Evolutionary biologists like to say that form follows function. In the national security world, the same thing happens. The structure of secrecy—its form—can tell a lot about its function. And the modifications made by agencies can reveal how an organization’s culture of secrecy and classification has evolved to fit its institutional needs and external duties.
That’s not to say that even the unclassified structure is easy to unravel. William Arkin, a persistent critic of secrecy whose research has contributed enormously to the public’s understanding of the national security apparatus, published Code Breakers in 2006, a remarkable book containing thousands of program names, code words, identifiers, and secret locations—a telephone book, basically, of the deep state. Arkin’s book received some attention at the time, but is now quite literally a reference book that special security officers are required to read in official (Top Secret) government classes. Several NSA offices have copies of Arkin’s book lying around simply for them to be able to check out unfamiliar names they come across.
The modern system of classification came into being on September 26, 1951, when President Harry Truman signed an executive order giving the CIA, a civilian agency, the power to decide what information ought to be classified in the interests of national security. National security was, as of that moment, no longer “merely a military consideration.”1
The United States has three formal classification levels for collateral information: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, referring to progressively higher threats to security (from “reasonable” basis to conclude that national security will be harmed, to causing “exceptionally grave” damage to national security). These are terms of art, and very little effort has been made inside the government to drill down and distill across agencies what type of information will be Secret and what will be Top Secret. (Most classified information is Secret.) Accessing Secret information requires a fairly simple background check and a name check through various government databases. (An FBI or Office of Personnel Management or Defense Security Service agent will ask friends you list whether you’ve ever had a sudden surprise source of income or come into contact with foreign governments.)
A Top Secret clearance is extremely valuable: it adds tens of thousands of dollars per year to the average recipient’s income, and it also costs the government several thousand dollars per person to grant, using a process called a Single Scope Background Investigation. Since the basic system was established, the prospect of a stringent background investigation has probably done more to deter would-be spies and unbalanced individuals from pursuing sensitive jobs than anything else.
Depending on the agency, applicants will be asked to take a polygraph, an instrument born out of the necessity to weed out communists and homosexuals from sensitive government service.2 Only recently has the DOD admitted that the polygraph is not purely a scientific instrument; its measurements correlate slightly with physiological responses that liars give, but there are far too many false positives for the poly to be the conclusive test. (The CIA’s polygraph examinations did not detect Aldrich Ames’s deceptions; the FBI’s did not detect Robert Hanssen’s.)3 In the words of the Intelligence Science Board, “there is no evidence supporting the assumption that autonomic and somatic responses reflect intentional deception.”4
Yet there is no formal alternative to the polygraph, and there are other reasons it remains a ubiquitous tool. The polygraph’s mystique is often used to simply scare people away or into confessing outright. (When the president travels overseas, the Secret Service will bring along a polygraph examiner in case they need to determine quickly whether someone acting suspiciously is intent on doing harm.) Top Secret clearance holders get repolygraphed every five years. And the questions asked are intrusive. If candidates already cleared require access to information denoting the sources and methods underlying intelligence collection—Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI—polygraph examinations will delve deeply into their intimate lives. (This is a “lifestyle” polygraph, as opposed to a “counterintelligence polygraph,” which asks generic questions aimed at figuring out whether the person taking the test is a potential agent of a foreign government.)
The exact questions are not released because of the ease with which methods can be found to fool the examiners, but they tend to follow the times: one question regularly asked during lifestyle polygraphs is whether the person has ever sent a provocative picture of himself or herself to someone he or she did not know over the Internet. Lest you conclude that former representative Anthony Weiner would therefore be disqualified, the polygraph examiners and clearance adjudicators have latitude. If your sexual behavior is colorful and rich but is unlikely to mark you as a target for blackmail and doesn’t interfere with your work, it won’t matter as long as you admit to it. The same goes for mental illnesses such as depression. Depending on the agency and the task, sufferers from chronic depression can usually pass the background examination if they are honest about their condition and their personal psychiatrist concludes that they are not functionally impaired.
There is no standard across the government for putting people “on the box,” as it’s called. Soldiers are rarely subject to them, and Defense Department civilian employees obtain Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (Top Secret/SCI) clearances without them.
The three basic classification levels do not even begin to peel the onion. This is because—despite the expense of conducting background investigations, and under the guise of establishing the government’s trust in an individual—the national security system does not in fact trust people with mere collateral clearances. The director of national intelligence (DNI) controls the SCI caveats that refer to (and in many cases limit access to) the sources and methods that produce intelligence.
As of 2012, there were four unclassified categories of SCI. They correspond to four classes of derivative intelligence. Special Intelligence (SI) refers to information derived from communications intelligence collection or signals intelligence. Talent-Keyhole (TK) refers to satellite imagery. Human Intelligence Control System (HCS) gives the bearer access to information that might implicate certain sensitive, specific human sources. This year, a new unclassified SCI compartment was added by the DNI. Geospatial intelligence requires clearance into Klondike, known by the trigraph KDK.
