WHEN SECRECY MEETS DEMOCRACY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303560005-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: December 8, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/23: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303560005-1
ILLEGIB ARTICLE T ImmE
ONPAt~E 8 December 1986
When Secrecy Meets Democracy
C an Americans do anything in secret anymore? You are a
Russian or an Israeli or an Iranian. Tomorrow you are ap-
proached by an American agent to help his cause in a secret op-
eration. Do you accept the offer? Not unless you have a lot of life
insurance and a craving for publicity.
The arms-for-Iran turned into cash-for-the-conrras scandal
is just beginning to unravel. One sure consequence of that unrav-
eling will be an endless series of disclosures-names. dates.
places. faces-that will make it very unsafe to be an American
agent. For some Americans that will mean the end of a political
career. Elsewhere survival has a different meaning. In the early
'80s. Israel had, then lost, contacts in the middle
levels of the Iranian military. "They died out."
said an Israeli official to the New York Times. "I
mean that literally. Our contacts were executed."
The U.S. is the only country in the world
where "covert" funding for "secret" wars is not
only front-page news but the subject of open par-
liamentary debate. At a meeting with columnists
and editors last year, President Reagan was
asked why he was not doing more to help efforts
in Congress to send aid to the rebels in Angola.
Reagan replied that he didn't want to go that
route, but that he would give covert aid instead.
The President was speaking on the record.
In American political debate, the words co-
vert and secret have lost all meaning. It is not just
that. as the European traveler invariably notes,
Americans are more open and informal in their
social relations. It is that the very idea of secrecy
carries a moral taint. Americans are passionately
democratic. and thus acutely sensitive to the con-
tradiction between democracy, with its promise
and premise of openness, and the secret world of
diplomatic and paramilitary intrigue.
Only what is known can be consented to. Se-
crecy smacks of tyranny. Americans do not
readily accept the argument that secrecy is nec-
essary for reasons of state. Americans would nev-
er stand, for example, for Britain's Official Se-
crets Act. In Europe the state predates
v
Still. Americans remain uneasy about secrecy The fire-
storm reaction to the Iranian fiasco has much to do with its se-
crecy. "They were running the State Department, the CIA and
the Defense Department out of the basement of the White House
without any kind of congressional oversight," complained Pat-
rick Leahy, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Siire, disclosure would have prevented the fiasco. but in the same
way that the guillotine prevents headaches. Disclosure of a secret
mission to a leaky Congress might kill it. and thus kill anv
chance of failure (or illegality). It also kills any chance of success.
As will undoubtedly be proved in the North affair. secrecy is
a breeding ground for lawlessness. It is also a
breeding ground for genius. Without secrecy we
would not have had the Kissinger trip to China
or the interception of the Achille Lauro hijackers
above the Mediterranean (North's idea, by the
way). The problem with the North operation was
not the secrecy. It was the policy of trading arms
for hostages and then misappropriating the prof-
its. The test of a policy is not its openness. but its
wisdom. If the outcome of the North affair is that
the covert becomes impossible, then it will have
been far more damaging than we now imagine.
American antipathy to secrecy could be
somewhat mitigated by one act of furniture
rearranging that would deal Congress back in on
the intelligence game and thus reduce the ten-
sion between secrecy and democracy. In the past
two decades congressional oversight of intelli-
gence operations has increased dramatically.
The CIA must report some of its activities to as
many as eight committees ( Intelligence. Foreign
Affairs, Armed Services, and Appropriations in
both houses) with hundreds of members and
staff. Because of these reporting arrangements.
certain to leak and to endanger policy and peo-
ple, both the Carter and Reagan Administra-
tions increasingly entrusted secret missions to
the NSC, which is not equipped to run them. One
change that might encourage the return of secret
work to the CIA (which is so equipped) would be
MW
democracy. In America, where the state and democracy were
joined at birth, reasons of state are not permitted to supersede
reasons of democracy.
The contradiction between secrecy and democracy did not
much matter to Americans during their first century and a half,
when they looked mostly inward and let two great oceans and
the British navy keep the world at bay. It was only after America
suddenly became a great power after World War I that the con-
tradiction presented itself most starkly. Woodrow Wilson imme-
diately proposed a typically American solution. From the New
World. a new way to do international business: open covenants.
openly arrived at. America would indeed enter the corrupting
arena of great power politics-but incorruptibly, without secrets.
In 1929 Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson found out about
American code-breaking and interception operations. He
abruptly terminated them with his deservedly famous dictum.
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
Another world war, the cold war and now the "low-intensity
war" against terrorism have dimmed American faith in gentle-
manliness. The first of these gave birth to the oss, the second to
the CIA and the third to everything from secret Delta Force com-
mandos to Lieut. Colonel Oliver North and the other NSC "cow-
boys" who dreamed up the Iran-contra connection.
the consolidation of congressional oversight into a single Joint
Committee
on Intelligence modeled after the old Joint Atomic Energy
Committee. which had an almost spotless record of maintaining
confidentiality.
But the deeper issue remains. Americans abhor secret cove-
nants secretly arrived at because they smack of Old World real-
politik, a way of doing business that the American Republic was
to make obsolete. But this objection is today no more than nos-
talgia and sentimentality. America cannot be Sweden. (And
without America, where would Sweden be'?) Americans may not
like being a superpower, but they have no choice. there being no
one else to carry the burden. So they have to face the responsibil-
ities of power. And one of them is the necessity for secrecy.
There will be future covert actions. and some are sure to go
wrong. No amount of structural tinkering will prevent that. A
world of Ayatullahs and Sandinistas is a world that will often de-
mand clandestine deals. The particular deal now unraveling was
cockeyed to begin with and probably illegal. Nevertheless, we
may have to deal secretly again. If we are going to play the great
power game, and ask others to risk their lives to help us win it.
we had best accept the need for sordid secrecy. Or give up the
game altogether. -By ChrisKrautlhnm>r
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/23: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303560005-1