Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Glenn Baker
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Stephen Sapienza
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
NARRATOR:
Kathryn Schultz
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
723
INITIAL BROADCAST:
20 February 1994
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
Editor, Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy & Government Bulletin
Rep. JOHN CONYERS, Jr. (D-MI)
Chairman, House Committee on Government Operations
THEODORE POSTOL
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Adm. STANSFIELD TURNER (USN, Ret.)
Director, Central Intelligence Agency, 1978-1981
Author, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition
"We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the department."
NARRATOR: A marvelous thing has happened at the Department of Energy. Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary has launched a new policy of openness. She told the public that its government had secretly exploded 204 nuclear bombs and, further, that 600 citizens had been secretly exposed to radiation experi-ments during the 1950s.
Secretary O'LEARY (same press conference):
"One of the benefits to openness will be to build public trust. If we are, in the Department of Energy or any of the other agencies in the department who have responsibility for these details, to really enter into informed dialogue with the public, there's got to be some trust around that informing, and that only happens when we release information that's necessary for the dialogue."
NARRATOR: The Department of Energy is the first and only federal agency attempting to lift its veil of secrecy. Maybe now it is time for the Department of Defense to try it also.
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Welcome once again to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
For the first 150 years of our existence as a nation we prided ourselves on the openness of our society. There were very few secrets in government. But since World War II and the Cold War, secrecy has become prevalent in our society. It's become an acceptable condition in our society. Early on, we prided ourselves on how we differed from other nations of the world which maintained their operations in secret. We pay a big price for that secrecy here in America, and our program's on that today and I think you'll find it very interesting.
NARRATOR: The House Committee on Government Operations recently explored the issue of government secrecy in the post-Cold War era. In public hearings, Committee Chairman John Conyers drew attention to the costs of Cold War policies.
Rep. JOHN CONYERS (D-MI): Well, what we were trying to do is get at what is really the biggest enemy of a democratic society -- it's secrecy -- the need for us as a government to operate in the open.
NARRATOR: Nevertheless, many of today's military activities are still kept secret from the public, even though the United States has no significant enemies. The Soviet Union is gone and the Cold War is over. Just who is this information being kept secret from?
The enormous volume of secret information has caused the US Government to recently build a new National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. This $250 million building was built to house both unclassified and classified information and to assist in the enormous task of making public some of the estimated one trillion "classified" documents in our federal government. Our cameras were not allowed into the secret document storage area, but it is identical to the type used for the storage of public information.
Every day in our government 17,000 decisions are made to keep information secret. In one year alone, the Department of Defense bureaucrats made 3 1/2 million pieces of information secret. The Central Intelligence Agency was second with nearly two million, and the remainder of decisions to make information secret was done by 19 other agencies throughout the federal government. All this secrecy costs the taxpayers an enormous amount of money.
STEVEN AFTERGOOD: It costs literally $10- to $20 billion per year to protect classified information in government and industry. It's basically the budget of a NASA-sized agency that's just for secrecy.
NARRATOR: Steven Aftergood is a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington, D.C. He's the knowledgeable editor of the federation's Secrecy & Government Bulletin. Mr. Aftergood thinks our government has been slow to change its Cold War policies on secrecy.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: President Reagan's Executive Order 12356, which is the one that's still now in effect, didn't even pretend that documents should be promptly declassified. It stated quite openly that if there's any doubt whether something should be secret or not, you'd better keep it secret.
NARRATOR: President Reagan's Executive Order 12356, which is still in effect today, allows government agencies to refrain from making information public unless someone specifically requests it. The president can issue an executive order to help reinforce his public policy when he feels it's necessary.
The Clinton administration has created two commissions to work on a new executive order. To date, the efforts by the Clinton administration have been only symbolic and have done little to change the culture of secrecy that is ingrained in our government.
For example, the Clinton panels are considering a 40-year maximum that information could be concealed. Some experts argue that this is not going far enough.
Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: I think they could probably shorten that some. But again, the principal thing is to curtail the number of people who can put classified labels on documents.
NARRATOR: After a long and distinguished career with the Navy, Admiral Stansfield Turner was selected by President Jimmy Carter as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served until 1981. He is the author of Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition.
Admiral TURNER: I would look at a document that came across my desk as director of the CIA and I would say: "Ten of these 12 paragraphs are unclassified. Now go back to the drawing boards and see what it takes to make the other two unclassified. What do you have to take out of here? And if what you take out doesn't ruin the report, doesn't make it invalid perhaps, or misleading, then let's take that out and publish this as an unclassified report."