A few SCI terms are not officially acknowledged but provide a window into the organization of the deep state. Focal Point (FP) refers to military assistance to intelligence operations as well as civilian agencies that need DOD support. There are more than a dozen FP cells throughout the DOD, providing Defense assets to support CIA, NSA, and other classified activities. NC2-ESI is the new designation for information about nuclear targeting. (The main nuclear war plan is known as 8010-08 and is classified as Top Secret//NC2/ESI). A compartment known as Extremely Classified Information (ECI) refers to joint CIA/NSA programs. Technical Intelligence (TI) refers to product from drones. Especially sensitive satellite or reconnaissance technology is compartmented as RSV.5 VRK is an NSA-specific compartment for intelligence derived from special sources. COIT is Compartments Intelligence, for especially sensitive DOD human intelligence and influence operations. Azure Blue, or AB, caveats come from an especially sensitive new reconnaissance platform. The compartment for information derived from measurement and signature systems intelligence (MASINT) is GG. Information from sensitive foreign sources is sometimes given the digraph CW. And so on.
In 1986, there were more than thirty SCI control systems, accounting for about five hundred different subcompartments.6 Information that flows through one control system must be air-gapped (separated physically) from information that flows through another, unless they are handled jointly. This adds immeasurably to the confusion and expense of SCI. There are about two dozen SCI control systems today and about two hundred categories of SCI information. And there are still at least a half dozen other ways that the government protects its information. The CIA and the NSA use the unfo
rtunately named BIGOT lists to specify access to named individuals, usually to protect their sources of information. (No, they’re not calling people prejudiced. The term apparently derives from a notation that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to compartment information from their Gibraltar station. Information sent there: TO GIB. Information returned: BIGOT.) Nuclear code traffic is passed through a SPECAT—a special category channel protected from other extremely well-protected channels—through an air gap.
The DOD and some intelligence agencies create special access programs (SAPs) to circumscribe access to specific military and intelligence operations; treaty drafts; particularly sensitive new technical collection technologies; and procurement activities. (Most DOD SAPs concern procurement, acquisitions, and testing.) James Clapper, director of national intelligence, famously told Dana Priest that “only God” had cognizance of all of the SAPs in government. In truth, the creation of even the highest-level SAP—a “waived SAP” that only eight members of Congress get orally read in to—triggers a notification process that involves two hundred people inside the Pentagon and national security establishment, according to a senior government program manager who creates them. But those managing SAPs can create subcompartments within the SAPs that aren’t (primarily for reasons of efficiency) subject to the same disclosure rules.
Where SCI is identified primarily by trigraph or digraph, SAPs are given unclassified nicknames (Neptune’s Spear was the SAP within which the Osama bin Laden raid was planned) and a classified code word that formally controls their access (in this case, CRANK SHAFT). GREYSTONE (or GST)—the CIA SAP created to manage its rendition, interrogation, and counterterrorism programs—had more than a dozen subcompartments, each of them given numbers. For example, the pilots and contractors who flew rendition flights didn’t need to know about the enhanced interrogation techniques that would take place at the CIA “black sites” in Europe and Asia. So they might be given access to GST-001; the interrogators might have been read in to GST-001 and GST-002, which would include the techniques and their use at the black sites, as well as the rendition portion of the program.
Even before entertaining questions of oversight, a balancing act occurs. It is prudent to keep sensitive sources and methods to a small group, simply because the chances of their being disclosed increases linearly with the number of people in the know. But the costs of compartmentalization can undermine the programs themselves. Consider the following example, which has been somewhat sanitized to protect the source and the technology. A certain very secret and highly valuable technical intelligence platform is run out of an Air Force base in the United States. There, operators control the platform and collect and disseminate intelligence. At a location overseas where this platform (call it BENJI) is based, there are ground operators. This program—think of it as a truck, an airplane, a drone, or a satellite, with a lot of special capabilities—is so sensitive that every tasking must be approved in advance by the National Security Council.
But the platform is so adaptable that it has a lot of customers. The DOD might want to use its abilities to monitor something in country X, whereas the CIA might want to use it to track nuclear fissile material movements in Pakistan. The problem is that the operators at PROJECT BENJI have to literally switch hard drives depending on which customer gets the product. For reasons that only the program manager himself or herself know, the Defense Department can’t know what the CIA gets, and vice versa. Indeed, the DOD, sensitive to the implications of the platform’s exposure, forces the ground operators to take a specific piece of equipment off of the platform before a DOD mission, lest anyone blame them. (Of course, if the platform is compromised, it’s compromised; it doesn’t matter a whit to Iran whether the DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency or the CIA is monitoring its nuclear program.)
