Classification has long been used for noble purposes (protecting vital national security information) and less noble ones (silencing critics, avoiding embarrassment, and advancing careers). In the Senate's Fort Hood report, the FBI was not protecting information. It was protecting itself, an instinct that started with J. Edgar Hoover and never left. Alexander's experience is not new either. Security people have been making silly classification decisions for years. One of my all-time favorites was a document about U.S. strategic nuclear forces that was declassified by the Pentagon in 1971, discussed openly by four defense secretaries over the next 35 years, and then, incredibly, reclassified in 2006. The nongovernmental National Security Archive had to protest to get the reclassified document declassified again.
What's different today is that the entire secrecy system has become so publicly dysfunctional. It used to be that fights over secrecy were often quiet affairs, the stuff of intelligence wonks and lawyers. Before wikis, blogs, tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn, apps, links, clicks, and other snappy-sounding ways of transmitting information all the time, everywhere, to everyone, a book about a secret operation or agency would simply appear one day in the local bookstore. The sordid details of how it came into the public domain were themselves often kept in the shadows. In the 1950s, for example, the National Security Agency classified and banned publication of Roberta Wohlstetter's award-winning book about the intelligence failures at Pearl Harbor even though all her sources were unclassified. She was told to destroy every copy. Fortunately, she didn't. John F. Kennedy's administration finally authorized publication five years later, and we are still learning from her analysis today. But when Wohlstetter was trying to get her book into daylight, nobody was blogging or reporting about her ordeal. By comparison, No Easy Day's no easy time is unfolding in a public drama all its own. It is a telling moment: Information is so hard to control that even the fight to keep things secret is not secret anymore. And the whole information cycle is spinning ever faster. It took decades for Americans to learn key aspects of the Cuban missile crisis, months to get details of the highly classified bin Laden operation, and just hours to learn Mark Owen's real identity after word of his book first surfaced in the media.
It is an uncertain and unsettling time for secrecy. As an academic who relies on public information about secret agencies to teach students the lessons of history, I am optimistic about this new information universe. As a citizen who wants the U.S. government to develop every advantage against adversaries to protect lives and advance national interests, I am deeply worried. Secrecy and openness have always been in a tenuous dance because one is essential for security while the other is essential for democracy. But the world is changing. The disconnect between America's 20th-century secrecy regime and 21st-century information realities is growing, making secrecy seem increasingly arbitrary and less meaningful. And in the end this threatens both security and accountability.
POST-SCRIPT: Since this article was published, several readers in the military and Intelligence Community have told me that the SEAL team's role in the bin Laden operation should never have been publicly acknowledged -- by the White House, "Mark Owen," or anyone else. As one former special forces operator put it, revealing the unit that carried out the mission "greatly dilutes the mystique and ‘fear factor' that we do want to elicit in all groups or individuals around the world that seek to do us harm. We want them to feel uncomfortable about not knowing quite what we are really capable of achieving operationally.... This is a powerful construct that is only leveraged by silence." Unfortunately, he said, "the generation of operators that appears to have followed my own does not comprehend the matter of the deed being greater than the glory." Sure, the world can suspect that Navy SEALs were responsible for taking out bin Laden. But there's a big difference between suspecting and knowing for sure. And as one Navy friend once said, "I never want a fair fight. When you're up against an adversary, you want every advantage you can get."
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