Mr. AFTERGOOD: President Nixon in his day said that there should be a maximum classification lifetime of 30 years; a docu-ment should not remain classified for more than 30 years, with very few exceptions. The new draft order says a document can remain classified for up to 40 years, and there are even some exceptions to that. So, it's astonishing and absurd that in the post-Cold War era there are some who feel that we cannot match even Richard Nixon's level of openness.
NARRATOR: During the Cold War, the military secretly devel-oped weapons and technology. Aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and Stealth fighter were products of the "Black Budget" method of buying costly weapons. To preserve secrecy only a few people at the Pentagon and a handful of members in Congress were aware of these programs. The excuse for this strict secrecy was to prevent potential adversaries from stealing our secrets. But secrecy also had the negative effect of hiding cost overruns, concealing technical problems with projects, and restricting the public from debating the need for weapons systems.
NARRATOR: Congressman John Conyers is the influential chairman of the House Committee on Government Operations. The committee is concerned with monitoring how the public's money is spent. He stresses how secrecy hinders oversight.
Rep. CONYERS: When we don't know how much they're spending and whether the terms of the contract are being met, and we're prevented inside the government from knowing because of allega-tions of secrecy, we've gone way too far.
NARRATOR: But some experts believe this is what happened during the late 1980s with the Navy's multi-billion dollar A-12 fighter program. This sophisticated stealth fighter was so secret that these drawings are the only hint we have of what it would look like.
In April 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and tried to persuade skeptical legislators to fund the Navy's costly A-12 fighter aircraft.
Senator JOHN GLENN (D-OH) (Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, 26 April 1990):
"When will we have the A-12 costs? Let me just give a little background. For a long time, the B-2 was kept black. And I still remember over in S-407 one day when we finally had the figures given to us. And I remember Senator Warner -- I'm sorry he's not here -- he walked out, shaking his head, couldn't believe we'd gotten to that point. And several of us vowed at that time, subject to changing our minds later, I suppose, but vowed we were never again going to vote on any program of which we did not have the costs outlined definitely."
DICK CHENEY, Then-Secretary of Defense:
"This would be 620 aircraft, production beginning in Fiscal Year 90: Peak rate, 36 per year, achieved in '94. Total cost would be 51.96 billion, of which we're already spent 5.077 billion."
NARRATOR: After spending billions of dollars on research and development, Cheney cancelled the project, despite an effort by the Navy that tried to mask high costs.
Secretary CHENEY (7 February 1991):
"The A-12 I did terminate. It was not an easy decision to make because it's an important requirement that we're trying to fulfill. But no one could tell me how much the program was going to cost, even just through the full scale development phase, or when it would be available. And data that had been presented at one point a few months ago turned out to be invalid and inaccurate."
NARRATOR: How could the Congress authorize $5 billion for a weapon few people in government seemed to know anything about? Part of the answer is that the A-12 was so secret the Congress was cut out of the process.
Why was even the secretary of defense not told of major cost overruns and schedule delays? Secrecy was used by the Navy to conceal problems from the secretary of defense that could have aroused concern.
Rep. CONYERS: Unfortunately, too many times, that classifi-cation is only a way to try to prevent us from finding out how inefficiently they've handled very large amounts of money.
NARRATOR: The B-2 bomber had numerous technical problems and enormous cost overruns during its development. Today, the cost to the taxpayer for 20 B-2 bombers is $2 billion per airplane. The B-2 bomber was originally designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, but is just too expensive to operate in today's world, where cruise missiles are just as effective and cost far less.
Some proponents of "black" programs point to the F-117 aircraft as a successful "black" program. The very existence of this fighter was denied until long after it went into production.
Multi-billion dollar aircraft like the A-12, the B-2 and the F-117 are examples of how "black" programs can come into being without public debate about their need, cost, and performance.
But how does secrecy effect the way the taxpayers' money is spent on weapons systems?
Mr. AFTERGOOD: The problem is when that authority, that classification authority is abused. And it is frequently abused politically to insulate programs from congressional or public scrutiny.
NARRATOR: Let's look at a recent example. Theodore Postol is a prominent professor of science technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Postol has been involved in detailed analyses of a number of anti-ballistic missile systems and held high security clearances with our government.
In 1991, Professor Postol was asked to give testimony to the House Armed Services Committee about the Patriot missile's performance during the Gulf War.
THEODORE POSTOL: The testimony raised questions about the effectiveness of Patriot in reducing damage on the ground. And at that time, I had no idea that there was a fraud going on and tried to explain some aspects of the damage on the ground which did not seem to be in agreement with the Army's and Raytheon's claims.
NARRATOR: Following his Capitol Hill performance, Professor Postol began to feel pressure from his university and others who had a stake in the mass production of the Patriot missile system. The pressure Professor Postol felt from the MIT administration reflects the extent to which our major universities are involved in the development and production of new weapons.
