|
VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
|
12. The Art of the Secret Everything in the West is secret unless there is a conscious decision to the contrary. Our civilization, which never stops declaiming about the inviolability of free speech, operates as if it distrusts nothing more. This taste for the hidden has not played an accidental role in the distortion of practical democracy. Both experts and Heroic leaders have found secrecy to be their natural ally. The word secrecy itself has become one of the most popular of the twentieth century and been elevated to the same verbal pantheon as management, planning, systems and efficiency. But secrecy alone among these is not a new obsession. Sun Tzu was giving advice 500 years before Christ on its military uses. He made a great deal of the role it could play in winning wars fast and without heavy costs. The Chinese character he used to indicate the concept of secrecy represented "the space between two objects"; that is, the intent was to divide the enemy through the use of foreknowledge. [1] Sun Tzu was very precise about the whole business. He laid out five different sorts of secret agents, each with a specific use. For example, inside agents (enemy officials paid to betray), double agents (enemy spies paid to betray) and expendable agents (those deliberately given false information). The key to all five uses lay in his idea of secrecy as a tool to be used specifically, in other words sparingly, to accomplish specific goals. Secrecy itself was not a general condition. Things were open by nature because there was nothing innately secret about them. Therefore the careful and limited use of restrained information and of deception could be very effective. Sun Tzu's insistence that, to be successful, secrecy must be a narrow means and not an end in itself was not an ideal intended for everyone. The means only worked if there was a justifiable end and a moral purpose guiding the way." He who is not sage and wise, humane and just, cannot use secret agents." Or again, "only the enlightened sovereign and the worthy general who are able to use the most intelligent people as agents are certain to achieve great things." This is not idealistic moralizing. Sun Tzu was a practical man who constantly differentiated between the illusion of success and real success. Our understanding of secrecy is very different. The rational revolution left us with the conviction that truth is a fact or a compendium of facts. This has grown into a way of life -- an integral part of Western civilization which now turns on structures and expertise. Most individuals with some expertise or authority work within these structures and therefore have control over an element of modern truth. Their responsibility is to facilitate the functioning of their part of the system. Doing that successfully amounts to compliance. The only individual power available to them involves obstructing where they are employed to facilitate. Obstruction within complex structures takes the form of retention; most often, the retention of information or expertise. Secrecy, therefore, is not at all what the security laws suggest -- a specific matter which involves hiding sensitive bits of information in the national interest. And yet we are fascinated by state secrets. We imagine them to be of great importance. As they grow in numbers, so do the threat and excitement provided by our enemies, who attempt to discover these valuable truths. This is the musical comedy side of secrecy, because state security and spying are the least important aspects of the whole system. We can reasonably imagine most states having two or three specific worthwhile or valuable secrets. But all the rest are artificially held back. At the root of that withholding lies our real problem, which is that reason by its nature encourages every citizen to use secrecy as a tool of personal power. This phenomenon is not endemic in Western society. Throughout the Middle Ages we were organized in such a direct manner -- between the extremes of feudal contractual relations and those of brute force -- that there was no room for the privacy or layered structures which would permit the development of secrecy into an important social weapon. Medieval society was a rude world in which all basic human acts were also public ones. It was a world which confused the necessary with the licentious. It was reason which introduced the idea that man was more hidden than apparent and, as always in the development of rational thought, Machiavelli was the pioneer in this area. The courtier, back-room manipulator and corridor manoeuvrer argued that there was much to conceal if a man wished to better his rivals. Machiavelli was followed six years later by the well-meaning Erasmus, who became the most influential scholar and humanist of the northern Renaissance. These two men appeared to be headed in opposite directions. Erasmus was arguing, among other things, for Christianity to turn away from dogmatic theological disputes and back to the simple message of Christ. His critical approach undermined the truisms of medieval scholasticism and opened the way for the Enlightenment. And yet, he was also the father of middle class conventional morality. Erasmus celebrated public discretion, which was intended to curb the licentious by curbing the public style of the individual:
"Use one noise to hide another." This practice would become a trademark of the educated man. Machiavelli and Erasmus were not so very far apart in their view of the individual. At the core of the new behaviour lay an approach which could be called either discretion or secrecy, whether bowels were being emptied or governments manipulated. This theme of the secret heart ran throughout the growth of reason. From what these and other philosophers were saying, the Inquisition was reconfirmed in its longstanding belief that all men were concealing something. Their rational conclusion had been that truth could be revealed by the simple act of posing questions. Questioning could, of course, be carried out without the crutch of torture. On the other hand, torture ensured an answer. And a truism of reason is that to every question there is an answer. The answer. Therefore, the true answer. Loyola, coming hard on the heels of Machiavelli, was more interested in structuring the questions in order to get the appropriate true answer. He mastered the technique of discretion -- that is to say, deceit -- in the service of God and went on to raise this deceit to the level of a fine art in the techniques of organization and argument. Richelieu took these ideas and further developed them in the service of the nation-state. He made