Book Review: "Secrecy: The American Experience," by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The title of Archie Brown’s new history of the USSR, The Rise and Fall of Communism, is emblematic of the recent paradigm shift in the understanding of the Soviet experience. Modern Soviet scholarship is conducted largely under the purview of history. Twenty five years ago, study of the USSR was focused firmly on what was happening and more importantly what would come; few contemplated the possibility of a world without the Soviets. Particularly not during the 20^th century.

Some foresaw the fall of the USSR years, even decades, in advance. Vide Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Michael Barone lauded him as “the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.” That designation is not so prestigious in the modern United States Congress (Moynihan probably wrote more books, 21, than most politicians have read), but it does not take away from Moynihan’s dexterous mind. During a career that took him from the New York governor’s mansion to the White House to a legendary quarter-century in the Senate, Moynihan cultivated a reputation as a pragmatic and professorial leader on a host of issues. Many of his most impassioned pleas for reform stemmed from his close involvement with oversight of the government’s intelligence community. During the bulk of Moynihan’s tenure in the Senate, the CIA and its companion agencies focused intensely on the Soviet Union. Their (secret) budgets allocated a tremendous amount of resources to the gathering and interpreting of Soviet intelligence, so much so that the CIA was occasionally accused of forgetting about the parts of the globe not hidden by the Iron Curtain.

The clandestine methods of the federal government began to raise questions in the latter half of the Cold War. The rationale for stamping trillions of documents “Top Secret” was not altogether clear. In Secrecy: The American Experience, Moynihan chronicles the surge in government secrecy that emerged after the Second World War and grew exponentially during the Cold War era. It was during the Cold War that government secrecy policy approached absurdity. A precedent-setting event occurred during the gathering of the Venona intercepts, cryptically coded cables sent by Moscow in 1943 to Communist figures in the United States. After several years of laborious code-cracking, the National Security Agency realized that a Soviet spy network had been established in America (as Moynihan notes, almost all of those spies and sympathizers lived in urban centers—McCarthy’s theory of a widespread menace was erroneous).

But this information was never made available to, of all people, the president. Harry Truman was excluded from the inner circle at the behest of General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who labeled the Venona intercepts as Army property. Bradley’s sworn duty to assist the president in matters of national security was overwhelmed by his desire to hoard bureaucratic secrets; as a result, Truman’s knowledge of Soviet espionage never advanced beyond what the likes of McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover wanted him to know.

The government became further consumed by Cold War-era secrecy, to the point at which “policy planners…did not entirely recognize when they had changed directions.” Moynihan notes that National Security Council report 68 (NSC-68), which offered detailed analyses of Soviet infrastructure, military, and politics, became for decades the premiere policy guide for federal officials. It was entirely based on classified information gathered by the intelligence community…and was almost entirely wrong. Its estimates of Soviet economic and military strength were wildly out of touch with reality. Moynihan’s frustration is evident when he remarks that the NSC could have drawn much more accurate information from the pages of the leading social sciences journals of the day.

His assertion that secret information is not inherently more accurate than public information leads Moynihan to disparage the CIA. This reflects Moynihan’s very public crusade against the CIA, an agency that he called outdated and archaic. He points out that the CIA budget was, by 1990, five times as large as the State Department’s. There is something undemocratic about such a vast sum being spent in almost total secrecy with little or no accountability, and this makes it hard not to empathize with Moynihan’s sturm und drang.

Efforts to reform government secrecy have been underfoot for decades. Moynihan gives vivid descriptions of the findings of the various Congressional commissions charged with streamlining the process but notes that all failed to reform intelligence gathering. Wearily, he makes a hopeful case for the dawn of a new era, one of openness. The internet has, Moynihan claims, opened the eyes of the world and seriously compromised a bureaucracy’s ability to hoard secrets. With open sources, we have the vast majority of information needed to make informed decisions. This, he says, will wear away at the notion that “clandestine collection…equals greater intelligence.” He quotes George F. Kennan, who legitimized containment theory, as an authority who asserts that “upwards of 95% of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country.” Would it were that American policy could function off of this directive. It could have saved untold sums and lives during the decades of posturing that ended in 1991. But was secrecy singularly responsible? It seems more plausible that the ideology of the Cold War (edified by government secrecy) played a bigger role in holding the West hostage; it was us vs. them without any room for disagreement. Indeed, Moynihan’s own belief in the eventual self-implosion of the USSR was ignored for well over a decade. When the collapse came, the intelligentsia sat stunned. Had we won? Well, yes. But the bureaucracies and their secrets did not carry the day.

-Mike Pawlows