Posting #5: Stories about classified documents and national security
Whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, the Rand Corporation 1971 secrets-releaser of the Pentagon Papers, Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, the 2010 US Army secrets-releaser, Edward Snowden, the 2013 NSA secrets-releaser, and, most recently, Matt Taibbi, the 2022 “Twitter Files” journalist, tell the story that a country’s secrets are the people’s information and so should not be kept from them with classification. Hence, their allegedly principled release of the secrets they had access to. Each has paid a price: Ellsberg was charged with espionage but the charges were dropped in 1973 after a trial. Assange is incarcerated in England and subject to extradition to the United States for espionage. Manning was court-martialed and sentenced to 35 years in prison on espionage charges and, after spending seven years in confinement, her sentence was commuted by President Obama. Snowden was charged with espionage violations and fled to Russia, where he is currently a naturalized citizen. And in March 2023, Taibbi testified to the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” House Committee about “digital McCarthyism,” censorship and the First Amendment.
In just the last year, classified documents were found to be illicitly in the homes and offices of current-President Biden and former-Vice President Pence, both of whom seemed to be unaware of the documents’ being in their residences and who returned the documents immediately to the National Archives and Records Administration. Former-President Trump, however, refused to return the documents he knowingly took with him when he left the White House in January 2021, and so has been indicted for keeping and concealing the documents, many of which were classified at the highest level. He has told the story that he declassified these documents before taking them, though there is no record of his having gone through the process required to do so. Trump has also told the story that he had two years to sort through the documents before returning them. The National Archives refutes that claim.
So which story is true: that the American people have a right to know United States’ secrets, or that much of the information needs to be kept under lock and key? This ongoing situation—of losing track of the nation’s numerous secrets—has spurred many experts to suggest the problem is less about accounting for the documents and more that too many are classified. Much of the information contained in the documents, they allege, does not need to be classified. While I agree that keeping track of the millions of classified documents produced every year is onerous and troublesome, I think these critics miss one of the primary objectives of classification: to protect national security by concealing the sources and methods of information-gathering. To protect national security, we need to keep secret how it is we know what we know.
Recently, for instance, in the June 2023 sentencing memo of a former FBI analyst who was found guilty of holding classified documents in her home, prosecutors stipulate that the problem for national security is less about the specific information in the documents and more about how the information was gathered. To them, the former analyst put national security at risk by retaining classified documents that “revealed some of the government’s most important and secretive methods of collecting essential national security intelligence.” It was how the info was gathered that was important to conceal, and the FBI analyst failed at that by having the documents in her home.
Sue Gordon, who was the Deputy Principal Director of National Intelligence from 2017-2019 and briefed the then-President on intelligence matters, has argued in a June 2023 Washington Post op-ed that presidents are given access to classified information for two reasons: first, as president they have both the responsibility and authority to act in the nation’s interest; and second, a professional structure is in place to ensure that the classified information and its sources remain properly protected. When presidents and vice presidents leave the federal government’s employ, they no longer have the responsibility, authority, and, hence, document protections. The latter, the protection, is essential to the former, the access.
Furthermore, while it is relatively straightforward to classify documents, the process to declassify documents is more complicated. (After 25 years, some but not all classified documents can be automatically declassified.) Not only does a person or agency have to have the authority to declassify information before the 25-year deadline, they also have to consult with the many agencies involved in the information’s classified status. These agencies could be the sources of the information or they could be its users. In any case, they need to be able to weigh in on the potential outcomes of unveiling sources and information and, especially, plan for changes to their programs if the declassification occurs. They must know that the source will have been compromised. In a democracy, this process only makes sense. Just as a slew of people are involved in producing classified information, a slew of people should be involved in declassifying it.
When I served on active duty in the US Army during the Cold War in what was then West Germany, I was a tactical military intelligence officer (35A). As a female, technically I was not supposed to be in a combat unit, so I could not be assigned to battalion level or below. This meant I would be serving as an analyst at the Division or Regiment level, and that because of that role, I would need a security clearance that gave me access to the most highly classified documents available. As it turned out, in both of my assignments, I worked in vaults—aka Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs)—that housed many, many, many classified documents. My jobs entailed analyzing the sources and then briefing my commanders on the stories these documents told about the East German and Soviet forces the Division was likely to encounter in war. It astonishes me now that I was given so much responsibility at such a young age: shortly out of college. But even at that young age, I had been trained to understand the criticality of abiding by the rules governing classified documents. Above all, I knew these rules were designed to protect the sources of the intelligence.
