WHY KEEP SECRETS?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605060003-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 4, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: April 12, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/04: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605060003-5
ARTICLE APPEA BALTIMORE SUN
ON PAGE
12 April 1987
Why Keep Secrets?
WHAT ARE the secrets the
United States is supposed to,
be keeping at the Moscow
embassy, and are they worth keep-
ing? A few days ago a Moscow em-
bassy officer spoke to me about Sovi-
et society with respect, sympathy
and insight, and then bitterly added,
turning toward the listening wall,
"That's what I think; I'll go on
--By` William Pfaff
thinking it; I don't care that you are
listening." The KGB listener, if he
was at all intelligent, ought to have
been edified by what the American
had said and reassured that his own
country was so perceptively as-
sessed in the heart of the hostile es-
tablishment.
Obviously there are secrets to
keep. There are names of contacts
and spies, whose disclosure gets peo-
ple killed. There are codes, technical
secrets and military contingency
plans that should be kept secret. An
ambassador and his advisers ought
to be able to speak to one another in
privacy. Gentlemen ought not read
one another's mail, as an American
gentleman, Secretary of State Henry
Stimson, observed in 1929 - there-
by earning the derision of his suc-
cessors and inferiors.
That was another world, no
doubt. But Is our world so packed
with vital information to be stolen at
any cast? My own impression, after
a rather long acquaintance with how
government policy is developed and
a brief and instructive encounter
with the trade of intelligence, is that
in the area of policy most of what is
classified as state secrets ought to be
known, or surmised, by any intelli-
gent political professional who reads
the newspapers. (This even works
reading communist-bloc newspa-
pers. You simply consider what is
said in the light of what is not said.)
"Intelligence" too often gets in
the way of understanding. The most
important spy the West has yet had
in Moscow (of whom we know), Col.
Oleg Penkovsky, informed the Ken-
nedy White House that the Soviet
Union would not go to war in the
Cuban missile crisis. Any moderate-
ly sophisticated political or military
analyst ought.to have been able to
do the same.
The objective of most intelligence
operations turns out, in practice, to
be the penetration of opposition in-
telligence services. Recent American
spy cases have involved betrayals
within the CIA and FBI or the theft
of U.S. codes and communication
methods. The great Soviet spy tri-
umphs in Britain were all inside the
British security services. The Soviets
did not, so far as we know, penetrate
the British cabinet or have their
man, or woman, at 10 Downing
Street, where British policy might
actually have been influenced. Their
spies were spying on the British
spies spying on them.
The triumph the Soviets narrow-
ly missed in London was to have
placed their man, Kim Philby, in the
job of head of British intelligence,
which, if you think about it; would
have represented a kind of reductio
ad absurdum. Simply to have done
it would have been a formidable feat.
Would it really have made a serious
difference in the political course fol-
lowed either by Britain or by the So-
viet Union?
National policies are conducted
on the basis of national interest, not
on what spies report. Leaders, in
any case, notoriously believe what
they want to believe of the intelli-
gence given them, and -disregard
what doesn't fit their preconceptions
or what they have already decided to
do.
Soviet spies in the United States
and Britain "stole" the atom bomb.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were
electrocuted in 1953 for doing so.
Yet everyone now knows that any
country of a certain level of techno-,
logical sophistication could then,
and can now, make atom bombs,
thermonuclear bombs and even par-
ticle-beam death rays. You can steal
other people's techniques to speed
things up, saving yourself the trou-
ble of working problems through,
but that's the best you can do.
The spies arrested in France, in'
March, were passing information on
a new liquid hydrogen and oxygen,
engine for the Ariane space launch-.
er. But this does not mean that the
Soviets lack the ability to build their
own liquid hydrogen and oxygen en-
gine. They were trying to economize
on time and resources.
Would we be worse off if the Sovi-
et leadership knew what President
Ronald Reagan or Mrs. Margaret
Thatcher or Chancellor Helmut Kohl
actually say to their associates? Pos-
sibly some dangerous illusions
would be removed if the Soviets did
listen in. Last November French
Prime Minister Jacques Chirac said
exactly what he thought about Israel
and the Palestinians, terrorism and
what to do about it, the merits of
U.S. world policy and a good many
other controversial subjects, in what
he thought was an off-the-record
conversation with the editor of the
Washington Times. When this was
published verbatim, it cleared the air
rather than causing damage.
I realize that what I am saying
flies in the face not only of the com-
mon wisdom but the entrenched
practice of modern government.
Nonetheless it is a fact that the intel-
ligence game is to an important ex-
tent just that, a game - a some-
times murderous but often absurd
game, played for its own sake as well
as for public advantage.
Given the nearly two decades of
official incompetence or indifference
responsible for the United States'
now possessing a Moscow embassy
building expensively fitted out with
Soviet listening devices, the country
might do better to go ahead and oc-
cupy it. Let American diplomats say
to the listening walls exactly what
they think about Soviet policy and
American interest. Let them say, as
my diplomatic acquaintance did: "I
say what I believe. I say what I think
true." Let the KGB listen. Let the
Soviet leadership deal with candor.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/04: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605060003-5