The American Way of Secrecy

October 8, 2006
Essay
The American Way of Secrecy
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

A RECENT article in The Washington Post described how researchers at George Washington University’s National Security Archive were surprised to find 1970’s statistics on the size of the American nuclear arsenal blacked out in documents they had obtained. This was surprising because the figures had been published many times in the past; more detailed ones had in fact been given directly to the Soviets in various arms control talks. And yet bureaucrats in the Defense and Energy Departments, acting under new post-9/11 rules, deemed the airing of this historical information dangerous in a world of terrorists and rogue nations.

It has become a cliché to say that “everything changed” after 9/11, but for two great American intellectuals — the sociologist Edward Shils and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former New York senator — recent events would have represented the eternal return of the same. Both argued that in the past, the United States has taken real foreign threats and vastly exaggerated the menace they represented, spinning out conspiracy theories. These justified the creation of a state based on secrecy that undermined American liberties and the free exchange of information, the fundamental sources of success for the United States as a society.

Shils, one of the founders of modernization theory and a longtime professor at the University of Chicago, wrote “The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies” in 1956, in the immediate aftermath of the McCarthy era. Shils accepted the reality of the Soviet threat and the existence of conspiracies against the American way of life. But he also argued that American democracy, in contrast to the historically aristocratic orders in Europe, was based on a principle of publicity in public affairs — indeed, it “luxuriated” in its wide-open culture. That openness made the idea of external threat and internal subversion especially shocking: “In America, more excitable temperaments and a tradition of violence in expression and energy in action have prompted a passionate response to the threat of secret machinations.” A weaker sense of privacy than that of the Europeans, as well as a “flimsier attachment to corporate bodies,” made Americans seek their identity in great national symbols, leading to a hyperpatriotism and a tendency to see things in black and white.

In the early days of the cold war, the government’s response to these fears was to grant the executive branch a huge degree of discretion in security affairs. The most visible manifestation of this tendency was the development of a classification system that suddenly removed a large amount of information from public scrutiny, and a system of loyalty checks that, in Shils’s words, “hurt the delicate tissue which binds our society together.”

Shils had no more ardent disciple than Moynihan, who wrote an introduction to a 1996 reissue of “The Torment of Secrecy.” Moynihan used his perch on the Senate Intelligence Committee to make a sustained attack on the government’s penchant for secrecy, and for his fellow Americans’ willingness to tolerate restrictions on their liberties in the name of security. In his book “Secrecy: The American Experience,” published in 1998, he argued that “secrecy enables a constitutionally weak executive to bypass the legislature in making decisions that the legislature will not support when things go wrong.”

Moynihan pointed out that the Venona intercepts of decrypted Soviet communications from the late 1940’s, declassified only after the cold war ended, showed without a doubt that there had been a major Soviet spy network in the United States. The intercepts proved that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of atomic espionage, and that Whittaker Chambers’s charges that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent were correct. Defense of Hiss had of course become a cause célèbre among the liberal intelligentsia of the 1950’s. And yet security officials within the government all along had conclusive evidence of his spying, and of the true scope of the Soviet conspiracy. But they failed to reveal what they knew, even to President Truman. This failure, Moynihan said, allowed the public imagination to supplement real knowledge with destructive fantasies, which in turn called into being a generation of anti-anti-Communists. This is a polarization with which we are still living today.

The creation of a national security bureaucracy walled off from public scrutiny produced other malign effects as well. Assumptions about the economic strength of the Soviet Union generated by the intelligence community were not scrutinized against what many people who had actually visited the country knew about its condition. This led to a consistent overestimating of the Soviet threat and the failure to predict the largest event of the late-20th century, the collapse of Communism. All bureaucracies seek to enlarge their missions, and in true form the end of the cold war led not to a decrease in the number of official secrets, but to a vast increase.

Rereading these books in the light of 9/11, the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s current efforts to extend executive power makes one realize the extent to which our current situation is not in the least new. While the nihilistic murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on American soil was unprecedented, the fact remains that both the actual and perceived threat of the late 1940’s was much more acute than the one presented by Islamist terrorism today. The Communists controlled a huge nation-state — the Soviet Union — and conquered half of Europe. In 1949 they came to power in the most populous country in the world. The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons was new; experts at the time confidently predicted that many states would acquire them in short order and that future wars would be nuclear. Americans lived in the shadow not of the destruction of a single city, but of their entire society. And the enemy had agents who could potentially penetrate the country’s most elite institutions, something few jihadists can aspire to do today.

All new threats entail huge uncertainties. Then, as now, there was a pronounced tendency to assume the worst, and for the government to claim enormous discretion in protecting the American public. The Bush administration has consistently argued that it needs to be protected from Congressional oversight and media scrutiny. An example is the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of telephone traffic into and out of the United States. Rather than going to Congress and trying to negotiate changes to the law that regulates such activities, the administration simply grabbed that authority for itself, saying, in effect, “Trust us: if you knew what we know about the threat, you’d be perfectly happy to have us do what we’re doing.” In other areas, like the holding of prisoners in Guantánamo and interrogation methods used there and in the Middle East, one can only quote Moynihan on an earlier era: “As fears of Communist conspiracies and German subversion mounted, it was the U.S. government’s conduct that approached the illegal.”

Even if we do not at this juncture know the full scope of the threat we face from jihadist terrorism, it is certainly large enough to justify many changes in the way we conduct our lives, both at home and abroad. But the American government does have a track record in dealing with similar problems in the past, one suggesting that all American institutions — Congress, the courts, the news media — need to do their jobs in scrutinizing official behavior, and not take the easy way out of deferring to the executive. Past experience also suggests that the government would do far better to make public what it knows, as well as the limits of that knowledge, if we are to arrive at a balanced view of the challenges we face today.

Francis Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the author of “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.”