The Craft of Intelligence (32 page)

Douglass Cater cited a particularly disturbing leak of a private memorandum written by Secretary of State Rusk to Secretary of Defense McNamara, in which Rusk allegedly proposed that even “massive Soviet attacks on Europe should be met with conventional weapons.” The story, Cater reports, “had not been based on the memorandum directly, only on an ‘interpretation’ of it, supplied by someone in the Air Force who was obviously hostile to the Secretary of State’s position.” He adds that it took an estimated one thousand man-hours of investigation before the Air Force general suspected of leaking the Rusk memorandum story could be identified, after which he was “exiled” to Maxwell Field, Alabama.

The careless leak, one not due to malice or plan, may be the result of someone talking thoughtlessly out of turn, perhaps encouraged by an astute reporter. By questioning enough people, the latter is often able to put together the true story of highly classified developments or programs in the making. All this is hard to deal with because reporters, who are directly or indirectly the beneficiaries of such leaks, refuse to disclose the sources, and it becomes almost impossible to obtain conclusive evidence as to who the guilty party, or parties, may be.

Very recently I found among the papers of my uncle Robert Lansing a most interesting letter and memorandum which President Woodrow Wilson, some fifty years ago, addressed to Lansing’s predecessor as Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan.
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This proposed a “panacea” to prevent leaks of secret White House–State Department correspondence. Here we see Wilson, who coined the phrase “open covenants openly arrived at,” trying, in his day, to deal with the protection of our high-level diplomatic correspondence. The “misplaced” memorandum enclosed with the President’s letter of February 8, 1915, to Secretary Bryan was obviously typed by Wilson himself and has somewhat illegible interlineations in his own handwriting. Undoubtedly Bryan passed this correspondence on to Lansing when, a few months later, Lansing took over the office of Secretary of State.

Woodrow Wilson, like all his successors, found only frustration in this field of protecting secrets. He lived to see, in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, one of the biggest diplomatic leaks of the century. Then the terms of peace handed to the Germans at Versailles were, despite security precautions, prematurely leaked to the American press.

Here is his 1915 plan to keep secrets from disclosure.

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

February 8, 1915

My dear Mr. Secretary:

Here is the memorandum of which I spoke to you some time ago and which at that time I had misplaced. I submit these suggestions for safeguarding the more important diplomatic proceedings for your consideration.

Cordially and faithfully yours,

Woodrow Wilson

enc.

Hon. William Jennings Bryan,

Secretary of State.

MEMORANDUM.

One person to draft all despatches which it is thought wise to keep safe from publication.

One (and the same) stenographer to transcribe
all
such despatches and their ciphered or deciphered versions.

One (and the same) official to do
all
the enciphering and deciphering of such despatches.

No flimsies
of such despatches; only one or two copies; a copy of the most important despatches to be sent to the President, to be returned for file always.

In brief, a single, clearly defined inner circle to handle these matters always, without variation of method or personnel, with the most carefully guarded exclusiveness, so that it may always be possible to fix the responsibility for a leak definitely and at once.

The only person outside this circle allowed even to
handle
such despatches nominated to be the head of the Index Bureau.

The despatches sent to the President to be sent always in sealed envelopes
to the White House
, never to the Executive Offices, where it is impossible to prevent their passing through several hands.

W. W.

February 12, 1915.

My dear Mr. President:

I have your letter of February 8th, enclosing your memorandum of suggestions for safeguarding the more important diplomatic proceedings of the Department. I think it will be entirely feasible to confine the matters of which you speak within the circle of you and myself and Mr. Davis, the Chief Clerk of the Department. Mr. Davis has been looking after these matters for some time, is familiar with the various ciphers used by the Department, and can also attend to the necessary typewriting of the despatches. This will seem to keep these most important matters within a very circumscribed circle which will be most advisable.

I am, my dear Mr. President,

Very sincerely yours,

(Sg)
William Jennings Bryan

From the earliest days, the effort has continued to protect secrets by keeping knowledge of them to the fewest possible persons—on the “need to know” policy. Excellent as is this principle, it is generally defeated by the complications of modern governmental procedures. There are just too many who “need to know” or, what is worse, think that they do.