Professor POSTOL: The most problematic aspect of these arrangements for universities that I'm aware of is the large sums of money that can flow into the laboratories operated by these universities, which then can create pressure for university administrators to do things that are probably not appropriate.
NARRATOR: MIT is ranked number 41 out of the top 100 defense contractors. In an effort to back up his claims, Professor Postol wrote a careful analysis of the Patriot missile system's Persian Gulf performance and published it in the Winter 1992 issue of Harvard's International Security journal.
Professor Postol explains what happened following the publication of his article.
Professor POSTOL: There was a strange and still unexplained investigation of my security access at the Mitre Corporation. Mitre is an organization whose job it is is to look into contracts and control contracts for the US Government. It's a watchdog organization. And the evidence suggests that Mitre was working with Raytheon, the company that built the Patriot, to -- possibly to hang a -- to try to hang a false security violation on me.
NARRATOR: Mitre Corporation ranks 38th out of the top 100 defense contractors doing business with the Pentagon.
The Defense Investigative Service, at the request of the Mitre Corporation and Raytheon, the Pentagon's seventh largest defense contractor, began to investigate Professor Postol for a possible security violation. The article, which was derived from open sources, allegedly contained sensitive information.
Professor Postol disputes that claim:
Professor POSTOL: And there may be pieces of information, when you look at them you might feel it's not a good idea for this to be generally known, and we might even agree on it even if we have different views about the role of classification. But we would also have to recognize that this information might not be protectable, might already be known.
NARRATOR: The investigation of Professor Postol's alleged violation of his secrecy contract with the government and the classification of his published paper by the Department of Defense led Congressman Conyers to start an investigation that fraud was committed by the US Army and Raytheon.
Rep. CONYERS: Ted Postol was given the runaround in defense circles because he dared to point out that the emperor had no clothes on, that the Persian Gulf War was not the incredible success it had been manufactured into in terms of public relations.
NARRATOR: The real issue was that reports during the Persian Gulf War claimed the Patriot missile system was nearly 100 percent successful in intercepting Scud missiles. These reports were effective in creating renewed enthusiasm for larger, more expensive anti-ballistic missile systems.
Professor Postol was entirely cleared of the alleged charges against him. His research caused the Army and Raytheon to lower their claims, saying that 75 percent of the Patriot missiles were launched from Saudi Arabia and 40 percent of the Patriot missiles fired from Israel destroyed the Scud missile warheads. But Professor Postol maintains the real percentage was less than 4 percent.
Rep. CONYERS: Oh, the people that were building the Patriot missile were in a tizzy. They were outraged that this was going to interfere with their additional contracts. Because, remember, back then we had now to have a lot more Patriot missiles because they worked. And the fact that they weren't working meant that we weren't going to need them quite as badly.
Professor POSTOL: The problem is that the people who are trying to hide the problems with Patriot are the same people who would be charged with the responsibility of building new systems. So, if you can't believe them now, there's no reason to believe them in the future. So, it's really a social question I'm addressing, not a technical one.
NARRATOR: Nowhere is the danger of excessive secrecy more evident than in the battle between the Air Force and the General Accounting Office over the F-22 fighter plane. The General Accounting Office, or GAO, is the investigative arm of Congress. The Lockheed F-22 was designed for the mission of countering the now-defunct Soviet Union's 21st Century fighter, which will never be built. The Department of Defense estimates this program will cost $87 billion. With the collapse of the Soviet military danger, the GAO claimed the production of the
F-22 fighter was not needed. The GAO concluded that our current fleet of aircraft is adequate far into the future.
Inside the Air Force reported that in a surprising move, the Department of Defense had "classified" the GAO draft report critical of the Air Force's plans to buy the F-22 aircraft. In effect, Congress is denied information about a program that could cost the taxpayers billions of dollars.
The Air Force's explanation for the unprecedented suppression of GAO's research was that the GAO did not interpret "threat data" correctly and misunderstood aerodynamics. By making the GAO draft report "top secret," the Department of Defense has denied the Congress the conclusions of its own investigation.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: Excessive secrecy undercuts the democratic process. Not only is individual participation in decisionmaking restricted or eliminated, but congressional participation in the decision-making process is severely undercut.
NARRATOR: When the Department of Defense censors GAO research, the military is, in effect, preventing Congress from doing its job.
Stopping wasteful military spending is important. But what effect does secrecy borne out of the Cold War have on our democratic institutions?
Rep. CONYERS: It's so out of date for us to be still carrying over this baggage from the communist period and it now operates in the negative, it operates against us. It operates against the best that government can be.