The first vault was an all-source center at the Division headquarters. “All-source” meant that we received reports from a wide variety of intelligence sources like human intelligence, counterintelligence (“spies”), electronic signals, and satellite imagery. Six of us—two junior commissioned officers (including me), two senior warrant officers (who had served since the Vietnam War), a senior enlisted man and a junior enlisted woman—worked in this tiny, subterranean, windowless SCIF with a vaulted door. We spent long days reading report after report, trying to glean a single puzzle piece, maybe two, relevant to the Division’s situation. From previous study at military training courses, we knew the East German and Soviet tactics generally, but our objective was to discern from reports about their training regimen what these units specifically might do on the battlefield. Our access to a wide variety of sources meant we were able to look for bits and pieces that, together, might help us and our commander recognize a story about how we could expect the opposing forces to behave tactically in combat. It was a job that required a lot of patience and attention and persistence, since it was basically the work of a scholar. Without question, because of the highly classified documents we studied, our work always had to be done in the SCIF. This was a daily enactment of “national security” and protecting sources.
The second vault was another SCIF, one I was largely responsible for, having been promoted to First Lieutenant and assigned as the primary intelligence officer (S2) for the Division’s Artillery (DivArty) regiment. The vault stored and provided a space to read all of the DivArty headquarter’s classified documents, so there were a lot of measures in place to control who had access, when, and why. Though my S2 position was meant for an officer much more experienced and senior to me, as a very junior and inexperienced officer I would say that the real person in charge was a Master Sergeant, a non-commissioned officer with about twenty years in the Army who knew deeply how to categorize and store the many documents we protected. Like my first position at the Division headquarters, moreover, a central element of my daily activities as an intelligence analyst was to study these all-source, classified documents so as to keep the DivArty commander informed about how our East German and Soviet opponents were training for war. What differed, though, was that now, as the primary intelligence officer for an artillery regiment, I was responsible for helping the DivArty commander understand how the opposing forces we expected to face on the battlefield were using and maneuvering artillery in particular. There was no handbook for how they would behave; I could only suss out their likely battlefield behavior by studying the invaluable, classified documents about their training that I received. The sources of this information were instrumental and to be protected, not revealed or treated carelessly.
In the decades since, to students I have described the analytical work I did in those vaults as not unlike the work I now do as a researcher: trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without there being a photo of the completed puzzle to guide my story construction. I am always looking for possible connections among the pieces, connections that reveal a story or a trope or a theme or a pattern. As a researcher, though, and without a security clearance, I cannot rely on the same classified bits and pieces I did as an intelligence analyst. Moreover, I am obligated via academic integrity to acknowledge my sources, whereas as an intelligence analyst, I was pledged to conceal the sources from those who weren’t authorized to know about them.
A decade ago, though, I had occasion to do research in the National Archives among formerly classified documents. As a specialist in the stories told about the American war in Viet Nam, I was curious about the post-World War II French war in Viet Nam and the nature of the United States’ support for and engagement in it. I noticed that stories about the French War appeared in American fiction during the US war there but had disappeared by the American war’s end in 1973. Some historians had researched in the archives and published books on the subject, but none had concentrated especially on gender, the focus of my attention. Therefore, I spent several weeks in the Archives at College Park, paging through and photographing hundreds of dusty State Department documents dating to the late-1940s and early 1950s.
The documents represented the technologies of the era: telegrams, typewritten and mimeographed daily and monthly reports, handwritten notes, published magazine articles. They were mostly produced by US State Department representatives in then-Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi, with an occasional response in the files from a State Department member in DC. Though the majority of the documents had previously been classified, their being at least fifty years old apparently meant they had been declassified and so I could examine them. Still, some of the document boxes I was interested in perusing were not available to me because the documents still were classified, these many decades later.
