The idea of secret intelligence, at the core, is a simple military paradigm.
Imagine that it’s May 1942, five months after Pearl Harbor.
Somewhere in the vast darkness of the Pacific, two fleets are maneuvering. Admiral Yamamoto wants to force the Americans to battle so he can finish off what’s left of them. If he can do that, he believes, the Americans will accept a negotiated peace.
Admiral Nimitz has many places to defend. He needs to know where the Japanese will attack next and with how much force.
Fortunately for the Americans, they’ve broken the Japanese code. But there is a code within the code. The Japanese aren’t using real place names, they’re using military designations and Yamamoto is heading for “AF,” which could be Midway or Oahu or the west coast of the United States. The Americans send a radio signal “in the clear,” that Midway is short of water. The Japanese intercept it, as the Americans hope they will, and when they pass the information up the line to the their own headquarters, they use the island’s designation, which is indeed AF.
Now Nimitz can commit his fleet. When Yamamoto gets there the Americans are waiting in ambush for him.
The Battle of Midway is considered the decisive battle of the War in the Pacific. It is the end of the Japanese advance and the beginning of the American offensive.
Nimitz needed secret intelligence. He also needed it to be a secret that he had that secret intelligence.
He goes on stating the fact that secrecy "grows layer-by-layer" based on that need to keep the idea that we have specific secret intelligence. This layering grows form the need to keep indirect information that could give an enemy a clue into our secrets thereby compromising our advantage. He gives examples, like specific information on military funding of specific programs.
Having spent 22yrs in the military and having experience with Secret information, I can tell you his examples and explanation are correct.
My personal example of the idea of classified information is in the "Desert Storm" campaign. Intentional or not, we had the decisive and swift victory of the campaign due, in part, to how the military handled the press. They (the press) may not like it, but they did play a part in how we won "Desert Storm." The military manipulated the press in such a way to gave Saddam's military inelegance the impression that we were going to attack from the South and the sea (the off shore Marines). Result, they were not paying attention to the West where our end-run attack actually came from. The press was manipulated by tightly classifying what they could show and talk about, what information they were given in the very orchestrated briefings.
For the above situation, here is my scenario for an innocent security slip that could have compromised "Desert Storm:"
- A reporter is interviewing a Army Sergent outside. Innocent and something the press should be allowed to do without approval form the military, correct?
- BUT, if in the far background, there was a convoy of flatbed trucks with tanks on them, fuel tankers, and troop transports going West?
- This could have caused Saddam's Intelligence Officers to question "why was all this going West when the attack is supposed to be coming from the South?" Remember, Saddam's military intelligence were no dummies, they just did not have all the tech-tools our intelligence community has.
The above scenario did not happen because of how the military classified information and thereby restricted the press.
The problem with "King" George, and Nixon for that matter, is they classify things Secret or Top Secret not because it is a threat to military security, directly or indirectly, but because they see it as a threat to their political agenda or to them personally.
The idea being that a threat to an agenda or to a President (the person) is not necessarily a threat to America. That is something that "we-the-people" should judge and should not be left to an individual who has a personal stake. Especially if that person is the only one making the judgment. Being human, do you really expect that a personal threat would not be rationalized into a threat on America by some people? Well G.W. Bush is, and Nixon was, such a person and we should not allow them to be the only judges on what threatens America and to do that we need information. This President has definitely not urned our trust.
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