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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(1998).
Secrecy: The American Experience.
Introduction
by Richard Gid Powers.
New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
62 pages, Bibliography, Index. $22.50
ISBN: 0-300-07756-4.
Secrecy
is for losers. For people who do not
know how important the information really is.
- Daniel P. Moynihan
In his
book Secrecy, US Senator D.P. Moynihan sharply criticises
the American government's secrecy. Drawing on the history
of this institution's development, Moynihan attacks its
legal framework and its function within the American political
system, viewing it as one of the key characteristics of
the governing methods of the executive. His work is a plea
for abandoning the current situation, which he calls the
"Culture of Secrecy", and for the establishment
and acceptance of the alternative, "Culture of Openness".
However,
Moynihan does not entirely discard the need for a certain
degree of secrecy in a state's affairs and claims his intention
is not to abolish secrecy, which is indeed "sometimes
legitimate and necessary". Why then does Moynihan so
forcefully attack and destructively criticize the institution
of secrecy?
First,
Moynihan does not attack the concept of secrecy as such,
which would be in the least impractical. However, he does
attack secrecy in its bureaucratised form and manifestations
as the institution of a modern democratic state. Second,
his harsh criticism, which arises in part from his general
view on freedom and democracy as well as from the dubiousness
of the relationship between secrecy and freedom, has one
concrete practical dimension; namely, the expensive American
bureaucratised secrecy system and the intelligence-security
Leviathan which rests on it have not, according to Moynihan,
fulfilled their only purpose in the second half of the twentieth
century: correctly assessing the degree of threat to American
national security from its main Cold War enemy, the USSR.
Continual intelligence overestimates of Soviet strength
and then being caught unprepared by its dissolution are
the cardinal sins which lie in the most distorted aspect
of the "Culture of Secrecy"; in other words, the
withholding of information for reasons of scientific pretensions;
that is to say, closed intelligence analyses and assessments
which did not allow for expert dialogue and criticism. Moynihan,
who is not only a politician but also a social scientist,
shows us how contradictory secrecy is to the essence of
scientific discourse.
Moynihan's
likeable style of describing various episodes from America's
most recent history helps to illustrate his basic arguments.
The making of the modern American secrecy system during
WW I; the extent of Soviet espionage before, during and
after WW II; ominous complementarity of the concepts of
secrecy, conspiracy and loyalty, and the expansion of the
secrecy system with the onset of the nuclear age; the Pentagon
Papers; the Iran-Contra affair are just a few of the elaborated
themes. One of the most fascinating and, from the perspective
of the American reception of Moynihan's work, the most controversial
parts of the book, is the author's presentation of the current
decline in the quality of strategic analysis regarding the
Soviet threat to American national security. Moynihan believes
that George F. Kennan's article, "The Sources of Soviet
Conduct", which was published in Foreign Affairs in
July 1947, is the best insight of its kind or, rather, "the
most prescient position paper in the history of modern American
diplomacy." Moynihan also covers various classified
assessments inaccessible to expert criticism and discussions,
assessments which have for decades served as a basis for
political decision-making, and which vastly exaggerated
the power of the USSR, until the final debacle: being caught
unprepared by the breakdown of the Soviet empire.
Moynihan
simultaneously follows two processes, illustrating them
with numerous examples - on the one hand the process of
establishing and developing an American secrecy system,
and on the other hand, the parallel battle of the public
and the parliament to restrain this institution; that is,
to define the level of regulation which would serve to effectively
resist an enemy, but which at the same time would not be
used against one's own citizens and their liberties, whether
it be in the form of bureaucratic inertia or political misuse.
In places
where Moynihan the social scientist argues for demolishing
the "Culture of Secrecy" and developing a "Culture
of Openness", Moynihan the politician demands the establishment
of a new, more stable model of decision-making in the area
of national security. The old model, grounded on secrecy,
with its legacy of intelligence failures and ill-conceived
political moves, must yield to a new way of addressing the
national security issue; that is, shifting the emphasis
from secrecy to analysis. Because he has confidence in the
beneficial effects of the "Information Age" in
which we live, the civilizational foundation of a "Culture
of Openness", Moynihan is thus confident in the intelligence
value of open sources.
He is
of course practical and hence does not rely solely on invisible
historical powers, but on the legislative activity of a
democratic state as well: the manner in which one must restrain
a "Culture of Secrecy" and allow for the development
of a "Culture of Openness" is a law that would
clearly define and limit the area of secrecy.
To be
sure, we must allow for the possibility that there exist
authors, mostly American, who would successfully oppose
some of Moynihan's arguments and show, on the basis of thorough
analysis of intelligence assessments, that their history
is not entirely comprised of dramatic failures.
However,
a critical approach to Moynihan's work, as well as to his
lack of modesty (he presents his former scepticism in regard
to the long-term survival of communist totalitarianism as
one of the rare bright spots in the darkness of delusions
about Soviet strength and invincibility) do not lessen the
value of Moynihan's other arguments, his support for a "Culture
of Openness" and his strong, morally and intellectually
principled stands in the defence of democracy and civil
liberties.
Moynihan's
text is preceded by an excellent introduction by Richard
Gid Powers, in which he sketches Moynihan's political portrait
and interprets the meaning of his efforts in light of critical
consideration of the Cold War's tangle of facts and illusions
wrapped in a veil of secrecy, and the epochal clash of the
two superpowers over the shortage of valid information-based
hysterias - the right wing ideology of anti-communism and
the left ideology of anti-anti-communism, as one of the
main characteristics of modern American history.
However,
even though he looks at secrecy from the perspective of
an "American experience", Moynihan's work is of
exceptional value for the non-American readers too, especially
those in the Central Eastern European "transitional
laboratory". Namely, while the American reader finds
this book predominantly, although not solely, polemical
and politically provocative, for this other group of potential
readers the book is first of all didactic, since this is
the area where there are deep structural changes being undertaken
in all aspects of social life, and thus the reconsideration
of the concept of national security and the reorganising
of systems and mechanisms for its protection are underway.
For all that, in areas where a fundamental breakdown of
the old totalitarian system and a rejection of its methods
in the area of national security are occurring (that is,
in the best case scenario), some of the already existing
models from the West are being accepted as an alternative,
and the very fact that they are western models necessarily
assumes the democratic legitimation of these models and
methods. Moynihan's work implicitly reminds us of the important
historical lesson that when "human affairs" are
in question, there are no ready-made and self-explanatory
solutions; that when it is once achieved, democracy is not
a self-maintaining "natural state" but rather
needs continual nurturing, and, finally that any measure
of freedom, regardless of the form it might take, should
always be fought for. Therefore Moynihan's concern for American
democracy is a concern for democracy in general.
Stribor
Kikerec, Zagreb, Croatia