The Federal Government's Culture of Secrecy   

Secrets: The CIA's War at Home
By Angus Mackenzie
University of California Press

Secrets: The CIA's War at Home
By Angus Mackenzie
University of California Press
254 pages; $27.50

Nineteen-year-old Angus Mackenzie was peddling his antiwar newspaper in a small Illinois town one day in 1970 when three police officers cornered him and asked if he had the police chief's permission to sell papers. Then they bundled him off to headquarters, where he was charged with selling obscene materials. The charges soon went away, but Mackenzie's anger never did.

Mackenzie devoted much of his subsequent career as a magazine writer and investigative reporter to fuming and fighting against First Amendment abuse. This book powerfully culminates his labors, but its publication is bittersweet. Mackenzie, only 43, died of brain cancer in 1994, and his family and friends assembled the book in its final form.

It is a tribute to lifelong indignation and indefatigable sleuthing, and a rebuke to journalists and others who have sat silent as a culture of secrecy accrued across the land.

Drawing on his own reporting, the Freedom of Information Act and the historical record, Mackenzie documents how government agencies, particularly the CIA, infiltrated the underground press, intimidated mainstream journalists, cowed civil liberties organizations, muzzled internal dissenters and harassed First Amendment outliers.

ýore important, they steadily constructed a body of laws and regulations that expanded their secrecy powers, shielded them from the courts and Congress, and created penalties, including imprisonment, for unauthorized disclosures by anyone, including journalists.

Summarized in a paragraph or two, these developments seem outrageous and un-American, and they raise a couple of obvious questions. Is "Secrets" just a shrill polemic that twists a few worst-case examples into an across-the-board indictment? If not, how could these abuses occur under the nose of an adversarial press and in a country that proudly insists on openness?

On the first point, Mackenzie provides persuasive corroboration that the federal government, under pretexts that began with Cold War hysteria and now trade on anxieties about terrorism, created a climate of secrecy "dedicated to the proposition that censorship is an American virtue."

He cites a multitude of examples:

• The history of secrecy contracts prescribing what government employees can write and discuss;

• CIA actions to silence writers including ex-agents Victor Marchetti (a federal judge ruled that the CIA secrecy contract overrode the First Amendment) and Frank Snepp (who forfeited all his book profits and had to clear anything he ever wrote about intelligence with the CIA);

ü Successful CIA efforts to water down FOIA and congressional procedures, so as to keep many documents away from judicial or legislative inspection, including documents covering up illegal domestic spying and international intrigues like Iran-contra.

"Incrementally over the years," he concludes, federal policymakers "expanded a policy of censorship to the point that today it pervades every agency and department of the federal government."

How did all this happen? Mackenzie doesn't pursue it as far as he could, but he does offer some insights.

Like many encroachments, the culture of secrecy didn't emerge all at once. "So gradual was the change," Mackenzie writes, "that most guardians of the First Amendment — working members of the fourth estate and dues-paying members of the civil liberties community — scarcely noticed."

The simplest explanation seems to be that the changes evolved because bureaucrats are, by and large, easily able to outlast the press. Over time, they chipped away at openness, cleverly putting the media on the defensive. They used legitimate concerns (after all, terrorists and enemies of the republic do exist) to stretch their powers. In perhaps ill-considered efforts to seem reasonable, mainline journalists and civil libertarians made piecemeal concessions that, cumulatively, became costly.

Mackenzie is especially harsh on the American Civil Liberties Union, which he believes was suckered into supporting numerous FOIA compromises, largely in the hope of fending off even worse restrictions.

While obsession with secrecy seems Nixonian, "Secrets" contends that more moderate presidents embraced it too. George Bush was a former CIA director. Bill Clinton began with strong words about openness but "within a month..Clinton's enthusiasm for an open, accountable government began to fade [see "Foiled FOIA," April 1996]... Clinton found the sticking point to be not concern about national security but rather his own sensitivity about activities at the White House."

ýt is human nature to want to control what we disclose, and we should hardly be surprised that the secret holders become ever more adroit at safeguarding their treasures. Mackenzie stubbornly refused to be tolerant of these practices, and this crusading book should raise our resistance as well.