I have published about what I found in my archive research in a chapter of my book, American War Stories. What I was able to detect in these previously classified documents was a gendered tension between the French and the Americans, both of whom vied in this war period to be seen as the most masculine in Viet Nam. As I point out in my book chapter, “State of Crisis: Stories of American Exceptionalism, the French, and Masculinities in Vietnam” (18-50), the generally formal language of diplomats calls attention to semantic departures from that formality. I noticed in these many documents that these departures were marked by invocations of male virility by the Americans, and a generally disparaging view of the French as men and, therefore, proper colonialists. These semantic departures also called my attention to two other departures from American diplomatic formality: the American threat to the French colonialist venture and the obstacles thrown up by the French to the United States effort to inform Vietnamese people about American life. I conclude that the documents reveal that “the Americans repeatedly indict the French for injudicious if not despotic exertion of force/censorship/repression primarily driven by fear of humiliation or loss of masculine dominance” and simultaneously pose themselves as enacting a “secure, proud masculine dominance that can perform colonialism justly” (47). No wonder we ended up at war there, something Rand-researcher Daniel Ellsberg saw in The Pentagon Papers as illegitimate from these starting days.
What is remarkable about these missives being classified is that the French and Americans ostensibly were allies in the post-World War II arena. Yet this tension between their diplomatic representatives had to be concealed, not discussed openly or revealed sincerely. It was less the information that the American diplomats conveyed and more that they were the source of the information. Certainly, the French needed to be kept ignorant of their ally’s attitude toward them. But it was as important to veil who was reporting this to the State Department as it was to conceal the information being reported.
Americans may object to gathering intelligence in the first place, especially about one’s allies. I certainly have perceived some mistrust in academia first, for my having been in the military and, second, for the work I’d done as an intelligence analyst. Until this practice of collecting information on our friends and our enemies ends, though, it is crucial to protect the sources of intelligence.
After all, despite the wide range of mechanical technologies that gather the intel, we’re also talking about human beings here, many of whom ostensibly are our friends. The sensitive-information gatherers for the United States in colonized Viet Nam were not only French colonists and citizens, they were also Vietnamese from the North and the South, men and women who wanted only to be left to their own sovereign devices. And those gatherers in what was then East Germany might have been soldiers from countries across the Soviet Union, they might have been civilian city-dwellers, and they might also have been farmers. But they, too, probably wanted their sovereignty and wanted the Berlin wall to come down. These are the humans at risk when classified sources are treated recklessly.
In Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War, author Phil Klay tells a story about the moral principles that have guided American troops since its founding. Klay served in Iraq as a Marine and published an award-winning collection of fiction short stories (Redeployment, 2014). Uncertain Ground, though, is a collection of non-fiction essays. In “What We’re Fighting For,” Klay recounts how a Marine who was shot by an enemy sniper was brought to his base. Despite the best efforts of the medical staff, the Marine died while being treated. They could not pause, however, because the sniper himself had been shot, captured, and was being brought into the facility and the staff had an obligation to treat him. They infused into him blood donated by American Marines and, once he was stabilized, sent him on a helicopter to a hospital for additional care.
According to Klay, this humane care was not an unusual situation. “This wasn’t just a couple of Marines and sailors making the right decision,” Klay comments.
These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage…This was standard policy, part of the tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure that their conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity,” so that their restraint “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.”
While it’s hard to think of war as humane, the massacre at My Lai and the torture at Abu Ghraib demonstrated to us that such “attachment” was not consistently applied, even by those who swore oaths. So, too, has the recklessness and disregard for sources with which former-President Trump is reported to have treated classified information, emphasizing how even those in positions of power can violate Washington’s “rights of humanity.”
Klay concludes his essay in a way that I think pertains to treating carefully and humanely the human sources of classified information as well. He tells the story of a Marine, one who is held up as an example of heroism, who now has second thoughts about the many people he killed, and one in particular. The heroic Marine imagines he could have disarmed this one man and gotten him some medical treatment, not unlike the enemy sniper who survived. Klay surmises in this shoulda-woulda-coulda situation:
If he had, then that enemy soldier would have ended up with a unit like mine, surrounded by doctors and nurses and navy corpsmen who would have cared for him in accordance with the rule of law. They would have treated him well, because they’re American soldiers, because they swore an oath, because they have principles, because they have honor. And because without that, there’s nothing worth fighting for.
Indeed.