During my eleven years of service with the Central Intelligence Agency, I have attended scores of meetings at the highest level of government where a scene like the following has been enacted. It has been quite the same whether the administration has been Republican or Democratic. A high official of government, often the very highest, would come into a meeting brandishing a newspaper article and saying something like this: “Who is the so-and-so who leaked this? It was only a couple of days ago, here around this table, that a dozen of us reached this secret decision, and here it is all out in the press for our enemy’s edification. This time we must find out who is responsible and string him to the nearest lamppost. We can’t run a government on this basis anymore. This thing must stop. Investigate and report and this time get us some results. I don’t propose to tolerate this sort of thing in this administration any further.”

And then the wheels start to move. A committee on security whips into action; the FBI may be called in if it is surmised that a violation of a Federal statute is involved. In due course, the investigation comes up with the following results.

It is found that the particular decision of government which leaked out was set down in a secret or top secret memorandum of which, initially, there were perhaps a dozen copies for distribution to the various departments, agencies and bureaus of government which might be involved, on a strict “need to know” basis. Several hundred people then had access to this memorandum, because it was reproduced in multiple copies by department heads for the information of their subordinates. Messages also might have been sent to officials in various parts of the world where action might be required. When such an investigation has been concluded, it is often established that anywhere from five hundred to a thousand people might have seen the document, or heard of its contents and have talked about it to X, Y and Z. No official will ever admit a violation of security was involved in this process, and no newspaperman or publicist will ever give away a source.

After the investigation is closed, the verdict is that the offense has been committed by a person or persons unknown and undetectable. Somewhere in the course of this proceeding, the Director of Central Intelligence is generally reminded that the law setting up the CIA provides that it shall be the duty of the Director of Central Intelligence to “protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.” He is then asked what is being done to carry out the mandate of the law.

His reply generally is that the law has given him no investigative authority outside of his own agency and, in fact, has made it expressly mandatory that he shall exercise no internal security functions. Furthermore, this particular provision of the law, as the history of the legislation shows, was primarily intended to place upon the Director of Central Intelligence responsibility to see to the security of his own operations.

I have to admit, and do so with a mixture of regret and sadness, that during my years of service in the CIA I did not succeed in making much progress in this field. I did not find an acceptable and workable formula for tightening up our governmental machinery or slowing down the tempo of frustrating leaks of sensitive information of value to a potential enemy. For one must do this in the face of the understandable but sometimes uncontrolled yen of the press to know everything.

However, it should be possible to improve the situation, and I have felt that a frank discussion of the problem was in order. The British, through their Official Secrets Act and other related procedures, have a better legal system in this particular field than do we, and they are a country which prizes and protects the freedom of the press as do we. They have shown, however, that their practices in hiring and retaining personnel leave a good deal to be desired.

I start from the premise that nothing should be attempted which would affect the freedom of the press. Freedom, however, does not necessarily mean complete license where our national security is involved, and the First Amendment of the Constitution never intended this.

It will be difficult to try to deal with this phase of the problem of security through legislation, except in the tightening up of some of our espionage laws, as I shall explain. Rather, the government should put its own house in order by an understanding between the executive and the Congress and then seek the voluntary cooperation of the press.

Here is a possible order of procedure: (1) the executive branch of government, particularly the Departments of State and Defense and the intelligence community, should do what they can to prevent the unnecessary publication of information that is valuable to our enemies and to deal more effectively with the leaks from the executive branch; (2) in conference with Congressional leaders and in agreement with them, steps should be taken to restrict the publication of sensitive hearings in the field of our national security, particularly in the military field. After some progress has been made in (1) and (2), there should be quiet (hopefully) discussions between selected government officials most immediately concerned and the leaders of the press and other news media, radio, television, technical and service journals, to determine to what extent there can be mutual agreement for setting up machinery to keep the press confidentially advised as to the matters in which secrecy is essential to our security, particularly those pertaining to military hardware and sensitive intelligence operations.