the possession of knowledge into his most valuable weapon -- knowledge received before others received it; knowledge intercepted without the sender or the receiver knowing; knowledge held back, perhaps forever, perhaps for future use; knowledge used opportunely to defeat others or to convince the king; false knowledge, such as invented facts or manufactured quotes or slander or self-serving good news, spread in order to aid his cause. All this was built upon an unrivalled continentwide network of informers and spies. The art of purchasing informers was one of his great contributions to modern government. Ultimately the art of the secret, combined with the advanced role played by the courtesan, replaced intelligence with cunning as the most important characteristic for those who hoped to gain positions of public power. One of the first men to recover from this obsession and to reapply common sense to public service was the British diplomat Sir William Temple, who was also Jonathan Swift's patron. Temple pointed out that the credit derived in negotiations from truthfulness was more useful than the suspicion aroused by cunning. [3] He used this approach while negotiating the marriage in 1,677 of Princess Mary with William of Orange, who later became Mary II and William III. This arrangement had precisely the announced and the intended effect. First, it loosely allied Britain with those European nations which had embraced the Reformation, thus stabilizing the moderate religious position of Anglicanism. Second, it diverted England's dynastic quarrel away from the two opposing schools of absolutism and towards a more contractual and limited interpretation of monarchy. Much of the careful moderation which for the next two centuries was associated with and admired in British politics was derived from that arrangement. This should be compared with Richelieu's brilliant, cunning, secret negotiation fifty years earlier of Spanish royal marriages for Henry IV's son and daughter. Richelieu wanted a, reasonable settlement with the French Protestants and feared the Spanish Catholic influence inside France. He tried to neutralize that element by pairing the French royal children with the Spanish. And so in 1615, the future Louis XIII was married to Anne, the daughter of the Spanish King; and Elisabeth, Louis's sister, to the future Philip IV of Spain. On the surface this was meant to reassure the conservative forces in France and to unify Catholic Europe. In reality Richelieu believed that by this double stroke he would transform Madrid from a meddling enemy into a manipulable ally. Somehow it never struck him that those two marriages and the children they produced would generate a logic of their own. Within a decade they had resulted in the exact opposite of what he intended. Instead of neutralizing the Catholics and bringing the Protestants into the mainstream, he had created a situation which led eventually to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of the Protestant community. The profound confusion produced by this successful use of secrecy on a matter central to the state started France off on a schizophrenic course between state reform and religious power from which it has not yet entirely recovered. The separate school crisis during Mitterrand's first presidential term was in some ways still a distant echo of the confusion created by Richelieu's Spanish marriages. The government was trying in the early 1980s to strengthen state education by weakening the financing of private Catholic schools. Centuries of revolution and political reform had still not managed to separate clearly state and church and in the late twentieth century the government failed yet again. The philosophers of the eighteenth century had attacked secrecy and cunning, just as they had attacked Machiavelli and the Jesuits. But so long as they equated open truth with reason, they were attaching themselves to a system which carried secrecy in its heart. In 1787 Jefferson wrote to Madison from Paris:
This approach was meant to be opposed to that of Alexander Hamilton's Federalists, who took a more expedient and elitist view. Jefferson reiterated his commitment to an open and straightforward approach in his first Inaugural Address: "the diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason." The Federalists had held great power for twelve years and their methods had led to serious corruption and profiteering. The new President immediately wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury:
What Jefferson missed was that reason itself had created the intricacies of the system. Rational elitism, which gave power to those who had earned it, benefited the self-serving moneyed class. This was an adjunct of Alexander Hamilton's belief that the state could be stabilized by cementing federal financial institutions to the rich, whose prosperity would then depend, as James Flexner has put it, on federal authority. It was this Hamiltonian spirit, so close to the European rational approach, which was to mark the government of the United States over the long term: an enthronement of the Heroic; financial opportunism; and an optimistic vision of what the possession of office could accomplish. [4] Power was needed in order to build perfect systems. The joint worship of Heroism and power could be counted on to obscure the machinations of self-interest and deform the intent of the public will. Jefferson's own idealized devotion to an imaginary sort of reason prevented him from seeing that much of his own labour was actually driven by honest common sense. From the very beginning of responsible government it was clear what rational systems would do with information, the release of which would not be to their advantage. What no one could have imagined was that a system in which selected information was consciously kept back by those in power would gradually become a system in which only selected information was released. The point is worth reiterating. At the end of the eighteenth century, everything was public knowledge except that which was consciously held back. By the second half of the twentieth century, everything was privileged information except that which was consciously given out. Had so many dangerous secrets come into being? Would it, for example, harm an Englishwoman or her nation to know the names and responsibilities of her own government's cabinet committees? Or to know which of her elected members are on them? Or ought a citizen to know whether radiation is dropping upon him? The citizen's life is filled with thousands of these unanswered questions. *** It is not that there are more secrets today. The nature of a secret has simply changed. In