-Caveat Lector- -----Original Message----- From: Remy Chevalier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thursday, January 14, 1999 10:20 PM Subject: [endsecrecy] End of Intel/Wash Times The end of U.S. intelligence By Richard Grenier THE WASHINGTON TIMES This was somewhere around the mid-1970s, when the Church committee was at its height, and it looked if when it finished the United States might have no intelligence service whatever. Pat Moynihan -- now considered the most scholarly man in the U.S. Senate -- was then a Nixon appointee as ambassador to India, in London on a visit. Mr. Moynihan, in genuine alarm, since we obviously needed an intelligence service, asked me what we were going to do? Reminding him that Alexis de Tocqueville said that in foreign affairs patience and secrecy were indispensable, I assured him confidently that the U.S. intelligence function would not be abolished but merely shifted to another service, for example the military. Mr. Moynihan was reassured. Well, times have changed. The United States has changed. Mr. Moynihan has changed. And perhaps above all, national attitudes to secrecy have changed. Mr. Moynihan has served many long years in the U.S. Senate, where his reputation for both intelligence and morality are extraordinarily high. Among other duties, he put in eight years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, years during which the American secrecy cult grew to grotesque proportions. It has been grotesque for some time. The "Venona" intercepts of encrypted Soviet messages in the immediate post-war period -- now public thanks to Mr. Moynihan --revealed many secrets, among them the fact that Alger Hiss was unquestionably a Soviet agent. But Gen. Omar Bradley never told President Truman. For decades the American public wrangled acrimoniously over whether or not Hiss was a Soviet agent, while our intelligence people knew he was an agent all along. But they couldn't "compromise their sources." President Truman, who'd probably never met a Communist in his life before Potsdam, could not, they felt, be trusted with this super-secret information. And secrecy in American government became institutionalized. At first, of course, there was the Red Threat -- although with our present access to Soviet figures we now have unmistakable evidence that this threat was exaggerated, that the Soviet economy was weak, and that most of all it was disintegrating. But in the Cold War secrecy reached absurd heights. By 1996, the total of all classified U.S. documents had increased, incredibly, to over five million. Information is power, and government agencies refused to share intelligence even with other government agencies. Also the bureaucratic rule is when an agency has fulfilled its function, and its job is done, rather than go out of business the agency invents new missions. Mr. Moynihan's new book "Secrecy" (Yale University Press) draws heavily on the work of social scientists Max Weber (who gave him the idea of discussing secrecy as a form of regulation) and Emile Durkheim (who described how it could be ritualized to stigmatize outsiders and critics). Mr. Moynihan suggests that even McCarthyism itself might never have existed had the security agencies revealed to the president the full facts about the spy "menace," that it existed, that it was small, and that it had been thoroughly investigated by the FBI. Meanwhile Vietnam and Watergate, in combination with the withholding of government information, created an opportunity for "secret" histories of the Cold War. After the fall of Teheran to Muslim extremists, the new adversary of the West was seen to be not Communism but fundamentalist Islam, and along with that Marxism-Leninism in Latin America. It was calculated that the United States might be due to make its last stand at Harlingen, Texas. And still secrecy prevailed. The Cold War, writes Mr. Moynihan, "has bequeathed to us a vast secrecy system which shows no signs of receding, it having become our characteristic mode of government in the executive branch." And he questions whether the CIA has "adequately redefined its mission for a new era." Secrecy has come at a price. Unfortunately, as has been said: a government's obsession with secrecy "creates in its citizens an obsession with conspiracy." Conspiracy theories have been part of the American experience for two centuries, but it now appears that in recent decades they've grown both in size and public acceptance. Popular entertainment is filled to overflowing with conspiracies. In 1993, an opinion poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe President Jack Kennedy was murdered by the CIA in order to prolong the Vietnam War. In 1997, a Time-CNN poll revealed that 80 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government is hiding the existence of extraterrestrial life. Mr. Moynihan's solution to all this is what he calls a "culture of openness," which, as he explains it, would have spared us such traumas as both the Bay of Pigs and, above all, the Cuban Missile Crisis. "The central fact," he writes, "is that we live today in an Information Age. Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. It's time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations. It's time to begin building supports for the era of openness that is already upon us." Mr. Moynihan's hero is George Kennan, author of the celebrated 1947 document announcing America's "containment" policy of the Soviet Union. The only trouble is that Mr. Kennan has vacillated many times over the years. A decade before the Soviet collapse, he was quite ready to give up all kind of strategic and military positions. He wanted to induce Greece and Turkey to withdraw from NATO. He wanted to abandon Korea and the Philippines. And above all he wanted to give up our nuclear deterrent by pledging "no first use" of nuclear weapons. Before World War II, he advised Czechoslovakia to surrender "heroically" to the Nazis. And a few years later, when the main adversary was Moscow, his advice to Western Europeans, incredibly, was to pursue guerrilla warfare under a Soviet occupation. ______________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HarmonyHouse.com gives you 20% off all CDs all the time! HarmonyHouse.com has over 150,000 titles available right now! So what are you waiting for? 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