Company Confessions by Christopher Moran

Author:Christopher Moran
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466847491
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 5

The Snepp Problem

I. The PRB

I have sacrificed everything since I started writing the book. I have no friends now. I have no honor. I have no credibility.

Frank Snepp, January 1978.1

Marchetti and Agee had put the CIA on red alert for intelligence officers who wanted to publicise unpleasant truths about the company. As we saw in the previous chapter, part of the Agency’s strategy for dealing with the revelations of renegades and whistle-blowers was to counterbalance them with a carefully coordinated PR programme that, inter alia, involved more press briefings and Langley ‘pow-wows’ for journalists and other key opinion-formers. However, the ideal solution was to stop people from washing their dirty linen in public in the first place. To this end, on 19 June 1976, CIA Director George H. W. Bush established the Publications Review Board (PRB), originally with seven members, to ‘review the non-official writings of current employees’. Hitherto, the CIA’s Office of Security had largely administered the vetting of manuscripts in an ad hoc fashion without any ground rules to inform the process. Indeed, there was no record of how many texts had been cleared over the years or what secrets had been officially approved for release.2 This undisciplined arrangement had sufficed when memoirs were few and far between, but was clearly unsuitable in an era where more staff were looking to get into print. When Turner took over as CIA Director in 1977, he broadened the Board’s reach by giving it the authority to examine the writings of former, as well as serving, intelligence officers.

At the heart of the CIA’s decision to create the PRB was a desire to have more control over what authors disclosed – something that had obviously been lacking in recent years. The declared purpose of pre-publication review was to prevent authors from making inadvertent disclosures of classified information that would be damaging to national security. The Board was especially concerned with material that would undermine sources and methods; betray the identities of Agency employees; and impair US foreign relations.3 An internal investigation into the PRB, carried out in summer 1981, emphasised that ‘even supportive books about the Agency and intelligence operations have proved damaging’.4 Without giving precise details, it referred to a former operations officer who had revealed in his book that he was a Chief of Station in a particular country. This revelation, explained the inquiry, ‘could be of assistance to hostile counter-intelligence elements, could embarrass the country’s government, and certainly could be exploited in anti-American propaganda’.5 Even the most seemingly innocent disclosure, it went on, could hamper vital liaison relationships since many cooperating intelligence services regarded books by former officers as ‘astonishing breaches of official discipline’.6

As Angus Mackenzie has argued, a formal review process was a necessary compensation for the CIA’s fragile legal position in the courts with respect to memoirs.7 In the Marchetti case, many of the deletions asked for by the CIA had been thrown out by the presiding judge, who castigated the vetting procedure as arbitrary and haphazard.

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