its purest form it was and still is information which, in the wrong hands, could damage the state. But very few bits of information can do that. States can be damaged by such things as the exhaustion of specific resources or changes in technology. More often than not, the problems of a state relate to the refusal of local elites to do their job -- that is, to provide competent leadership and to protect the interests of the population as a whole. This includes improperly managing resources, failing to adjust to changes in technology or simply losing interest in leadership and management. Exploiting the pleasures of power without assuming the accompanying responsibilities is the most common means by which established elites inadvertently destroy their own nations. But none of this has to do with secrets. Periodically a secret can be useful. The place and time of a military attack, for example. Perhaps the size of a military formation at a certain moment in a certain place. But that kind of information doesn't stay secret for very long. Besides, the nature of a defence is not necessarily a secret, since knowledge of it may be a deterrent. As for knowledge of new weapons, this has rarely helped the other side. Military history, as we have seen, usually gives quick victories to the best commander, not to the largest army or to the best equipped or to those armed with secret weapons. The reality of spies who betray secrets is nevertheless dramatic. Betrayal is a central theme in all civilizations. It is as disturbing on the personal level as on the public because it is always the result of a personal choice by the betrayer and is therefore felt personally by the betrayed, whether an individual or a population. However, no equation links this deep sense of betrayal with the relative importance of specific secrets. Even a case as infamous as that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg demonstrated this ambiguity. Americans and convinced Communists, they delivered nuclear secrets to the Soviets, fur which they were arrested in 1950, put on trial, convicted and, after a worldwide controversy, executed. If everything said at that time about ideology, loyalty, patriotism and betrayal is put aside, what remains is the secret itself and an estimate of its value. Nuclear fission was discovered late in 1938 in Germany by Otto Hahn, who split the atom at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. This was neither an isolated nor a secret discovery. It was part of a long-term process spread throughout the West and, within a month of Hahn's breakthrough, it was being openly debated at the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics. Fear of Germany's head start. pushed a number of scientists to press Allied governments to move faster. The most famous among them, Albert Einstein -- also a friend of Hahn and a former director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute -- was encouraged by other scientists to take the lead. He agreed to write to President Roosevelt, calling for a concerted scientific effort. The eventual result was the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb. This success was in part the result of an international concentration of scientists in the Allied camp. However, the Germans had also failed to exploit their head start, and for several reasons. The Nazis decided that the nuclear domain involved impure Jewish science. They had also lost a number of their key scientists, both Jewish and anti-Nazi. Finally, the practical outcome of nuclear research was still uncertain, and scientists are unlikely to make promises to governments which may well imprison or kill them if they fail to deliver the appropriate results. The race to produce the first bomb was therefore largely imaginary. Nor did secrecy play a useful role. The Allies dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; that is, six and a half years after the first breakthrough. Many of the scientists who developed the bomb advised against dropping it, because they said that very act of exploding the bomb would give the Soviets the few remaining facts they needed to catch up. But if the Soviets were that close, then the difference between dropping the bomb and simply explaining enough about it to create a sufficient fear would have been marginal. Four years after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union tested its first bomb. That was in 1949, the year before the Rosenbergs were arrested. What difference, then, did their betrayal make? Six months? A year? Two years? It now seems unlikely that anything very useful was handed over. Certainly the Rosenberg secrets did not alter the outcome of a war or change the balance of power. And yet this was one of the most important betrayals of the century. No other military development could rival the nuclear bomb in importance. As for civil secrets, they aren't really secrets at all. They have more to do with negotiating techniques than with security. Sir William Temple demonstrated that the best deal is one that makes sense and looks good out in the open. Secrecy is only useful in selling a bad deal, and those rarely hold after the fact except as complex deformations of reality. *** There are no more secrets today than there were when Sun Tzu wrote. What we do have now is a worship of the idea of secrecy. The brief vogue of existentialism in the middle part of the twentieth century illustrates precisely what has happened. A philosophy which declares that people will be judged by their acts could not possibly survive in the West. We believe that people are what they know and can be judged by their power; that is, by what they control. In a society based not upon action but upon systems, our place within the system determines our importance. The measurement of our power is based upon the knowledge which either passes through our position or is produced by it. One of the truly curious characteristics of this society is that the individual can most easily exercise power by retaining the knowledge which is in his hands. Thus, he blocks the flow of paper or of information or of instructions through his intersection to the next. And with only the smallest of efforts he can alter the information in a minor or a major way. Abruptly he converts himself from a link into a barrier and demonstrates. if only to himself. his own existence. The principles of Erasmus and Richelieu have been carried to such a preposterous extreme that the encouragement of such retention has become a religion of constipation. It's worth pointing out in passing that when you go beyond the Judea-Christian rational civilization. actual physical constipation ceases to be a