Secrecy and the Powerful

  

Secrecy and the Powerful

Peter Schultz

 

                  Secrecy is popular with the powerful because it protects them from being seen as failures, and failure is one thing that the powerful seek, mightily, to avoid. Avoiding or hiding failure might be even more important to the powerful than succeeding because failure undermines how the powerful want and need to be seen.

 

                  “In fact, as they later admitted, prior to September 11, 2001, ‘the CIA had no penetrations of Al Qaeda leadership, and the Agency never acquired intelligence from anyone that could be acted upon.’ It was George Tenet’s biggest secret. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country’s greatest threat.” [221, Bamford]

 

                  So, secrecy helps to maintain the appearance of being powerful. So too does inactivity, which is facilitated by secrecy. Very often, in the time leading up to the attacks on September 11, 2001, secrets were learned, intelligence was revealed that was not acted upon.

 

                  “Despite the importance of the operation, Rich [Blee] had never bothered to write up and distribute an intelligence report on it - … a TD or Telegraphic Dissemination. ‘A TD would have gone to a lot of people,’ admitted the senior intelligence officer, ‘but we didn’t do that.’” [227, Bamford]

 

                  Was this conspiratorial behavior? Hardly. It was merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill behavior meant to conceal how powerless the Agency was against potential terrorists. And such behavior continued: “Despite losing the key suspects, Rich [Blee] told senior CIA officials four days later, on January 12, that the surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was continuing. Two days later he again told his superiors that they were continuing to track the Al Qaeda suspects, but by then Alec Station had no clue where Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and Khallad were, and all tracking had ceased.” [228]

 

                  Conspiratorial behavior? Hardly. And finally: “Alec Station made no further attempts to locate the missing suspected terrorists.” [228] If you don’t try to locate suspected terrorists, you can’t fail at finding them. Using secrecy as a way of avoiding or hiding failure works well, particularly for the officials involved.

 

                  Ironically, often what the powerful do to appear powerful undermines their power. The Agency and its secrecy were in fact empowering its enemies, but not conspiratorially. CIA officials were behaving normally, that is, secretly. But they were, unintentionally, colluding with Al Qaeda and its terrorists. So, it goes.