U.S. Secrecy and Lies.

Secrets and lies have always been intrinsic to the functions of states. In a democracy, public tolerance of official secrecy tends to shift with the tides: in times of national emergency, such as war or civil unrest, people are willing to forgo open governance in exchange for safety and victory; in peace, the citizenry becomes more assertive, claiming its right to knowledge of past misdeeds and to informed participation in current affairs. Today that right is being asserted against continuing government efforts to bolster the secrecy system.

During the long, dark winter of America's cold war, a system of secrecy first devised in the crucible of the Second World War flourished. It took root and grew, reaching beyond the corridors of power in Washington to taint government operations across the country and around the globe. It served to hide not only the individual misdeeds and misadventures of successive administrations but, under the guise of "national security," to conceal the rationales behind them. Presidents, policymakers, and legislators used the advent of the national security state as an excuse for their evasiveness. They assumed they could abrogate the people's "right to know" without prior consultation just as if the United States were engaged in an open, armed conflict.

U.S. citizens accepted this curtailment, to a degree. Fearful of the prospects of a nuclear face-off, Americans allowed the erosion both of freedoms and of the presumption of openness that they had once taken for granted. As a result, secrecy spread its shadow over the crafting of foreign policy, the building of weapons, the birth of entire government agencies, the spending of federal funds, and, inevitably, the play of public debate.

In the early 1970s, as public opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam mounted, publication of the Pentagon Papers revealed the military's misdeeds in Vietnam, and FBI documents obtained by antiwar activists exposed COINTELPRO, a covert domestic surveillance program. Two seminal congressional investigations, named for their chairs, Congressman Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church, helped document government abuses and partially lifted the lid on state secrets.

With the end of the cold war, however, the first broad-based movement for openness, accountability, and an end to secrecy grew, as librarians and archivists, academics and historians, Republicans and Democrats, human rights and public interest advocates, scientists, jurists, and even some members of the defense and intelligence establishment demanded declassification. Forged in the wake of a half century of covert operations, black budgets, and information controls, this new constituency is demanding, in the words of the bipartisan Moynihan Commission, that "it is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy."

Sensing this shift, the national security bureaucracy scrambled to renounce old habits. Agencies long submerged in the black waters of secrecy realized that they needed to surface and become part of the growing public debate over changing missions and shrinking resources. In February 1992, CIA Director Robert Gates announced the advent of "CIA openness" ("an oxymoron," he admitted), promising more media briefings, academic conferences, and documents. In 1993, a scathing newspaper series documenting four decades of nuclear establishment radiation experiments on unwitting human subjects compelled the Department of Energy to launch its own "openness initiative."

Bill Clinton, the first post-cold war president, also took some important first steps to challenge the system he inherited. In 1995, after launching a government-wide review of the country's secrecy policies, he signed Executive Order 12958, a directive to overhaul the classification system of U.S. national security information. The order drove a stake in the heart of one of the national security establishment's most cherished beliefs--that secret documents must remain secret indefinitely--by requiring the "automatic declassification" of most historically valuable records older than 25 years. The executive order established an interagency review panel with the power to reverse agency classification decisions. In its first two years of operation, the panel declassified (in full or in part) more than 80% of the classified records it reviewed--a sharp indictment of past secrecy practices.

Driving the executive branch's incipient reform efforts was mounting public pressure for change. Simultaneously, Congress played a more limited role by opening discrete record collections where a compelling public interest existed--such as documents on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, on U.S. citizens missing in Vietnam, and on Nazi war crimes. In the wake of the detention of Chile's ex-dictator Gen. Agusto Pinochet in 1998, both overseas activists and foreign governments joined the call for declassification of CIA and other U.S. government files.

Key Points

* During the cold war, a system of secrecy, first devised during World War II, continued to flourish, tainting U.S. operations around the globe.

* Under the guise of "national security," this system of secrecy has affected crafting of foreign policy, building of weapons, birth of entire government agencies, government spending, and play of public debate.

* In 1995, under pressure from a growing broad-based movement for an end to secrecy, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 to overhaul the classification system.

Kate Doyle,([e-mail]) a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, is based in Mexico City. This brief is adapted from her essay in National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War.