cultural phenomenon. The most obvious reason is that toilet training outside the West tends to take positive. reassuring, even pleasant forms. as opposed to our controlling and disciplining approach to what we see as an unpleasant function. [5] In Buddhist and Confucian societies. the idea of power through retention also disappears. The concept of the secret still exists, but in a different mode and not as a central theme. Even the Islamic world. which rises out of the same religious roots as ours. has drawn different conclusions and gone off in another direction. The first victim of the Western system. in which everything is secret unless there is a conscious decision to the contrary, is the citizen, who is after all also a creator of secrets. The simple mathematics of this system are that the individual can control a small slice of exclusive knowledge, while the rest will be hidden among the rest of the population. The generalized secret has introduced such a terrible uncertainty into our society that citizens' confidence in their own ability to judge public matters has been damaged. They constantly complain that they don't know enough to make up their minds. They have a feeling that the mass of information available would not be available if it were truly worth having. The result is a despondent mental anarchy which prevents them from actively using the considerable powers democratic society has won. They are convinced that essential information is being held back. The reality is that more than enough information is available on most subjects and our difficulty is therefore making sense out of the shapeless sea of facts in which we often seem to be drowning. Governments use the weapon of quantity as often as the weapon of retention in order to sell their point of view. Factual attacks from the outside can be neutralized by a volley of governmental facts. Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics. That is one of the privileges of power. They also have access to captive research institutes and bevies of "independent" professors, who are kept on contract to provide supportive studies and statements. How is the citizen to choose among so many "true" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the late twentieth century. Our curious obsession with secrets, in a world where the real problem is keeping one's head above the Rood of facts, has encouraged a generalized fantasy life revolving around spies and plots, as if only the convoluted had value. In away, the Le Carre-esque school is merely a continuation of the old obsessions with popish plots, Jewish conspiracies and Masonic cabals. When Joseph Conrad wrote the first spy novel, The Secret Agent, he made it clear Just how petty, abasing and fundamentally irrelevant the whole business was. G. K. Chesterton made fun of secret agents and terrorists in The Man Who Was Thursday. And Graham Greene carried on this understanding that the secret services are filled with third-rate men chasing third-rate secrets. But the public sees it all quite differently. Living in organizations in which knowledge is power, they must treat the secret as a cult. The fictional spy is thus a glorified reflection of the citizen -- James Bond on a good day, George Smiley on a bad. The great fictional archetypes have always reflected the chief concerns of their society. The Lancelots and Quixotes carried dreams of physical valour and justice. Our archetypes struggle in mazes without exits. They often lose and never really win, because the nature of the battle isn't clear. *** Most people, upon hearing the word intelligence, would think of the CIA before they would Einstein. This is not a minor matter of linguistic evolution. Intelligence, after all, was one of the central concepts of the rational revolution. In this new and better world, men were no longer to be rewarded for their bloodline or their physical strength. The Age of Reason was to be the age of men using their intelligence to improve society and the state of man. The rational vision of government was tied to this. It is therefore astonishing that in English the word intelligence should gradually have come to stand for the manipulation of secrets. In nineteenth-century dictionaries, there is no hint of the new meaning, apart from the word intelligencer, meaning one who conveys information. But with the rise of modern War and the parallel rise of the staff officer, the cult of secrecy invaded the idea of intelligence. This first became obvious at about the time of World War I. After that its evolution went so fast that when the historian Asa Briggs edited a new encyclopedia in 1989, he gave two definitions of equal length to the word intelligence -- one tied to the positive, optimistic gathering and use of knowledge; the other to the retentive, negative use of secrecy. [6] Exactly the same evolution can be found in French, in which the word renseignement was first tied to knowledge and to the imparting of information. Gradually it has come to imply the gathering of information in order to retain it. The effect of this burgeoning secret world upon our society has been destructive. A single example is sufficient. The Pentagon has been and remains profoundly divided from within, not by rival ideas but by rival sections seeking increased power. One of the most effective weapons they have is to withhold information from each other. This has been a constant factor in the failure of such military expeditions as Grenada and the Iran hostage expedition. The responsible people are quite simply riot told what they need to know. This leads to failure on the ground. The subsequent investigations and explanations are invariably secret, because public disclosure theoretically would not be in the public interest -- that is, it would damage the careers of those involved. The problem of retention is so great that today 3.5 million Americans must be given various levels of security clearance in order to keep the system functioning at all. In 1989, a normal year, the U. S. government created 6.8 million new secrets. [7] In Britain, even the curators of public museums are bound by the Official Secrets Act. Talking to the public puts them technically in breach of it. Again in 1989, the Victoria and Albert Museum restructured the responsibilities of its curators. Many protested. The museum invoked the Official Secrets Act to prevent their airing their disagreement. [8] *** Knowledge retention has become an integrated characteristic of modern structures and is central to their immobilization. The premise of a rational system is that by organizing and training in great detail it will be possible to determine events. Accustomed to being dominated, by