GETTING HIGH ON SECRECY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302510003-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 23, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT ~
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/26 :CIA-RDP90-009658000302510003-1
VE[JSWEEK
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PA6
Getting High
on Secrecy
Knowing secrets is
the ultimate chic
here, a better
status symbol
than social class
or even money
ow there is talk of apost-disclosure cover-up at-
tempt bysome ofthose most deeply involved in the
Iran-contra arms deals. There is also increasing
talk about who, within the top ranks of govern-
ment,lied towhom. There is talk as well about who
may have been precisely how closed out and for how long. In
a way. this whole affair has been about one thing: secrecy.
Secrecy-tempting, addictive and ruinous in the ever?larg-
erdoses that are required-is the drug of choice in Washing-
ton. Itprovides apleasant little buzz ofself-esteem at first, a
mild high; it has a way of eventually taking over, though, of
disorienting and, at last, of deranging.
Let's get the exceptions and distinctions out of the way
first. There is such a thing as privacy, and it should be
respected: some things are nobody else's business and their
disclosure should be up to the individuals whose business
they are. There is also such a thing as confidentiality which
is necessary in getting things done. It can spare people
gratuitous embarrassment or reprisal or hurt, and its cost is
fairly low. Sunshine laws~ave their value, but they often
just lead to the opening up of a new "backroom" where
things may be said that are neither evil nor corrupt, only
more easily expressed outside of camera range. This is as
true of international diplomacy as it is ofcity-council meet-
ings.Finally there is what w?e in the press have come to think
of as the "troopship examples"-the truly justifiable secrets
affecting national security, the kind of stuff that the Walk-
er-family spies dealt in.
But of course all of these categories of legitimate secrecy
are subject to abuse. Public figures habitually create their
own political need to keep certain things quiet, for example,
by shamelessly campaigning on the other side of an issue
because they want so badly to be loved and/ or elected. Half a
journalist's time in Washington is spent listening to these
folks explain "off the record" that they are well aware that
something opposite to what they have been saying must be
done, but that the people i whom they have been exhorting to
go in the other directions just "aren't ready." So here you
have the groundwork for the preliminary and all-but-inev-
itableslide into the lie, secrecy's No. 1 byproduct.
Our officials tell us they will never recognize China or
unrecognize Taiwan or deal with the Great Iranian Satans
or negotiate away this program or that-and then they
start down the road to doing it and they need their cover
stories at first and one thing leads to another. And precise-
ly because there are some things that deserve to be kept
quiet and even to be cagey about, the idea of the justifi-
able lie, the lie for the greater public good, is born.
What I am struck by, reading the record available so far on
the Iran-contra deals, is the intellectual ease, even self-
satisfaction, with which so many public servants and their
quasi-public partners in these particular doings lied to one
another and to us. happily certain that they were sacrificing
a lesser, even trivial. public duty to a larger one. And I
believe some of that is still going on. Secrecy then, in the
worst case, makes notjust liars out of these people. but a rare
and truly intolerable breed: smug, unrepentant liars. why
should they tell the truth to the committee of Congress that
is charged with monitoring their activities or to the other
members of the administration who disapprove or to the
ambassador who comes in and asks just what w?e are up to in
his country? There are overriding reasons of state not to-
and these, of course, are secret, cannot be shared.
But there is more than the slippery slope involved here.
There is the intoxication. the high. The White House person.
whoever it was, who ordered certain intelligence intercepts
formerly routinely received by Secretaries Weinberger and
Shultz to be withheld from them as the Iran affair pro-
gressed had in a way reached the high point of Washington
experience. He can have no more Everests to climb. For
knowing more secrets than others know is the ultimate chic
here, taking precedence as a status symbol over money.
social class and all the rest. I remember during the Cuban
missile crisis when we were all scratching around for closely
guarded information how a Kennedy administration aide.
whom we hadn't even called, got in touch with a colleague
and me to volunteer some secrets-frantic, as I reflected on
it later, that his friends in the press might have concluded he
wasn't in the know.
Final papoH: Secret knowledge is a commodity we are always
looking for and, one way and another, always heavily hint-
ing that we have. Hubert Humphrey, when he was vice
president, used tojoke about how the fellow would arrive at
his apartment every morning with the topmost-secret
White House intelligence report, more or less chained or
handcuffed to his arm. and how, after reading it in appropri-
ately guarded circumstances, Humphrey would ride to the
office and read almost all of it over again in the morning
paper. His point was not that the paper was full of secrets.
but that the report was Full of?things that only affected to be.
The real danger is that people at the top will in fact create
so many secrets and dissemble so routinely about them and
be so unencumbered by misgivings that they will finally go
through the looking glass. They will have created another
reality and they will live in it. Their assumptions and certi-
tudes will be different from ours, and they will be contemp-
tuous of us because they will always know something we
don't know and will thus find our arguments wholly irrele-
vant. People not in the know will not be, in their opinion. tit
to argue with, let alone to take seriously. The contempt and
arrogance are the final payoff of this drug incautiously
taken. The users lose touch and run amok. That is why
invariably it is so hard, when these things are exposed, to
figure out what on earth the participants could have been
thinking of and why we are aways marveling at how "dumb"
it was, how crazy.
Secrecy can't be outlawed in government; there can be no
prohibition of this heady stuff. And there doesn't have to be:
true grown-ups in government can handle it. Such persons
are always the ones who are cal led in to deal with the mess-
witness the Tower Commission, the utterly responsible in-
vestigators on the Hill. There are not a lot of these grown-
ups in the picture, but there are enough. What you are
seeing now is their long-suffering effort to sweep up the
broken glass and restore order after a binge.
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/26 :CIA-RDP90-009658000302510003-1