Before doing this, it might well be worthwhile for the interested members of government and of the press to take a look at what has been accomplished in Great Britain through the D notice system, whereby on a voluntary basis the press cooperates with the government to prevent compromise of military secrets. In suggesting we study this system, I recognize that there are vital differences between the situation here and that in the British Isles, where there is such a large centralization of press and publications in one great city, namely, London. There is in this country no comparable center of authority in the matter of press and publicity, and it would be harder here to find any relatively restricted group of men in the field of news media whose judgment would be accepted by the press in all parts of the country. And in all fairness, I should also point out that the cooperation of the British press with the government is the result of the enforceability of the Official Secrets Act and is not in all cases purely voluntary. Newspapers frequently consult the government to be sure that material they intend to publish does not run counter to security standards. The D-notice system is over fifty years old, having been set up a year after the coming into force of the Official Secrets Act of 1911. It has no formal legal sanction but it operates through a committee consisting of four government representatives—the permanent heads of the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aviation—and eleven representatives of the various news media. Where there is a sensitive national security matter which might well leak to the press, the secretary convenes the committee and the facts are presented. If all the press members concur, the notice goes out to the press. In urgent cases, the secretary is authorized to issue a D notice on his own responsibility but with the concurrence of at least two press members. If later other press members object to the D notice, it may have to be withdrawn, although this situation has never arisen, since the emergency powers have only been exercised on the rarest occasions where time was of the essence. The range of subjects covered by D notices are military matters, the publication of which would be prejudicial to the national interest, but the press does not insist on a rigid interpretation of this formula. A recent report of a committee headed by Lord Radcliffe, which was reviewing British security problems, also considered the effectiveness of the D notice system. It commented that “There have been cases of non-observance . . . more often accidental than deliberate and they have never been persisted in after the secretary has taken the matter up with the responsible editor.” By its operation, the Radcliffe report indicates, the British government has succeeded “year in and year out in keeping out of newspapers, radio, and television a great deal of material . . . which needs to be concealed and which would be useful to other powers to possess . . . and which so far as we can see could not have been kept out in any other way.” The Radcliffe report, in stressing that the D notice procedure “appears to suit the needs of both sides,” added that according to the evidence before the committee “neither side wishes to amend the present system” and it recommended the continuance of the system along the present lines.

The point of studying this system would obviously be to see whether any of its features could usefully be adopted in this country to help deal with our own security problem. I would add that this procedure has nothing whatever to do with the case which has been much discussed on both sides of the Atlantic of the two British newsmen who spent several months in jail because they refused to tell a tribunal set up by Parliament to investigate the case of William Vassall the sources of stories they had written about him. There was a third reporter, who escaped a jail sentence because his reputed source voluntarily came forward and admitted to being the one who was the origin of the information. There are times, of course, when sources are not given because the writers would have some difficulty in producing them, even if they were so minded, as their stories might have been the product of their own intelligent guesswork. In the case of able reporters, these guesses often hit quite close to the mark.

A further point in the program to improve our security posture is that we should review and tighten up our espionage laws in certain respects. Since 1946, on several occasions, attempts, all abortive, have been made by the executive branch of government to amend the Espionage Act so that prosecution would not fail merely because of difficulties in establishing “an intent or reason to believe” that the information wrongly divulged or passed to a foreign government was “to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” This is hard to prove. Fortunately, the requirement of proof of such intent has already been eliminated in cases involving restricted data under the Atomic Energy Act and with regard to disclosure of classified information in the field of “communications intelligence.” The requirement still holds, however, in cases where other types of secret and classified information are divulged. Much secret information has been divulged without authorization, even passed to foreign governments, where the defense would be made that the culprit was really trying to help our government by helping an ally—as the Soviet Union was for a time after 1941. There are other problems of a security nature which arise under our existing legislation when it is necessary to prove that a case is related to “the national defense and security,” as our present espionage law requires.

Comparable British legislation is based on the theory of privilege, that all official information belongs to the Crown and that those who receive it officially may not lawfully divulge it without the authority of the Crown. This theory of government privilege in such matters seems a sound one. In our country, there are many cases where the disclosure in court of all the details of secret information wrongfully acquired or retained or passed on to the adversary may be contrary to the public interest. There are even times when prosecution has to be abandoned rather than divulge this classified information. Some persons who have been guilty of serious actions affecting our security were never prosecuted for one or more of the above reasons. The knowledge that our government is only likely to prosecute in the most heinous cases of espionage gives certain people the assurance that they can commit minor infringements against the espionage laws with impunity. The knowledge has not been lost on the Soviets.