tyrants, nature and the unknown, man will suddenly have the power to use organization in order to become the active director of his own destiny. From the earliest example of professionals -- the staff officers -- onwards, the expectation was that structure would be used to change circumstances. But the circumstances of war turned out to be unpredictable and stubborn. Those of civil government, involving millions of citizens spread over great distances and carrying with them a variety of long-established interests, are even more surprising and immovable. The modern manager has had great successes and great failures in his attempts to change circumstances. His structures fly over the heads of civilizations rather than interacting with them. The result is that the success rate is higher when dealing with radical changes. Coming out of revolutions, wars or economic disasters, the structuralists are able to impose whole new patterns. The disappearance of the kings and the arrival of democracy provided grounds for massive re-creation. The disasters of this century, created in large part by the rational approach, also created a need for massive societal change which, again, suited the creative side of large structures. Now, however, the West is bunged up with these organizations and is attempting valiantly to make massive longer-term programs function on a day-to-day basis. When a new idea comes along, it either tends to be supported or opposed for structural reasons. And structures have a natural tendency to say no, because a new idea disturbs. Not in the old way, in which habit, lethargy and established interests always tended to say no. That sort of blockage was concrete and identifiable. Now new ideas are rejected because they disturb organization. In this way energetic new ministers filled with good ideas will be rapidly deflated and co-opted to the conviction that "new" is impractical. The difficulty today is that government is constantly called upon to deal with real, practical problems -- employment, pollution, inflation, productivity, financing of social services. At the same time there is a long list of critical items which for decades have escaped practical attention. Knowledge of the situation has been widespread for years. General agreement on the seriousness of the situation has reached the level of the popular cliche. And yet the entire established structure of official science, public administration and corporate management un consciously ignores the situation or actually works to discredit what it knows to be true. The massive destruction of forests by acid rain, and the crumbling of European cities because of leaded gasoline are two very simple examples. The solutions are practical and imaginable and have been for a long time. Instead the American government has persisted for years in asserting that there is no solid proof of a link between acid rain and the death of forests. The United States has glanced away from their own New England states and Canada towards the Midwestern industrial states, which said that smokestack modernization would bankrupt them. And. so a five-year study was proposed to look into the matter. When popular pressure in the late 1980s -- which the authorities identified as irrational panic -- reached a dangerous level, the government offered a series of half measures. These were proposed not as part of an admission that the problem existed but as a political sop. The basic denial continued. For years the authorities and the experts in Britain and France fought desperately against unleaded gasoline. They did everything they could to discredit the environmentalists -- calling them ignorant, childishly emotional and subversive. When, in the late 1980s, it was no longer possible to go on ignoring the problems of lead pollution, the two governments set about arguing over the level of response necessary. This process lasted a year. At the EEC level, many of the members were worried about the increase in oil import costs that lead-free gasoline would involve. Their economists told them this would have an important impact on their balance of payments. In the end all the governments compromised in favour of a gradual lead-reduction program, which will cost each country thousands of times more in damage to buildings and health than it will in oil imports. The destruction of buildings, damage to statuary and long-term illness, however, are not part of the annual balance of payments. In order to maintain the fiction that their compromise is the correct one, the majority of EEG governments have been ready to prosecute member governments, such as the Dutch, who are unwilling to wait for clean gas. The Dutch said their cities and countryside were dying. The EEC replied that the strong Dutch environmental control regulations constituted unfair competition barriers to the other community members. The very idea that environmentally sound regulations could constitute unfair trade barriers to environmentally unsound products is an indication of the Alice in Wonderland mentality among Western elites. The point of these well-known examples is that, whatever the merits of each case, modern structure responds to its own errors by a refusal to admit error. It responds to failure by a denial of failure. The system could prove that it does work by simply responding to problems with an open mind, rapidly and positively, eager to find solutions. Instead it automatically goes into a defensive pose, throws out diversions intended to slow criticism, then spends time and money to prove factually that there is no problem. As a final ploy it will attempt to gain time for new ploys by agreeing to negotiate. If even this fails, the system will drop its own position, grasp that of the other side and treat the new position as if it were an absolute truth always known. The explanation for such odd reactions to rather straightforward problems is that systems are constructed from an assumption of correctness. They are built backwards from this assumption. There is no room for error, except through some properly laid-out procedure. That is why the system is unable to simply assimilate all the obvious factors before coming to conclusions. Thus acid rain may lead to the destruction of trees but it doesn't fall into the same process as the decline of the Rust Belt states. And leaded gasoline may harm agriculture and stone buildings, but it doesn't fall into the same process as trade balances or competition regulations. The officials in charge of all these procedures are decent people. It's just that there is no room for them to use their common sense. And from the structure's point of view, when there is an error, it is