Secrecy: The American Experience

Product Description

The U.S. senator from New York traces the development of secrecy as a government policy over the twentieth century, demonstrates its adverse effects on Cold War policy making, and offers recommendations on curtailing its exploitation by government agencies.

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Amazon.com Review

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) was one of the first members of the United States government openly to predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union–and, by extension, statist communism–as far back as the late ’70s, as political historian Richard Gid Powers reminds readers in a lengthy introduction (comprising approximately one-fifth of
Secrecy’s total length). Had we spent less time trying to gather secret information about the Soviets and more time openly discussing rather easily interpretable data, Sen. Moynihan argues, we might have been far less paranoid about the supposed Red menace. The problem, he writes, lies in the essential nature of government secrecy: “Departments and agencies hoard information, and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization’s assets…. The system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decisions are either made poorly or not at all.”
Sen. Moynihan draws upon several incidents to make his point, from the Army’s deliberate withholding from President Harry Truman of information about Soviet spy rings to the disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs to the Iran-Contra affair. The senator knows whereof he speaks; he was for eight years a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Secrecy ably combines hands-on experience and historical perspective, calling for the United States to take advantage of the new era in international relations to implement policies that once again encourage the open, uninhibited flow of information among government agencies and, whenever possible, the public. –Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

In his decades of governmental service, New York Senator Moynihan has championed the principles of liberal democracy, in its original sense. His intellectual rigor and wry demeanor are both amply evident in this signal work on the state of American democracy. His skepticism of the secrecy bureaucracy began in the ’70s, when he was ambassador to India, and reached a high point when CIA director William Casey lied to him about the Iran-Contra affair. He became the chairman of the 1995-1996 Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy and there continued his investigation into the scope and repercussions of governmental secrecy with further research and privileged access to major players within the FBI, CIA and executive office. Starting with Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917, institutionalized secrecy expanded, culminating in the McCarthy era and the continued disastrous miscalculations of Soviet strength right up to the moment of the U.S.S.R.’s collapse. Moynihan argues that secrecy, while necessary in a very few cases, is both counter to democracy and antithetical to well-informed choices, since what is not known cannot be debated or debunked. The inherent propensity of the bureaucracy to enlarge its powers has resulted in exponential increases in what is “classified,” and national decisions are dictated by an unaccountable few. While details of momentous cases, such as the Verona project’s successful break of Soviet code, with the concomitant implication of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, and the Iran-Contra affair, are on public record, it is Moynihan’s skill as a social scientist that integrates them into a succinct historical analysis of the American culture of secrecy.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Secrecy, New York’s senior senator maintains, is a form of regulation: a ritualized, bureaucratized interference in the marketplace of ideas that shields error more th