Whistleblowing Nation by Kaeten Mistry

Author:Kaeten Mistry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE ADVENT OF PREPUBLICATION REVIEW

Because of the government’s success in the 1970s in weaponizing secrecy agreements to promote secrecy, by the 1980s the requirement to sign an NDA had become standard for national security officials throughout the federal government. Yet as the Vietnam War and then the Cold War receded from the American consciousness, and perhaps because the hardships experienced by those who wrote in the 1970s deterred subsequent writers from following suit, fewer controversies surfaced in the news or were graphically illustrated by blacked-out (redacted) passages in publications.7 But the clash between security and privacy that followed the 9/11 tragedy and U.S. declaration of a “Global War on Terror” dramatically increased the tension between secrecy and transparency. The whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning were sent to jail for revealing classified information; Edward Snowden, to exile. And although the charges against him were dropped, Thomas Drake had his security clearance suspended; was indicted for obstructing justice, giving false statements, and mishandling (not disclosing) classified information; and spent a year clearing his name.8

What these cases all had in common is that the protagonist self-identified as a whistleblower who directly challenged, or in extreme cases willingly violated, the NDA in order to serve what she or he considered the greater public good by exposing behavior that would otherwise remain secret. Important as these cases are, they fail to capture the broader impact of the national security establishment’s efforts to censor the public writings of current and former employees. Shortly after the CIA’s ad hoc intervention to prevent the publication and control the contents of Marchetti and Marks’s The Cult of Intelligence and Agee’s Inside the Company, the environment changed. Many members of America’s national security community, who not only never intended to violate their NDAs but also judged that they had conscientiously adhered to the terms, found themselves victims of the federal government’s expanding and intensifying culture of secrecy. Seemingly treated more as suspected outlaws than faithful civil servants or other government employees, they were compelled to choose between the same kind of legal jeopardy that Ellsberg and his successors confronted or the sanctity of their integrity.

The reason for this development was not complicated. In the wake of the judicial proceedings that enveloped The Cult of Intelligence and an extraordinary increase of the number of aspiring authors who were agency employees or former employees, the CIA determined that the structure of the existing mechanism for ensuring against the disclosure of classified information, the Office of Security, was insufficiently rigorous to enforce NDAs. Hence on June 10, 1976, it created a unit, the Publication Review Board (PRB), composed of senior officers representing each of the CIA’s four directorates—labeled at the time Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology—plus officers responsible for cover and for personnel security and a legal counsel. CIA Headquarters Notice 178, the directive that established the PRB, mandated that all present and past, and by some interpretations future, Agency personnel, regardless of the position held, submit to it for

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