25 September 1997

Angus Mackenzie recounts in his new book the US intelligence 
agencies' and supporters' gradual erosion of Firt Amendment 
rights since the passage of the National Security Act of
1947.

   Secrets: The CIA's War At Home
   Angus Mackenzie
   University of California Press
   Berkeley, 1997. 241 pp. $27.50
   ISBN 0-520-20020-9

"Secrets" decribes the origination of the Freedom of Information 
Act and other legislation to make government secrets available, 
the battles to get the laws passed and to defend them against 
subsequent attacks by proponents of secrecy who invoke the 
National Security Act.

Mackenzie sets out the ways the intelligence industry, helped by
the Department of Justice and the courts, manipulates 
the media, other governmental agencies and the citizenry 
by force and by seduction, with special attention to how 
it coopts its ostensible opponents like the ACLU and 
investigative journalists.

He documents the undisclosed arrangments between the CIA and the
media to favor journalism at the public's expense in legislation and
in working relations.

He carefully traces the long-running campaign to limit governmental 
employees from revealing what they know through various 
non-disclosure and lifetime secrecy agreements, sometimes breached
by ex-agency heads who reveal secrets to boost careers.

The book amply documents the ongoing struggle, now 50 years
underway, to open the archives of domestic spying, new attempts 
to limit public access to governmental information, and moves 
by the intelligence industry to invade privacy.

Here are the book's closing paragraphs:

   By the 1990s, reflecting the general conservative shift in
   Congress, many House members were actively welcoming a
   secrecy oath. Consideration of the oath, less comprehensive
   than the standard contract, first came up in the House Select
   Committee on Intelligence during a discussion of the fiscal year
   (FY) 1992 Intelligence Authorization Act. That led to a House
   rule requiring the intelligence committee members and staff to
   sign the oath. Interest in broadening the use of the oath did not
   stop there, especially for committee member Porter J. Goss of
   Florida. Goss's ties to the CIA dated from 1962 and his ten year
   stint as a clandestine service officer at the Agency. He and his
   fellow enthusiast, Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, offered amendments
   to the FY 1993 and 1994 authorization acts that would require
   secrecy oaths from every member of the House. The
   amendments did not prosper, but when the 104th Congress
   convened on January 4, 1995, backers of the oath changed
   tactics. This time the oath requirement for every House member
   was included in the packet of rules from the House Conference
   of the Majority. It became a new rule without debate.

   In the mid-1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded the alarm about
   government censorship. Although a member of the Reagan
   administration's inner foreign policy circle, Kirkpatrick had a
   personal encounter with government censors over her refusal to
   sign the lifetime secrecy contract. Upon returning to her political
   science chair at Georgetown University from her post as U.S.
   United Nations ambassador, Kirkpatrick reexamined John Stuart
   Mill's classic essay On Liberty and delivered a lecture on
   censorship. "Societies are not made stronger by the process of
   repression that accompanies censorship," she warned.
   "Censorship requires an assumption of infallibility, and that
   seems to Mill invariably negative. Repression of an opinion is
   thus bad for the censor, who inevitably acts from a conviction of
   his own infallibility," she told her students, "and bad for the
   opinion itself, which can neither be corrected nor held with
   conviction equal to the strength of an opinion submitted to
   challenge."

   As the twentieth century draws to a close, the 1947 National
   Security Act has become the Pandora's box that Ambassador
   Kirkpatrick and Congressman Hoffman had feared. Placing a
   legal barrier between foreign intelligence operations and
   domestic politics in the National Security Act has proved
   ineffectual. In the decades that followed 1947, the CIA not only
   became increasingly involved in domestic politics but abridged
   First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press in a
   conspiracy to keep this intrusion from the American people. The
   intelligence and military secrecy of the 1940s had broadened in
   the 1960s to covering up the suppression of domestic dissent.
   The 1980s registered a further, more fundamental change, as
   the suppression of unpopular opinions was supplemented by
   systematic and institutionalized peacetime censorship for the
   first time in U.S. history. The repressive machinery developed by
   the CIA has spread secrecy like oil on water.

   The U.S. government has always danced with the devil of
   secrecy during wartime. By attaching the word "war" to the
   economic and ideological race for world supremacy between
   the Soviet Union and the United States, a string of
   administrations continued this dance uninterrupted for fifty
   years. The cold war provided the foreign threat to justify the
   pervasive Washington belief that secrecy should have the
   greatest possible latitude and openness should be restricted as
   much as possible -- constitutional liberties be damned.

   With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power in 1990,
   even the pseudo-war rationale evaporated. But the partisans of
   secrecy have not been willing to accept the usual terms of
   peacetime. They have made clear their intentions to preserve
   and extend the wartime system. They will find a rationalization: if
   not the threat of the Soviet Union, then the goal of economic
   hegemony. Thus the U.S. government now needs to keep
   secrets to give an advantage to American corporate interests.
   Yet it is entrepreneurs who have been making the most use of
   FOIA -- not journalists, not lawyers. As of 1994, the great
   preponderance of all FOIA requests have been for business
   purposes. As the framers of the Constitution understood, the
   free exchange of ideas is good for commerce, but this idea has
   been widely forgotten in the years since the passage of the 1947
   National Security Act.

   Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has
   secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in
   the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The
   United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a
   place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and
   thought police, where people can say what they want, when they
   want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end
   of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was.
   The issue is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo
   Hill. The issue is principle, as it was for Ernest Fitzgerald, who
   never signed a secrecy contract but retained his Pentagon job
   because he made his stand for the First Amendment resonate in
   Congress. Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend
   their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope
   that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of
   the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.