Admiral TURNER: There was excessive secrecy in the Cold War. One can understand the sense of patriotism, the sense of dedication that went with it. But we lost sight of the fact that in a democracy, the strength of the country is how well the people are informed.
NARRATOR: When the public and Congress are excluded from the decisionmaking process, our system of checks and balances is jeopardized.
Admiral TURNER: There are lots of requirements for secrecy. You and I have them in our private lives, our businesses have them, and our government has them. One can't deny that. But one must always in a government ask the question: Is this really worth keeping secret, so much so that we should deprive the American public of this information?
Mr. AFTERGOOD: Recently, of course, we've seen the uproar over radiation testing on human beings in the 50s, and 60s, and 70s. If that could not have been prevented in the first place, it should have been exposed a long time ago. All of the documents on that case should have been made accessible to the public a long time ago. But because they were largely secret, the checks and balances of our system didn't work.
NARRATOR: Today, the desolate stretches of the Southwest desert are again the site of secret testing. Ninety-four miles north-northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, the military is testing its latest high-tech aircraft, known as the Aurora Project.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: Well, one of the more amusing and perverse secrecy dramas today is being played out in Nevada, where there is a secret unacknowledged military facility, which has been used for decades as a test facility for advanced aircraft. Not only does the Air Force refuse to acknowledge the existence of the facility, but they have recently moved to seize several thousand additional acres of public land.
NARRATOR: In order to prevent any public knowledge of its secret activities, the government is trying to seize the land surrounding the installation. However, if you don't feel like hiking the rough Nevada landscape to get a good look at the secret installation, you can simply buy a satellite photo.
This is a Russian satellite photo of the site and is being sold to the public by an American international import/ export company.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: American citizens who want to know more about what's going on there cannot ask the military and are prohibited by law from photographing the site themselves. However, they are permitted and they are capable of purchasing Russian satellite photos.
NARRATOR: Russian satellite photos are not the only source of information about Area 51 available to the public. This is a model of the Aurora Aircraft. It is a replica of the hypersonic spy plane combo that is reportedly operating from the Nevada test site. The model is sold nationwide by the Testor's Model Corpora-tion, who claim it to be an accurate reproduction of the real thing.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: It's ironic and it's grotesque that American citizens have to go to Russian satellite photos to get informa-tion on US Government activities. And it's just another example of the pathology of the Cold War secrecy system that we all need to overcome.
NARRATOR: With no enemies in the post-Cold War era, many people are asking why is there still a need for such secrecy?
Admiral TURNER: There is probably lesser need for secrecy today because we have fewer enemies in the world. But the criteria should be limited to 'will the national interest be hurt if this is released?'
Mr. AFTERGOOD: Aside from details of weapons designs, the identities of intelligence sources, the details of advanced intelligence technologies, and just a few other categories all need to be rigorously protected. But virtually all other infor- mation that's currently classified needs to be made accessible immediately or within the passage of no more than a few years.
NARRATOR: The Department of Energy, the agency responsible for nuclear weapons production, is attempting to break from its Cold War practices of secrecy.
Secretary O'LEARY ("Openness" press conference, 7 December 1993):
"...We've got to expose the impact of the Cold War, both in terms of its environmental, health and safety impacts, and also impacts on, if you will, the psyche of the nation."
NARRATOR: Maybe it is time for the Department of Defense to follow suit.
Admiral LaROCQUE: Well, as you can see, we have a lot of secrets in our government. And the tragic aspect of it is, however, that the number of secrets are actually increasing in our government, not decreasing. The trend is going in the wrong way. Obviously, our democracy suffers when there are too many secrets, particularly when our Congress, which is charged with passing laws to run our government, is denied information by the people in the Pentagon or other agencies of the government. Secrecy, in the long run, is expensive and it's very corrosive on our democracy. This is something new in the American experience. And until the American people wake up and realize that their government is being run increasingly on secrets, the secrets will continue and it will be costly for all of us Americans.
Until next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Gene LaRocque.
[Over credits]
INTERVIEWER: Do you think it's okay for the military to keep programs secret? Do you think the public has a right to know?
MAN-on-the-Street: Well, sure. Because, I mean, a lot of military funding I think would come from the taxpayers. And, obviously, if I'm paying money for the military, I ought to know what my money's going into. I mean, I think it's only fair.
MAN-on-the-Street: The public, general public, it should be able to say "yea" or "nay" because it is their money.
INTERVIEWER: What was your initial reaction to the reports that during the Cold War, there were radiation experiments done on uninformed citizens?
WOMAN-on-the-Street: Outrage. I was not surprised, but I was outraged. The government has consistently failed to disclose to the public the things that it is doing in defense and out of defense.
[End of broadcast.]
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