the error which is in the wrong. *** The temptation to use secrecy is now so great that it has become one of the prime skills of the leading courtesans. Presidential and prime ministerial advisers specialize in this commerce. Sir Robert Armstrong was famous for his secret manipulations. Henry Kissinger revelled as much in the wiretapping of rivals as he did in his secret Chinese negotiations and his secret Cambodian operation. There is nothing wrong with a few overblown egos puffing themselves up with secret games, providing this affects no one else. The real problem with the system is that it encourages the private inversion of public policies without anyone else having enough information to protect the public interest. During the 1960s and early 1970s, local hill tribes in Southeast Asia agreed to give their military services to the war against Communism in return for the use of U.S. planes. They wanted the Americans to transport opium for them out of the hills and into the hands of heroin wholesalers. The American officers in the field were not ideologues. They organized this deal because it solved their military problems in a difficult situation. Some officers on higher levels or in the security services must have known about it, because the process of transfer and replacement went on without any new officers expressing shock. When ever hints of this organization leaked out, there was an automatic denial. When everything was eventually confirmed in a carefully documented book in 1972, the authorities were horrified. [9] Of course, they were horrified off the record. There was never an official admission of what had gone on. Nor was there any attempt to explain how officers sent "to fight for freedom" had become drug dealers to advance the good cause. The question is interesting on a human level. but it also reflects how much difficulty sophisticated structures using secrecy have in maintaining a policy direction. let alone a moral standard. That particular secret was worth keeping. from the point of view of those involved. because it contained a terrible and inexplicable truth. The more typical situation today is quite different. Now that every pencil has become a national secret. the majority of the people in theoretically sensitive positions are very low on the salary scale. Many of them are simple computer operators. They probably realize that what they are handling is not earth-shattering, despite being classified as secret. top secret or whatever. They also know. as case after case in England. France and the United States has shown. that almost any old piece of information has a market value several limes their own salary. The Ronald W. Pelton case in 1986 was quintessential petty-larceny spying. Pelton, salary $24.500, a National Security Agency (NSA) technician. sold a banal bit of information to the Soviets for $35,000. He did this by telephoning to the Soviet Embassy from his office. In a high-security building all external calls are automatically recorded. The NSA security system was so overburdened by the simple process of digesting the information collected in this way that it was weeks before anyone focused on the call. Weeks again before they managed to identify the voice of the caller. Then Pelton was dragged into the public light as a traitor. Traitor is a grand word for a man of below-average intelligence. confused about his hopeless personal finances, who gives in to the temptation to make a few bucks out of banal information. [10] Clearly the scale of crimes has lost all meaning. In the same period Edwin Meese, the Attorney General, walked away free having, as his own department concluded, engaged in conduct that should not be tolerated of any government employee, especially not the chief law officer of the United States. Meese was cleared on a technicality while Pelton was imprisoned on principle. And that is as it should be In a society where security and secrecy have little to do with content and everything to do with structure. Petty-larceny spying is just a sidebar to this structural phenomenon. The computer maze which increasingly dominates all information, from the most banal to the most complex, is part of a seamless whole. While every individual may .try to control his little package of knowledge. a determined gatherer of intelligence can penetrate almost anywhere. Between the civil and the military sectors there is no longer any real division. Governments may push the definition of restricted or secret information further and further outwards, but they cannot cut themselves off from the electronic structure which has become their means of contact with the outside. Increasingly the cases of military and industrial espionage which are uncovered turn on the impossibility of closing electronic doors. In other words, through our obsession with secrecy and retention, we uselessly obstruct the functioning of our society, while those who are actually in the business of gathering information illegally can do so without much difficulty. These mountains of information which must be retained have made the fortune of people in the shredder business. Private companies now send fully equipped trucks, manned by security-cleared employees, from office building to office building. The men go in to gather bags jammed full of secrets. These they carry downstairs and outside to the parking lot, where all is shredded on the spot. The individual, never without resources, has reacted in some countries by fighting for new laws which offer the citizen the right to know. But these laws merely confirm the principle that everything is secret unless specifically decided otherwise. The citizen will know only what he specifically asks. Indeed, the right-to-know laws encourage increased retention of information. They drive the experts to use greater cunning -- to register their information in more disconnected ways, so that when it is fished out it will give away as little as possible of what else is in the water. In that sense the countries with right-to-know legislation are not as far as they think from places such as Britain, where the belief in secrecy still grows unchecked. When Lord Stockton, chairman of the British publishing house Macmillan and son of Harold Macmillan, protested against the passage of a new, more inclusive Official Secrets Act in 1989, he said that now "the mechanisms of tyranny are inbuilt in our society." [11] He regretted that Britain had learned nothing from the more open approach of Canada and the United States. But the differences are more apparent than real. In 1983 Canada enacted an Access to Information Act which now draws more than ten thousand requests for information per year. And