Secrets: The CIA's War at Home. - book reviews

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Burton Levine

by Angus Mackenzie (Barkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); 241 pp.; $27.50 cloth.

In the congressional hearings on President Clinton's campaign financing, one of the more intriguing figures is a man known only as "Bob." A middle-level CIA official, Bob apparently knows a lot about the colorful but dubious financier Roger Tamraz and his alleged attempts to buy influence at the White House, the CIA, and the Energy Department. Unfortunately, we may never know more about Tamraz's relationship with Bob, about the CIA's treatment of him, or even his full name. As a CIA employee Bob cannot speak to journalists without the agency's permission. For the rest of his life--not just his working life but until he dies--the CIA has the right to censor anything he writes for publication. It also has the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to stop anybody from revealing Bob's full name.

How did American democracy arrive at the point where a government official with information about an important public issue is forbidden to discuss it with his fellow citizens, and journalists are threatened with fines and jail terms Mackenzie's Secrets: The CIA's War at Home answers these questions. It is a very critical and detailed discussion of the CIA's successful campaign over the last twenty-five years to exempt itself and our country's many other intelligence agencies from the public scrutiny and debate so necessary for a democracy. Secrets is a painful book about the decay of American democracy that tediously reviews the origins of every law, executive order, and court case the CIA and other intelligence agencies have used over the years to protect themselves in a cocoon of secrecy.

In the 1970s, the CIA began using secrecy agreements to silence employees and critics. These agreements required all employees to submit anything they wrote for the rest of their lives to CIA censors. In 1972, the agency obtained the first peacetime injunction in U.S. history to enforce censorship. The injunction temporarily stopped the publication of former CIA employee Victor Marchetti's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. Our courts sided with the CIA and ruled that protecting Marchetti's First Amendment rights and the public's right to an informed discussion of the CIA were less important than protecting

In 1977, the CIA used this principle against Frank Snepp, another former employee who published Indecent Interval, a very critical book on the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Both the CIA and Snepp agreed that the book contained no classified material. Nevertheless, the court forced Snepp to turn over all profits from the book to the government and submit all future writing to CIA censorship.

In the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations tried to spread the policy of secrecy contracts to 3.6 million State and Defense Department employees and civilian contractors. Here, Mackenzie's story is most interesting because of his choice of villains and heroes. In Congress, the heroes were Republican Senators Barry Goldwater and Charles Mathias, who criticized the secrecy plan and blunted its success. Within the administration, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger balked at requiring all of his department's employees and contractors to sign the secrecy agreements. Weinberger disagreed with the CIA and the intelligence establishment's policy of hiding problems and mistakes. Instead, he advocated quickly releasing information and, thus, quickly getting over embarrassments.

The surprising villain in the book--outside of the CIA itself--is the Washington, D.C., office of the American Civil Liberties Union, particularly ACLU director Morton Halperin and lawyer Mark Lynch. Mackenzie charges that, each time the CIA, the FBI, or another intelligence organization proposed a measure restricting public access to information, the ACLU would compromise rather than mobilize its membership and allied organizations to oppose the measure. In 1980, it supported the Intelligence Identities Protection Act which made identifying CIA officers a crime. In 1982, it agreed that CIA operational and counterintelligence files could be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act in return for the CIA not asking for total exemption from the law. Mackenzie believes this agreement emboldened the Reagan administration to try to spread the secrecy agreement to all State and Defense Department employees and contractors. In 1986, the ACLU agreed that the amount of FBI information exempted from the Freedom of Information Act should be extended.

Most disappointing is the ACLU's hostility toward people who challenged the CIAs secrecy campaign. In 1987, Ernest Fitzgerald, a well-known whistleblower and Pentagon employee, refused to sign a secrecy agreement. He feared that, since it committed him to a lifetime of censorship, it would interfere with his career as a whistleblower. He could even be prosecuted for revealing public information that the government subsequently classified after he revealed it. The ACLU refused to support Fitzgerald.