seen to be, and therefore the more important you came to feel.

The person who had more little letters surrounding the photo on his or her CIA badge, denoting access to more categories of information, the smarter, and more powerful he or she obviously was. It was demeaning for me, first as an Army officer and then as a State Department employee, to have to be escorted around the CIA buildings—even to the bathroom—wearing a visitor’s badge on a chain around the neck.

When the CIA finally issued me a photo badge of my own in the mid-1960s (I was then working for the State Department, in a job that regularly sent me to the CIA to consult with various officials there) I finally had the freedom to roam the halls. At once I found myself looking down with condescending pity on escorted visitors with their shameful scarlet letter of a visitor’s badge hanging round their necks, slightly inadequate, not quite to be trusted.

One Sunday morning in 1964 the New York Times Magazine carried on its cover the picture of an earnest National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, standing in the White House Rose Garden explaining something to an attentive President Lyndon  Johnson. Clearly visible under Bundy’s arm was an open copy of that morning’s Current Intelligence Bulletin, a document prepared each night by the CIA and containing the latest current intelligence and brief analyses of critical issues of interest to top decision makers. On top of the visible page of the document, in bright red letters, were the sacred words “TOP SECRET DINAR,”—“Dinar” being the then current codeword used with documents containing information derived from SI (COMINT) material.

The security people must have gone wild. Here was one of their cherished secrets, flaunted around the world. The code word was changed immediately. To do so meant sending rush messages to every security agency, military unit and diplomatic post that might have access to COMINT material, reclassifying every new Top Secret SI document not yet in final form.

And the worst of it was that there was no one to punish. You couldn’t jail the President’s National Security Advisor or the New York Times photographer. Presumably some hapless NSC staffer was given a tongue-lashing. The world may never know. In due course a new codeword began to appear on the pages of the Current Intelligence Bulletin and all other COMINT documents.[1]

The uproar over the Manning and Snowden revelations may result in some much-needed controls over NSA access to telephone and internet records of American citizens and to the content of their phone calls and email messages, but it will likely do little or nothing to end the bureaucratic fascination with the cult of secrecy. 

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[1] Ironically, the printed information visible under the TOP SECRET DINAR classification line happened to be a summary of newspaper commentary on the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident— not classified at all. But the bulletin's pages were preprinted with the highest classification of any article that might be carried in a particular edition. I happened to have been the State Department representative on the interagency team that had prepared that particular day's “CIB” and remember observing the flap with wry delight. More security-conscious intelligence types were less amused.