The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.
From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand.
Regular readers of the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News may already be familiar with issues of overclassification in American government, but in my first Homeland Security class on Tuesday, I got a bit of a first-hand account of it from my professor, who was a former Air Force intelligence and CIA officer for many years. Part of your training as an officer involves learning the process of classification, and not suprisingly in the CIA's secrecy culture (where even widely known information like the intelligence budget is never "confirmed") it is an extremely easy thing to do: your officer sitting at a desk stamps the top and bottom of the document with "Secret", and then adds on the line the reason for classification, which comes from a list of various coded categories. The biggest is, not suprisingly, the catch-all in-the-name-of-national security category, although he said that a newly popular one these days was "Sensitive But Unclassified" — information which people have been actually prosecuted for distributing, even though it is not technically "secret". And as for at what future date the classification of material can be later reevaluated, "ImpDet" — Impossible to Determine — is literally built into the stamps they use.
This is all on the first day, so I only have broad anecdotes to share right now, but I think it's going to be an interesting class. (P.S. to Nadezhda - Can you add new categories for my four new courses this semester? Thanks!)