Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303120625
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TOO MANY SECRETS IN WASHINGTON
DURING confirmation hearings last month for the director of central intelligence, senators asked the nominee about openness.A good thing in principle, replied James Woolsey, but he hadn't studied the matter in detail. However, he agreed with Sen. James DeConcini of Arizona that too many documents are classified every year.
What's this? A breath of fresh air blowing with the end of the Cold War, a show of respect finally for values of freedom, accountability and openness that lie at democracy's heart?
Well, maybe. Americans will have to wait and see.
When pressed for specifics about changes he'd make in the way documents are classified, Woolsey asked the senators if he could address the topic in the closed portion of the hearings. Thus was openness aired - in secret.
Robert Gates, former CIA director, talked a good talk about reforms made possible by the Cold War's collapse. In 1991, he convened a task force that recommended declassifying certain historical materials and national intelligence estimates on the Soviet Union more than 10 years old. Pretty safe stuff.
But during Gates' 16 months in office, the only concrete examples of openness were the release of selected documents on the Cuban missile crisis and a symposium for former high officials to reminisce about the crisis.
Promised, meanwhile, is release of materials about John Kennedy's assassination, and about CIA operations in the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala in 1954, and Iran in 1953.
It's a start, but just barely. None of this goes to the question of why hundreds of thousands of documents should remain classified, or why so many current and future files should be classified in the first place.
CIA spokesmen fall back on the principle that openness is OK as long as intelligence sources and methods aren't compromised. It's a sound principle that sometimes gets lost in the translation.
In practice, it's often used as a blanket excuse to prevent release of information rather than to protect sources and methods. Too often, it carries no more substance than that other overworked rationale for secrecy: "for reasons of national security."
Much of the CIA's work should remain classified. But this agency is not merely an organ of covert operations. It's also a collector and analyzer of information on all sorts of trends - military threats; but also political developments, economic competition, environmental crises and the like - that inform America's foreign policies.
The effect of excessive secrecy, therefore, is to preclude full and informed public discussion of the nation's policies. If information is power, Americans kept in the dark aren't allowed to share enough of either.
The CIA, of course, isn't the only agency keeping too many secrets. But if it took the lead in becoming more open, others could be pressured to follow.
The hope is that Woolsey and his boss appreciate the assumption underlying the democratic experiment - that debate generally helps rather than harms policy-making. Perhaps they recognize that rigid secrecy is particularly unhelpful if the thrust of foreign policy is to spread democratic values.
Maybe they'll distinguish rigorously between information classified to protect national security, and information kept secret to protect the reputations of those doing the classifying.
So far, if they have a plan to let the sunshine in, it remains a secret.