Cries to reform this system and iron out its ironies—information classified Secret but marked with a caveat is given better protection than Top Secret information without one—have come from inside and outside government since the dawn of the Cold War. Robert Gates, former director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, once called the system the “greatest deterrent” to saving money in the national security arena.7 Commissions on government secrecy tend to observe the same trends (more secrets, more people with classifying authority, bizarre examples of information that’s been classified, and the toxicity of overclassification on the public’s faith in government) and propose the same solutions: get rid of most of the caveats; strengthen automatic declassification rules; establish better auditing systems so that people are presumed to have access to information, rather than “no need to know.”
The first major government report to call for reform of the process was convened by Congress during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. The sociologist Edward Shils noted that the secrecy system was set up to justify the “phantasies of apocalyptic visionaries,” a phrase that would forever resonate with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.8 Things were kept secret because no one could be trusted; because an existential threat existed in the form of nuclear weapons and communist intrusions; because the average American had to be protected by the government for the sake of the government’s legitimacy. After the Cold War, this was manifestly no longer the case.
In 1993, the CIA and the DOD received a report from a commission chartered by Gates, suggesting that the state wipe away the twelve separate über-categories of classified information and replace them with two.9 Classified information was classified, so there would be one collateral term—Secret—and certain very sensitive information would be compartmented with a code word, although the decision to compartment information would be taken very seriously.
The report was ignored. Three years later, a commission chaired by Moynihan took an even more caustic and sociological view of secrecy and recommended wholesale changes to the secrecy system. He coauthored legislation calling for a National Declassification Center, for the mandatory declassification of certain information, and for a wholesale overhaul of the classification apparatus.
David Schanzer, a top Pentagon lawyer at the time who was sympathetic to the Moynihan report, recalls how stakeholders fought back: “DOD had a strong revulsion to the bill on a cost basis. So program managers put together a cost case for all the requirements that Moynihan’s bill would have had them do. Given the volume of material, it would wind up costing just the general counsel’s office about $10 billion a year alone. We sent a letter to Moynihan, and as soon as he saw it, he got sick to his stomach because he knew that legislation wasn’t going to be able to make it through that kind of opposition.”
Because the classification apparatus is labyrinthine, those in power sometimes feel safe compounding the issue by making up new schemes. In 1984, Representative Dick Cheney, a young congressman from Wyoming, saw his assignment to the House Intelligence Committee “as an honor.”10 It was also his formal introduction to the deep world of secrecy. “The very nature of the committee’s work requires absolute confidentiality and secrecy,” he wrote in his memoir.11 He visited the secret test site at Area 51 near Groom Lake, Nevada, to see an early version of the F-117 stealth fighter. He spent time at the then classified National Reconnaissance Office watching real-time satellite feeds. He was read in to the highly compartmentalized Continuity of Government procedures, a subject he would take a particular interest in. Under President George H. W. Bush, he would serve as secretary of defense.
Charged with vetting potential vice presidential candidates for Governor George W. Bush, Cheney managed a tight process with no leaks. Indeed, the first hint that he might be chosen came only a day before it was announced. After the inauguration in 2001, Vice President Cheney and his chief counselor, David Addington, former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, created a layer of insulation around the Office of the Vice President. It was easy for Cheney to ignore any interest the press might have in him; he was not going to run for president and had no reason to develop a public pers
ona. A former staff member who is close to Cheney today says that the original reason for walling himself off was that “he just didn’t want to be bothered.” After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Cheney may not have changed, but everything around him did. The Secret Service assigned a full-time counterassault team to his detail. When terrorist threats spiked, he spent nights at Camp David, and when the threat was acute, at the Alternate National Military Command Center on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Early on, Cheney likely had a conversation with President Bush about managing the post-9/11 national security interagency process. No one knows for sure, because Cheney never discussed his conversations with the president. According to Steven Yates, deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney, “In eight years, not once did any of their private conversations leak.” Even inside the “vault,” as staffers called the vice president’s office, “there was a one-way feedback mechanism. You give Cheney what he asks for and he told you what you needed to know,” said Yates, adding, “When you walked out of that door, it closed behind you, courtesy of a lawyer named David Addington.”
Did Cheney take it upon himself to task JSOC with specific missions, as Seymour Hersh has alleged? Yates said he doesn’t know. “But there is nothing illegal about the vice president doing something the president gave him permission to do.” (General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of JSOC from 2003 to 2007, does not recall having spoken to Cheney during the period.) According to Yates, no one ever discussed whether Bush and Cheney had a conversation in which power was formally delegated. But Cheney, perhaps more than anyone in the White House, knew about how sclerotic the national security bureaucracy could be and had little patience for the lawyerly way in which the National Security Council adjudicated policy. “Cheney had a habit of reaching, three, four rings down into the bureaucracy, asking people on the ground what was really happening. And that frosted people on the NSC.”
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