yet in his annual report of 1991, the Federal Information Commissioner appointed by Parliament accused the government of hiding information in a manner which bordered on being antidemocratic and of treating openness as "an alien culture." [12] There are endless simple methods for any government to get around access-to-information legislation. The simplest is to formally classify the information in question at some level of secrecy. All Western governments now routinely classify planning documents, whether they relate to culture or fisheries, as secret. The most famous modern example of this was the Pentagon Papers. In June 1971 seven thousand pages of American government documents and analyses covering the preceding quarter century of Vietnam policy-making were leaked to the New York Times. They were all classified secret. Many inside journalists and the paper's own lawyers were against publication. The lawyers felt so strongly about the need to respect the secrecy act that they walked out on the newspaper. which then went ahead and published in nine installments. President Nixon and the government structures did everything they could to stop them. A court order blocking publication was followed by "the most important press case in U.S. history." which finally ended in the Supreme Court with a victory for the Times. It is probable, given the current Justices of the Court, who are much more sympathetic to the desires of authority, that were the Times to plead a similar case today, it would lose. In 1989 Erwin Griswold, who as Solicitor General had presented the original case for the government, wrote that he had "never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication" of the Papers. [13] Access-to-information laws amount to little more than legislative manoeuvres that open or close peepholes. They do not change the basic assumptions of a rational society, which are: only through the control of knowledge can a man define his own existence; only by a judicious holding back of what he knows can he prove that he matters. Such massive retention has played a role in our society's inability to debate problems openly and to act upon them. Take Mrs. Thatcher, for example. She is perhaps the most perfectly modern public leader yet to have appeared anywhere. Her ability to combine hectoring with an absolute assurance of holding truth made her the mistress of retention. It was often felt, even by her admirers, that she used the methods of a nanny, but why should that be surprising when nannies are responsible for toilet training and general social retention? The nanny may be outdated as a social institution, but she is perfectly adapted to the governing of modern democracies. It was mesmerizing to watch Mrs. Thatcher pursuing escaped secrets around the world as if she could force them back under cover. A relatively harmless book called Spy Catcher -- by a retired. second-level. ex-secret agent called Peter Wright -- was published in 1987. She, the Prime Minister of a functioning democracy, chased this one-week tabloid wonder from country to country in an attempt to have seized and banned what had already been read by everyone who was interested. Or again, following a television documentary on the shooting in Gibraltar of three IRA terrorists by the British SAS, she insisted that the journalists either did not know the facts or had ignored them. The television network felt obliged to carry out an, inquiry. The resulting report by well-known Conservatives exonerated the journalists. She rejected the report and insisted that the program had been unfair. Her attitude was that only the responsible authorities can know enough to say what is the truth. The point of these two almost-comical examples is that the official secrets acts of Western countries have gradually been brought into line with the sophistication of modern management structures. These laws are no longer simple mechanisms for punishing treason. They have been given real teeth -- that is, whole new rows of teeth with a detailed administrative bite designed to match the massive but intricate growth of artificial secrets. The practical result is that governments now have greater legal control than ever before over the information which the public needs to clarify how they are governed. *** Almost a century ago, on December 22, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a junior officer in the central bureau of French military security, was court-martialed for treason and sent to prison on Devil's Island. The handwriting on a piece of paper found by a cleaning woman in a wastepaper basket in the German military attache's office had mistakenly been identified as belonging to Dreyfus. The bordereau, as this scrap of paper was known, contained information of troop movements. The evidence against Dreyfus was contradictory; however, he was Jewish at a time of growing anti-Semitism and therefore made a convenient scapegoat. The army did everything it could to cover up the weakness of its case and an officer called Major Henry fabricated additional false evidence. Nevertheless, information continued to leak out and late in 1897 the real culprit, Count Major Esterhazy, known to be a gambler, a womanizer and heavily in debt, was publicly identified. Emile Zola, the most popular novelist of the day and an outspoken advocate of social and political reform, chose that moment to enter the debate. With the question of guilt settled in everything except legal form, he felt able to concentrate on the horrifying use of Dreyfus as an excuse for anti- emitism, "La verite est en marche," he wrote, "et rien ne l'arretera," "Truth is on the march and nothing can stop it." Esterhazy was put on trial and, in a travesty of justice, acquitted. The Dreyfusards were now doubly outraged, Zola wrote an intentionally libellous letter to the President of the Republic and published it in Georges Clemenceau's newspaper L'Aurore under the title "J'Accuse," This forced a libel suit against Zola and put the Dreyfus case back into the courts. The novelist was sentenced to a year in prison and fined three thousand francs, However, he had lied to London before the trial was over and waited there for the boil to burst. His use of the courts had done the trick. He was able to go home eleven months later when Dreyfus was given a new trial. Though its outcome was still short of clear acquittal, the President of the Republic pardoned Dreyfus. He was reinstated in the army, promoted and went on to complete a respectable but rather ordinary career. This was perhaps the most important political and legal battle over a question of secrecy and treason to take place in any modern Western nation. Its outcome eventually led to the breaking of military power and the strengthening of civil structures. The debate stretched on for almost a decade and divided the nation. Were Captain Dreyfus to be convicted and imprisoned for treason today in Paris. London or Washington, his defenders wouldn't have a hope of reversing the verdict. The various official secrets acts would prevent them from taking up the case in a serious manner. In Britain. the mythological home of fair justice. Zola would today be silenced by the law from the moment of his first intervention. Were he to persist. he might well be tried himself in a secret court. this being a matter of state security. Were he to succeed in using the libel laws, he might well find himself bankrupted by both court costs and an order to pay several million pounds to the libelled parties. In fact, examining the Western countries one by one. there doesn't seem to be any case since that of Dreyfus. 