Deep State by Marc Ambinder

Author:Marc Ambinder [Ambinder, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2013-07-31T03:36:13+00:00

THE STRUCTURE OF SECRECY 167

given numbers. For example, the pilots and contractors who fl ew

rendition fl ights didn ’t need to know about the enhanced interro-

gation techniques that would take place at the CIA “black sites” in

Europe and Asia. So they might be given access to GST-001; the

interrogators might have been read in to GST-001 and GST-002,

which would include the techniques and their use at the black sites,

as well as the rendition portion of the program.

Even before entertaining questions of oversight, a balancing act

occurs. It is prudent to keep sensitive sources and methods to a small

group, simply because the chances of their being disclosed increases

linearly with the number of people in the know. But the costs of

compartmentalization can undermine the programs themselves.

Consider the following example, which has been somewhat sanitized

to protect the source and the technology. A certain very secret and

highly valuable technical intelligence platform is run out of an Air

Force base in the United States. There, operators control the plat-

form and collect and disseminate intelligence. At a location over-

seas where this platform (call it BENJI) is based, there are ground

operators. This program—think of it as a truck, an airplane, a drone,

or a satellite, with a lot of special capabilities—is so sensitive that

every tasking must be approved in advance by the National Security

Council.

But the platform is so adaptable that it has a lot of customers.

The DOD might want to use its abilities to monitor something in

country X, whereas the CIA might want to use it to track nuclear

fi ssile material movements in Pakistan. The problem is that the

operators at PROJECT BENJI have to literally switch hard drives

depending on which customer gets the product. For reasons that

only the program manager himself or herself know, the Defense

Department can ’t know what the CIA gets, and vice versa. Indeed,

the DOD, sensitive to the implications of the platform ’s exposure,

forces the ground operators to take a specifi c piece of equipment off

of the platform before a DOD mission, lest anyone blame them. (Of

course, if the platform is compromised, it ’s compromised; it doesn ’t

matter a whit to Iran whether the DOD ’s Defense Threat Reduction

Agency or the CIA is monitoring its nuclear program.)

c13.indd 167

05/02/13 2:49 PM

168

DEEP

STATE

Cries to reform this system and iron out its ironies— information

classifi ed Secret but marked with a caveat is given better protec-

tion than Top Secret information without one—have come from

inside and outside government since the dawn of the Cold War.

Robert Gates, former director of central intelligence and secretary

of defense, once called the system the “greatest deterrent” to saving

money in the national security arena. 7 Commissions on government

secrecy tend to observe the same trends (more secrets, more people

with classifying authority, bizarre examples of information that ’s been

classifi ed, and the toxicity of overclassifi cation on the public ’s faith in

government) and propose the same solutions: get rid of most of the

caveats; strengthen automatic declassifi cation rules; establish better

auditing systems so that people are presumed to have access to infor-

mation, rather than “no need to know.”

The fi rst major government report

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