Secrecy
Part of the discretion of power has traditionally resided in the ministrations of secrecy. As a form of human agency it is both exciting to be in on something special and dreadful because it is hard to keep a secret. Since nations, as self-regarding and self-justifying entities, have rivals, secrecy is valued as one way of doing unholy business. The matter at hand may be chicanery, intrigue, duplicity, or the planning of some momentous event—invading another country, for instance. The ruled, the masses that are going about their daily lives far from the whispering sources, need not be consulted or informed. Such is not their business.
In modern times, secrecy has at once proclaimed itself and hidden itself. Citizens know that, for instance, the CIA exists and they can read books about what it has done that are based on secrets that the CIA no longer cares about or that have been deduced by historians from scraps and mounds of information. At the same time, no taxpayer can waltz into the CIA headquarters and ask for a briefing about what the spooks are up to these days. No self-respecting secret agent wants to be pinned down to particulars. “Stirring up trouble, putting down trouble, keeping an eye out on trouble, the usual stuff” would be the airy answer to any inquiry.
What defines “trouble” is the nub of the matter. Must there always be trouble? Is vigilance, to say nothing of fomenting coups and carrying out assassinations, a permanent state of being like the standing army most nations have? Must trouble be pro-active, a sort of task that cannot be shirked? The short answer is “Yes.” The world of nations is a famously dangerous place. Each nation wants what it wants and is driven by manias and contrivances that it believes make perfectly good sense, even if the person at the helm seems less than rational. One fascination of modern times is that secrecy and its perquisites have their own lives independently of who the nation’s leader may be. This is different from the world of kings where everyone served at the king’s pleasure. What modern times have witnessed is a permanent state of tension, another representation of the stress that has become such a common concept and feeling. Relations among nations are sometimes described as “strained.” The world of secret bearers is always strained.
Although the bearers of secrets are concerned that others will learn their secrets, as James Jesus Angleton was anxious about a mole within the CIA, secrets depend on the imaginative process of assigning importance. Some secrets are more crucial to the nation’s well being than others. The intent of any institution, since it is an institution, is to treat secrets equally but that creates a strange landscape. The spoken is unspoken. The unspoken is spoken. The known is unknown. The unknown is known. The frontal assault on truth that modern times have witnessed coincides with intentional lying, or, as it is called, disinformation.
Disinformation may be an outright lie or, more enticingly, the telling of a false secret. Someone or some people decide to make public something that isn’t true but is given the aura of truth—a commission report or interview or speech or as with that epigone of twentieth century malfeasance Donald Trump an opinion or assertion that is true to Donald Trump because he said it—narcissism as truth. Throughout modern times, citizens have pushed back against lies, even as others embraced them. For the former group, however abundant the cascade of deceitful Twitter messages may be (as if the quantity of lies removed the onus of lying), the notion of truth matters—regardless of politics. For on the other side of truth is nihilism, whether genial--”Just believe whatever I say, folks”--or belligerent--”You better believe what I say”--but manipulative in either case. The commoners tell lies, too, but theirs typically have emotional sources. Rarely do citizens devote their lives to dissembling, whereas the bearers of secrets must dissemble all the time. Otherwise, there is no reason for them to exist. They might as well be haplessly sincere, unstressed people who merely enjoy life.
Permanent secrecy, along with its attendant diet of lies, produces, among other things, paranoia, cynicism, and contempt. These outcomes seem inevitable. You can’t live in an environment in which secrets are present but not disclosed (since they are secrets) without people wondering what the secrets are and how they came to be. Any official version of truth is bound to be compromised on the sheer grounds of “Says who?” To me, for instance, the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was connected with the CIA but then somehow acted on his own seems a gross and unbelievable contradiction. It makes more sense that he acted in concert with the CIA or was set up by the CIA. How could it be otherwise that he, of all people, was fingered as the killer of the President? He wasn’t just some guy with a grudge who decided to do something lethal about it.
Or he was. Secrecy is bound to mock truth. All the pious proclamations in the world cannot undo that mockery. The numerous scenarios (and accusations of paranoia) that surround calamitous events such as 9/11 are understandable. If people live in a world where one darkness is combating another darkness, where are they supposed to look for light? If they must sift through disinformation, where is information? Conspiracy theory (as it has come to be labeled) thrives on intelligence just as the CIA thrives on intelligence, making sense of pieces that, at first or even second glance, may not make sense. Conspiracies, as Julius Caesar could attest, are not just theories. Much like Caesar’s wife, intelligence is always looking for patterns and signs. Intelligence values persistence but also values invention, the seeing further into the maze or riddle or seeming incoherence.
In the United States, to cite one nation, there is, then, an un-sovereign body existing within the sovereign body that has unparalleled powers. It need only point to the need for secrecy and all trepidation must be brushed aside. If the Company (as it is familiarly known) along with the National Security Agency monitors its own citizens that monitoring is the price of vigilance. Be good, go about your mild business, and you will be left in peace. If people are murdered in the name of the nation but no one knows about those murders, what does it matter? Life is dear but life is cheap. The steps in “free” nations from the secret bearers and gatherers of secret intelligence to the secret police are countable. Or they would be if they were not secret.
If provoking interesting conversation is a metric of a great essay, this essay certainly makes the grade. If one views intelligence organizations as a specialized news organization focused on foreign countries (excluding sabotage operations, which is arguably more military than intelligence), one can ask if the benefit of revealing secrets of potential bad actors (e.g., a plan to kill innocent people) outweighs the risk of someone taking the "countable steps to a police state." It is a simple question with complex answers. If we agree that learning of nefarious plans is a good thing, then we must acknowledge that, like news reporters, it is also important to keep secret how we learned them. Like democracy, both the risks and benefits are enormous. We can put in checks and balances, but, in the end, we count on good actors within the government to do the right thing.