'with the possible exception of the Pentagon Papers, in which popular forces were able to take on the state security laws over a major issue of unjustified secrecy and win. *** Definitions are simple yet central reflections of society. They are the elements upon which everyone consciously or unconsciously agrees; the givens which precede all conversations and actions and laws. Under the old regime of church and monarch. truth was defined as an absolute. The early men of reason disturbed the status quo by questioning that definition. They pointed out that it involved an arbitrary absolute. They didn't question the idea of an absolute truth. They concentrated on creating rational methods for discovering it. In that sense truth became relative for a time. "You have the right." Diderot wrote, "to expect that I shall search for the truth, but not that I should find it." [15] The simple pleasure of this honest search removed the emphasis from the need to find truth. which depended, perhaps more than ever before in history, upon common sense. And even as the desire to find absolute truths regained momentum. it did so through a relative process. The mid-eighteenth-century English definitions of truth illustrate this. Johnson defined it as "honesty, reality, faithfulness." Chambers, in his Cyclapaedia: Or Universal Dictionary, which later inspired the Encyclopedistes, put it that truth was "a term used in opposition to falsehood and applied to propositions which answer or accord to the nature and reality of the thing." The basic French definition of truth in the nineteenth- entury Littre Dictionary ran as follows: "A quality by which things appear to be what they are." Littre, like Johnson and Chambers, was trying to be reasonable. Compare their careful restraint to Noah Webster's brand-new nineteenth-century definition: "Truth, conformity to fact or reality: exact accordance with that which is, or has been, or shall be." Or to the contemporary Oxford definition: "In accordance with fact or reality." Or the American Heritage: "Consistent with fact or reality." Or the Petit Robert: "Knowledge which conforms with reality. That to which the spirit can and must give its agreement." The "knowledge" in question, of course, is factual knowledge. The use of the word must summarizes the new attitude. [16] Truth today is as much an absolute as it was in the fifteenth century. Then as now the greatest power is the one that enables the holding of truth. The heart of our absolutism is the "fact" which we must all accept as the guarantor of irrefutable veracity. And now that truth is a fact, it is not surprising that facts have become like rabbits, "user friendly," prone to copulation, rapid multiplication and jumping about, to the point where the planet lies metres deep beneath their hopping mass. Nor is It surprising that as a result truth has become as arbitrary as paper money in an inflated economy. The same truth alters endlessly according to the choice of facts. That choice is in the hands of every expert, of every individual who controls a file or signs a letter. Finding themselves with the power of truth in their hands, is it surprising that they retain it? This is their personal version of the schoolboy's dream -- of doing the one thing which even Merlin and Lancelot could not -- pulling the sword from the stone. Every man now has a weapon -- secrecy -- that can give him some protection against other men's absolute truths. It also gives him self-pride. Secrecy has become the device which tells man he is worth something. The negative, retentive, constipating refusal to reveal, to act, to cooperate, is the key to rational man. Truth today is not so much fact as fact retained. This is not to say that we truly believe even the great spy scandals to be important. A few seconds of introspection are enough for anyone to fix the real role, for example, of Philby, Burgess and Maclean in the decline of Britain. They had none. Twenty years of regular betrayal at the highest levels were virtually irrelevant to a nation which, was collapsing for concrete reasons. And so we do not worship in any profoundly divine manner the spies of Le Carre or the athletics of Bond. Anymore than we are deeply scarred by actual spy scandals. They are the miserable little faits divers of our century. On the other hand, their very lack of real importance has freed us to treat real and fictional spies as the romantic model of modern civilization. They have replaced the old models of courage and chivalry. Given that there are no real secrets, those betrayed by Philby are, to all intents and purposes, as important as those each citizen retains. Our obsession with secrecy and plots is therefore not aimed at opening the curtains in order to let in light. Rather we are wallowing in the dream that our personal limited powers of retention belong in the same category as those which occupy the front pages of the press. There was a subliminal identifying shiver of pleasure when Robert Calvi was found hanging by the neck from London Bridge. When Senator Joe McCarthy pointed his finger, there was an unconscious sensation that he was pointing it at each of us. When Gouzenko came forward in disguise to spill the beans in public, individuals imagined themselves beneath the white hood, revealing all. [17] Colonel North's popularity stems only in part from the fact that he was attacked for defending a certain vision of .the American dream. Just as important was his willingness to risk all by adopting the most secretive of methods. We do not follow the trail of mystery in search of the truth, but in search of the confirmation that mystery exists. These imaginary secrets are titillating because all of us are bearers of fact and therefore control secrets.
|